Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. Bringing together contributions from a diverse range of international scholars, A Research Agenda for Public Attitudes to Welfare draws upon past and contemporary research methods used to study citizens’ attitudes to welfare. It highlights the rapidly growing research potential within the field, examining both new and understudied social policies to map out a comprehensive agenda for future research. This essential Research Agenda offers crucial suggestions to broaden the scope of research in the field and expand our knowledge of public attitudes to welfare. Chapters examine support for new social welfare policies such as active labour market policies, Universal Basic Income, and Social Europe, as well as investigating support among understudied subgroups in the population and over the life course. It ultimately emphasizes the importance of applying different analytical and methodological perspectives in order to understand public attitudes to welfare more thoroughly. Employing a diverse range of data and methods, this informative Research Agenda will benefit scholars of sociology, social policy, political science, and economics seeking to gain insight on public attitudes to welfare and welfare states. It will also be useful to social policy professionals and officials endeavouring to reflect on the progress of research within the field.

Presenting a stimulating contribution to the quickly advancing field of welfare attitudes research, this important book develops the understanding of welfare legitimacy. It does so by assessing the nature of popular judgments about welfare deservingness, as well as the roots and consequences of these attitudes, offering a state-of-the-art picture of the latest theoretical, conceptual and methodological developments. The Social Legitimacy of Targeted Welfare provides a multidisciplinary view on deservingness attitudes, with contributions from sociology, political science, media studies and social psychology. It advocates a multi-actor perspective, looking not only at citizens' attitudes, but also at attitudes of social administrators and policy-makers. The chapters also present new research methods in the field, including discrete choice experiments, factorial surveys, focus groups, and media content analysis. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in sociology, political science, and the fields of social psychology, philosophy, economics and history. It will help practitioners and policymakers in social policy, social work and healthcare understand popular perceptions and beliefs regarding just distributions of welfare. Contributors include: H. Blomberg, A. Bos, C. Buss, R. de Vries, M. De Wilde, B. Ebbinghaus, S. Evers, A. Fladmoe, B.B. Geiger, M. Hiligsmann, M. Jeene, J. Kallio, O. Kangas, A. Kootstra, C. Kroll, S. Kumlin, T. Laenen, D. Lepianka, B. Meuleman, E. Naumann, M. Niemela, A. Paulus, J. Ragusa, T. Reeskens, F. Roosma, M. Sadin, K. Steen-Johnson, W. Uunk, M. van der Aa, T. van der Meer, B. van Doorn, W. van Oorschot, D. Wollebaek