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Government quality, egalitarianism, and attitudes to taxes and social spending: a European comparison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2012

Stefan Svallfors
Stefan Svallfors*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
*
*E-mail: stefan.svallfors@soc.umu.se
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Abstract

The paper analyses how perceptions of government quality – in terms of impartiality and efficiency – impact on attitudes to taxes and social spending. It builds on data from the European Social Survey 2008 from 29 European countries. The paper shows a large degree of congruence between expert-based judgments and the general public's perceptions of the quality of government. It also shows that the quality of government has a clear, independent effect on attitudes to taxes and spending, so that people who perceive institutions as efficient and fair want higher taxes and spending. But government quality also conditions the impact of egalitarianism on attitudes to taxes and spending: in high-quality-of-government egalitarianism has a clearly stronger impact on these attitudes. It is concluded that government quality is an important and so far neglected factor in explaining attitudes to welfare policies.

Keywords

welfare stateattitudesquality of governmentEuropean Social Surveycomparative
Type
Research Article
Information
European Political Science Review , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , November 2013 , pp. 363 - 380
Copyright
Copyright © European Consortium for Political Research 2012 

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