Mass public attitudes on social policy priorities and reforms in Western Europe: WELFAREPRIORITIES dataset 2020

This paper presents the WELFAREPRIORITIES dataset 2020, which contains new and detailed data on citizens’ attitudes regarding social policies, the relative importance citizens attribute to different social policy fields (old age pensions, childcare services, higher education, active labor market policy, unemployment benefits, social assistance), their social policy experiences, their perceptions of party positions regarding social policy, voters’ electoral preferences, as well as respondents’ social status, status mobility and socio-demographics. The representative sample consists of 12’000 respondents in 8 West European countries (Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, UK, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark). Through detailed information on voters’ social policy priorities (measured through conjoint experiments, point distribution question and trade-off questions), the data allows to study new research questions in the field of the mass politics of welfare state development and reform. The dataset also contains extensive information regarding voter preferences, and thus allows to link the study of electoral politics, partisan competition and welfare politics in new ways. This paper presents the motivation and implementation of the data collection, the data itself (including the codebook) and its validation