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United We Stand? A Household Perspective On The Impact of Public Employment on Attitudes towards Retrenchment of Welfare Spending

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2020

Troels Fage Hedegaard
Troels Fage Hedegaard*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics and Society, Centre for Comparative Welfare Studies (CCWS), Aalborg University, Denmark, E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores the impact of public sector employment on attitudes to retrenchment of social spending from a household perspective. The idea the employees of the public sector will stand together to preserve public spending exists throughout the literature on support for and persistence of the welfare states. The empirical evidence for this link, however, has been poor. In this article, I show that this link can be established when studying it from a household perspective. Using a nationally representative survey from Denmark I show that people living in a household where one or both are employed in the public sector are more willing to spend more on the public sector. This effect is, however, only for some policies – unemployment benefit, social assistance, education grant, and integration services – which were generally the least popular policies in the eyes of the public.

Keywords

Public employmentwelfare attitudeshouseholdretrenchment
Type
Article
Information
Social Policy and Society , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 357 - 370
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

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