Attitudes to the Welfare State: A Systematic Review Approach to the Example of Ethnically Diverse Welfare States

There has been a growing interest in and expansion of research on welfare attitudes and the legitimacy of welfare states as they face both internal and external pressures at social, political and economic levels. The number of cross-national surveys is steadily increasing and many studies examine developments in social provision and public attitudes towards welfare. However, there is a lack of a clear and comprehensive overview of knowledge about tendencies in support for the welfare state in light of these pressures. Moreover, there is a lack of understanding of what impacts variations in attitudes and the relationship between attitudes and other constructs such as perceptions, values and stereotypes, which all form part of support for the welfare state. The article reports on findings from a project using tools from the systematic review tradition in an innovative way to achieve a comprehensive and systematic overview of current knowledge. The article has three main contributions; firstly, it adds to our understanding of the relationship between attitudes, perceptions, beliefs, stereotypes and values, secondly, it adds to attitude theory and thus enhances our understanding of welfare attitudes and lastly it illustrates how it achieves the first two through applying adapted tools from the systematic review tradition. Systematic Review as a method originated in natural science and medicine, and the paper examines how it can be successfully transferred to issues in social science. The article argues in favour of emphasising the importance of differentiating and investigating what is known and not known by examining the relationship between immigration and support for the welfare state. Thus, an adapted systematic review is found to enhance our understanding of trends in welfare support by use of theoretically framed research synthesis.