Svallfors, Stefan. "Worlds of Welfare and Attitudes to Redistribution: A Comparison of Eight Western Nations". European Sociological Review, Vol.13, No.3 (1997): 283-304.

Svallfors, Stefan. "Worlds of Welfare and Attitudes to Redistribution: A Comparison of Eight Western Nations". European Sociological Review, Vol.13, No.3 (1997): 283-304.

• This essay uses the welfare regime typology developed by Dr. Esping-Andersen in his 1990 article, dividing welfare states into liberal, conservative, and social democratic categories based on distributional models. The author builds on this typology using a critique by Drs. Castles and Mitchell in their 1992 article to distinguish between 'true' liberal states and radical welfare states, which have greater benefits supported by stronger labor movements (284-285).
• The author chooses a pair of Western countries from each category of welfare states: Norway and Sweden for social democratic states, Germany and Austria for conservative, USA and Canada for liberal, and Australia and New Zealand for radical (286).
• General societal opinions on the role of the state in welfare and redistribution vary considerably between types of welfare regimes. Social democratic and conservative welfare states tend to strongly support state intervention compared to liberal and radical states. However, conservative and liberal states are generally okay with income disparity in ways that radical and social democratic states are not (289-290).
• There is a general belief that support for the welfare state and its policies are stronger among the lower classes, who are more likely to depend on its benefits. Women may also support the welfare state for similar reasons, as they disproportionately benefit from it (290).
• An analysis shows that class and gender are indeed salient factors determining support for redistribution in all case studies, whereas private or public sector employment is not. In liberal and radical states, class differences are the most important, while in conservative and social democratic states, employment levels are more predictive (293).
• Societal attitudes toward income equality and redistribution in different welfare regimes match the types of policies carried out by those states. Social democratic states tend to have high support for both, while conservative states believe in redistribution, but not income equality. Liberal states believe in neither, while radical states support income inequality, but not redistribution (295).
• Why these attitudes emerge and their relationship to the construction of welfare states, however, is unclear. The more radical attitudes of Canadians and lack of strong support for redistribution in social democratic Sweden raise further questions about any causal relationship between welfare regime type and societal attitudes (295).