Political Parties’ Preferences about the Volume of Social Spending and its Distribution between Programs and Age Groups: a Comparative Study of France, Spain and the UK

The transformation of the Welfare State is not a standardized response to globalization or a by-product of European Union policies, but rather ‘what parties make of it’ (Burgoon, 2006). Different welfare regimes and welfare cultures contribute to the maintenance of diverse national responses to global and regional integration in terms of their public welfare systems, but there are also meso-level variables, such as parties´ ideologies, that may have an impact on the volume and distribution of welfare expenditure. This article presents a new scheme and procedure to code party manifesto statements in favor of social spending and retrenchment; it applies them in Britain, France and Spain in order to show the possibilities of the new data. The preliminary results indicate that ideologies are linked to parties´ preferences regarding the distribution of social spending between programs, the emphasis on different age groups as beneficiaries of welfare expenditure, and the rationale for social cuts.