Regimes, Social Risks and the Welfare Mix: Unpacking Attitudes to Pensions and Childcare in Germany and the UK through De-liberative Forums

Modern welfare regimes rest on a range of actors – state, market, family/households, em-ployers and charities – but austerity programmes diminish the contribution of the state. While changes in this ‘welfare mix’ require support from the population, attitude studies have focused mainly on people’s views on state responsibilities, using welfare regime the-ory to explain differences. This paper contributes to our understanding of the welfare mix by including other providers such as the market, the family or employers, and also intro-duces social risk theories, contrasting new and old risks. Regime theory implies differences will persist over time, whereas risk theory suggests that growing similarities in certain risks may tend to promote international convergence. This article examines attitudes to the roles of state, market, family, charity/community and employer for pension and childcare in Ger-many and the UK. For data collection we used deliberative forums, a new method in social policy research that allows citizens space to pursue extended lightly moderated discussion and permits researchers to analyse people’s justifications for their attitudes. Our results show that there are patterns of convergence especially in preferences for childcare, but that regime predominates in people’s justifications for their attitudes: regime differences in atti-tudes are resilient.