Political Parties ’ Welfare Image, Electoral Punishment and Welfare State Retrenchment1

Will voters punish the government for cutting back welfare state entitlements? The com-parative literature on the welfare state suggests that the answer is yes. Unless governments are effectively employing strategies of blame avoidance, retrenchment leads to vote loss. Because a large majority of voters supports the welfare state, the usual assumption is that retrenchment backfires equally on all political parties. This study contributes to an emerg-ing body of research that demonstrates that this assumption is incorrect. Based on a re-gression analysis of the electoral fate of the governing parties of 14 OECD countries be-tween 1970 and 2002, we show that most parties with a positive welfare image lose after they implemented cutbacks, while most parties with a negative welfare image do not. In addition, we show that positive welfare image parties in opposition gain votes, at the ex-pense of those positive welfare image parties in government that implemented welfare state retrenchment