Institutional trajectories of the welfare state: returns from social policy inception to modern public opinion

Welfare state systems are major social, economic, political and historical institutions that shape public opinion in favour of more or less government regulation and provision of social insurance and income redistribution across societies. In other words, they comparatively influence public attitudes toward security against social risks. Institutional influence is historical in nature, stretching back to the early conditions of the welfare state, in addition to present developments in public attitudes. This is problematic empirically because data on both institutions and public social policy preferences are scare historically. In this chapter I suggest studying institutions based on the combined age of core social security policies of work-injury, pension and unemployment insurance in each society as a variable to capture a theoretical impact of institutions and how this shapes attitudes over time.