Political legitimacy and welfare state futures: Introduction

Welfare attitudes are pivotal in understanding the preferences and demands of citizens to help shape future policy reforms in welfare states. Accordingly, and due to the availability of large scale comparative survey data on attitudes, large numbers of studies of welfare attitudes have emerged during the past few decades. However, some limitations still exist in the field, such as the background assumptions informing the questionnaire design and top–down framing of issues, the population represented, and, lastly, limitations in teasing out the causal mechanisms of relationships, especially pertaining to that of policy reform. This regional issue brings together articles that address some of these issues and others in welfare attitude research to provide some guidance for future studies. This article first summarizes the existing studies on welfare attitudes to identify some of the key limitations, and introduces the five articles in this issue. It concludes with some suggestions for future studies in welfare attitudes.