Understanding welfare attitudes: A cultural-sociological approach

What does 'welfare' mean to people, and how do they respond to prominent political issues in the welfare domain? In this dissertation, Thijs Lindner explores how Dutch citizens perceive of welfare, analyzing how people attribute meaning to the phenomenon and how their worldviews inform their responses to key issues in the field. This research employs innovative methods, both qualitative and quantitative, including survey experiments, correlational class analysis, and focus groups, using original small-n and large-n data. Lindner uncovers substantially different meanings attributed to welfare and reveals surprising responses to salient political issues in the domain. He concludes that these varied meanings indicate that seemingly identical stances may, in fact, reflect fundamentally different substantive positions. Furthermore, people's worldviews can shape welfare attitudes, producing different responses to information about salient issues. These findings have important implications for our understanding of welfare attitudes, as well as for politicians, policymakers and scholars engaged in social policy and public opinion research.