CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025

Friday, September 27th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room H405 (28, St-Pères)

The Rise of New Social Risks and Welfare Attitude Change across Generations:
A Cohort Analysis of Social Spending Preferences in Switzerland

Andrew Zola

PhD Candidate, Sciences Po - CRIS

Transformations in the labor market and family structures since the postwar era have contributed to the rise of “new social risks,” including difficulty reconciling work and family life, single parenthood, increased care obligations, and obsolete skills. This work approaches this context with two questions in mind. First, how has exposure to new social risks changed across cohorts? And second, how has this shift contributed to generational change in support for welfare spending in different domains?

Using retrospective life-history data on risk exposure at the family level gathered from a nationally representative sample of participants in the Swiss Household Panel solves the identification problem that arises when attempting to disentangle age, period, and cohort effects. I analyze cohort changes in risk exposure and how this influences preferences for spending on pensions, unemployment protection, childcare, and social assistance. There has been an increase in exposure to new social risks among respondents who were born and raised since the 1960s. This is associated with a shift in support away from spending on pensions and unemployment protection, welfare domains designed to protect against prominent social risks in the postwar era, and towards higher spending on childcare and social assistance, which address new social risks. Hence, with the aggregate shift in risks, intergenerational support appears to move away from transfer-oriented policies and towards an activating framework that encourages employment.

The study sheds light on how socioeconomic changes since the postwar era may influence expectations of the welfare state over the long-run. More broadly, it opens a new research agenda for the politics of the welfare state by highlighting the importance of socialization in the analysis of individuals’ preferences.

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