Studies on climate change mitigation and environmental degradation suggest that lifestyle changes in high-income countries can help promote environmental sustainability. Such changes may include material sacrifices on the part of the individual. Yet, accepting material sacrifices can be a challenging task for both individuals and countries. Can publicly provided economic protection facilitate the acceptance of such sacrifices? This study examines whether social insurance generosity is likely to make people more willing to accept material sacrifices for the sake of environmental protection. Using multilevel regression modelling to analyse data on social insurance programmes and attitudes towards material sacrifices in nineteen high-income countries, the results of the study suggest that social insurance generosity has a positive effect on attitudes towards accepting material sacrifices, with some variation across programmes and social groups.

Governments in the industrialised western democracies have repeatedly been advised to curb the welfare state when adjusting public finances in order to stabilise public debt in the long run and to create economic growth. This recommendation has been founded on a vast body of research on fiscal adjustments, which has come to the conclusion that cutting social expenditures leads to expansionary and more sustainable budget consolidations. This paper adds to the existing literature suggesting a more nuanced view, which challenges the simplicity of the “cutting-welfare” advice: first, we find that whereas less social spending is indeed associated with expansionary and successful adjustments, this is not the case for overall welfare state generosity. Second, disaggregating the welfare state in its components reveals that a reduction of pension generosity is indeed related to successful adjustments whereas reducing unemployment generosity does not seem to play a major role.