Election Campaigns and Welfare State Change: Democratic Linkage and Leadership Under Pressure

For over three decades, mature European welfare states have been on their way into an austerity phase marked by greater needs and more insecure revenues. A number of reform pressures-including population ageing, unemployment, economic globalization, and increased migration-call into question the economic sustainability and normative underpinnings of transfer systems and public services. And while welfare states long seemed resilient to growing challenges, it now seems clear that they are changing. Election Campaigns and Welfare State Change examines how political leaders and the public respond to reform pressures at a pivotal moment in a mass democracy: the election campaign. Do campaigns facilitate debate and attention to welfare state challenges? Do political parties present citizens with distinct choices as to how challenges might be met? Do leaders prepare citizens for the idea that some solutions may be painful? Do their messages have adaptive consequences for how the public perceives the need for reform? Do citizens adjust their normative support for welfare policies in the process? The answers to these questions affect how we understand welfare state change and representative democracy in an era of mounting challenges.

Staffan Kumlin, Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo,Achim Goerres, Professor of Empirical Political Science, Department of Political Science, University of Duisburg-Essen

Staffan Kumlin is full Professor in Political Science at University of Oslo. Kumlin's research concerns comparative political behaviour, public opinion, and democracy in European welfare states. He is the author of The Personal and the Political: How Personal Welfare State Experiences Affect Political Trust and Ideology (Palgrave-Macmillan 2004) co-editor of How Welfare States Shape the Democratic Public: Policy Feedback, Participation, Voting, and Attitudes (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014). He has also published in numerous scientific journals such as British Journal of Political Science and Comparative Political Studies. He co-designed the "welfare state module" in the 2016 European Social Survey 2016. In 2005 Staffan Kumlin became the first political scientist to receive a Pro Futura Fellowship from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.


Achim Goerres (PhD, LSE) has been full Professor of Empirical Political Science at the University of Duisburg-Essen since 2011. Goerres is a political scientist, political sociologist and political demographer who works at the intersection of comparative political behaviour and welfare state research with an emphasis on ageing and immigration. He is the Principal Investigator of POLITSOLID (2021-25), a project on political solidarities funded by a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council and Co-Principal Investigator of the Immigrant German Election Studies I & II (2016 - 2024) funded by the German Research Foundation. He published in major journals, such as the British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, Ethnic and Migration Studies, Journal of European Social Policy, Journal of Social Policy and Electoral Studies.