Welfare Retrenchments and Government Support: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

A large body of literature has provided mixed results on the impact of welfare retrenchments on government support. This article examines whether the impact of welfare retrenchments can be explained by proximity, i.e. whether or not the retrenched policy is related to people's everyday lives. To overcome limitations in previous studies, the empirical approach utilizes a natural experiment with data from the European Social Survey collected concurrently with a salient retrenchment reform of the education grant system in Denmark. The results confirm that people proximate to a welfare policy react substantially stronger to retrenchment reforms than the general public. Robustness and placebo tests further show that the results are not caused by non-personal proximities or satisfaction levels not related to the reform and the government. In sum, the findings speak to a growing body of literature interested in the impact of government policies on mass public.