Institutional Feedback and Support for the Welfare State: The Case of National Health Care

Abstract

Researchers interested in the political consequences of the welfare state argue that cross-country variations in the design of social policy institutions produce distinct patterns of public support for the welfare state. This research proposes an institutional feedback effect in which welfare institutions, once created, transform political debate, generate new constituencies, and alter how individuals and interest groups interpret their preferences. Existing research has found mixed results for these proposed institutional feedback effects on public opinion. This project contributes to research on institutional feedback through an analysis of cross-national variation in public support for national health care. National health care provides a unique opportunity for studying institutional feedback by avoiding problems with the measurement of key variables common to previous work in this area. This research offers evidence in support of institutional feedback effects by demonstrating links between the structure of health care institutions and public attitudes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 98 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.