Sustainable Welfare in Public Opinion: Analyzing the Relations between Attitudes Towards Social and Environmental Policies

The causes, costs and consequences of ecological degradation are distributed unequally between social classes and countries: There is a ‘triple injustice’ (Gough 2013) meaning that the rich make for the most of the environmental pollution while the poor bear the brunt (Büchs, Bardsley & Duwe 2011) and pay the bill. The emerging eco-social policies and practices tackling social and environmental injustice vary among welfare types and according to their underlying basic values, believes and conceptions of society-nature relations. So far relatively little is known about these different ways of thinking about how to reconcile social and ecological needs.

This paper seeks to increase such knowledge and investigates how attitudes towards environmental and welfare policies are related to each other. Building on recent contributions (Koch & Fritz 2014; Fritz 2016; Jakobsson, Muttarak & Schoyen 2017) it analyses new data from the European Social Survey 2016 which contains two thematic modules: questions about welfare policies and climate change attitudes. This unique set-up allows for comparative and multidimensional analyses exploring the latent eco-social patterns within public opinion. In the analyses the relations, tensions and interdependencies between social and ecological issues will be discovered and compared among welfare regimes, countries and classes. The results will contribute to a better understanding of cross-country, welfare state and class differences in society-nature relations and provide useful information about the public support that eco-social policies may get or not get from these actors.