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 finally limitations in teasing out the causal mechanisms

of relationships, especially pertaining to that of policy reform. This regional issue brings

together papers that address some of these issues and others in welfare attitude research to

provide some guidance for future studies. This paper first summarises the existing studies on

welfare attitudes to identify some of the key limitations, and introduces the five articles in this

special issue. It concludes with some suggestions for future studies in welfare attitudes.