1 Introduction -- 2 Democratic Linkage and the Party Decline Debate -- 3 Democratic Leadership and the Changing Study of Changing Welfare States -- 4 Up and Down with the Welfare State -- 5 What Politicians (Don't) Tell You about Welfare State Change -- 6 What Makes People Worry about the Welfare State? -- 7 Who Persuades and Who Responds? -- 8 Do People Adjust Policy Preferences to Reform Pressures? -- 9 Democracy and Welfare State Change Revisited

For over three decades, mature European welfare states have been on their way into an austerity phase marked by greater need 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 underpinning of transfer systems and public services. And while welfare states long seemed resilient to growing challenges, it now seems clear that they are changing. This book 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 policies may be painful? Do party 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? Overall, the answers to these questions affect how we understand welfare state change and the functioning of representative democracy in an era of mounting challenges. The book builds on an integrated set of data sources collected by the authors. These include information about campaign themes from a large number of countries across three decades, content analysis of party leader speeches from the largest parties in Germany, Norway, and Sweden in the 2000s, as well as experiments and panel survey data from these countries.