Economic Fluctuation and Shifts in Popular Solidarity with Unemployed People

Abstract

Over the past decades, the social protection of unemployed people has been high on policy agendas of many welfare states. Here, we address the question how the Dutch general public’s solidarity with the unemployed—in terms of the welfare benefits they would grant this group—has been influenced by economic developments and changes in unemployment rates over a longer time period. We analyse repeated cross-section data from the Netherlands (1975–2010). Our findings show that in times of higher unemployment people’s solidarity with the unemployed is higher, while independently from that, in times of economic downturn solidarity is lower. These macro-level effects vary only little across social groups, yet we do find that the unemployment rate affects people’s solidarity more positively during economic good times.

Appendix: Robustness Analyses

We performed several analyses to check whether results were robust with distinct specifications. Results are available upon request with the authors.

• ‘Don’t knows’ on solidarity measure: We checked whether omitting the ‘don’t know’ answers (19%) from the ‘sufficient’ category influenced our findings. This hardly did so; only the effect of economic downturn varied somewhat more across social categories (notably a less negative effect for middle and higher educated than for lower educated), yet with the same pattern as displayed in Table 5.3. To preserve statistical power, we decided to keep the ‘don’t know’ answers in our analyses (coded as ‘sufficient’).

• Lagged effects of economic cycle factors: Lagged measures (t = −1, t = −2) for economic downturn and unemployment rate displayed a weaker effect for economic downturn, but still a strong effect for the unemployment rate. This indicates that the effect of economic downturn is more immediate than that of the unemployment rate.

• Political stance: Including political stance in our models did not change economic cycle effects (and accompanying interactions). Political stance in itself has an effect though (which is moderate in size): holding a more right-wing political stance lowers solidarity with the unemployed (also see Jeene et al., 2014).

• Analyses per time period: We also tested whether cross-level interactive patterns (in specific with the unemployment rate) were more prominent in one period than the other. We did this because Model 3 of Table 5.2 showed that the unemployment rate has a distinct effect in beginning years than later on (effect became more positive over the years). Findings were inconsistent; e.g. while before 1993 the unemployment rate effect was weaker among higher income groups (significantly so), the reverse was true from 1993 onwards. We think this inconsistency may have to do with the power at the year level that is reduced when analysing only certain subperiods.