The limits of solidarity: changing welfare coalitions in a transforming European party system

The configuration of political party competition has been in upheaval in Europe for several decades now. Much has been written on how the competition between the New Left and the New Right has transformed voter coalition potentials on socio-cultural issues. By contrast, the reconfiguration of mass political competition over the welfare state has received much less attention: most studies assume either convergence or the persistence of a traditional conflict between the Left and the Right. However, this assessment of stable and/or pacified political conflict on welfare issues is erroneous, as it neglects massive differences in the relative importance voters attribute to different social policies, in particular to social investment and social consumption policies. Integrating these differences reveals conflict and changing coalition-structures both at the societal and partisan levels. Using newly collected survey data from 8 West European countries (the welfarepriorities data), we are able to combine attitudes on policy support with policy priority, computing an individual-level indicator of weighted social policy positions. Our findings reveal that the conflict structure regarding social policy actually differs starkly from the traditional left-right conflict. We find a distinctive, uni-dimensional alignment of social classes and political parties, with at the poles green and far right party voters. While the social-liberal voters support social investment as opposed to consumption, the reverse is true for the far right voters. This preference configuration reveals coalition potentials between green and moderate right parties for social investment, and between far left and far right parties for social consumption, with the social democrats “lost” in the middle.