East versus West: comparing political attitudes and welfare preferences across European societies.

Recent work on the issue of welfare entitlements in Central and Eastern Europe has focused on discovering the variation in citizens' preferences both within and between the post-communist states and across individual social policy areas. Empirical results suggest that substantial attitudinal differences exist along both of these dimensions. In this paper we build on extant work in two ways: first, rather than focusing on aggregated attitudes towards entitlements, we examine the micro-level influences on both government responsibility for and government spending on welfare assistance; and, second, we expand the spatial scope of other studies to include countries from Western Europe. This allows us to generate conclusions about how the different political contexts (stable democracies versus recent transitions) affect individual welfare beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]