Replication Data for: Attitudinal consistency in citizens’ social policy preferences

Studies of public opinion on welfare policy implement increasingly concrete and complex survey measures that frequently assume relative preferences on the part of respondents. Yet, we lack evidence on whether voters hold such structured attitudes towards welfare policies. We rely on novel survey data from eight West European countries to study horizontal attitudinal constraint in welfare policy preferences. Addressing both logical and relational consistency, we find that most respondents hold structured welfare belief systems and relative preferences about where reform is more important, even when confronted with complex tasks and tradeoffs. Moreover, by addressing individual-level heterogeneity we show that differences related to socio-demographic factors and attitudes are rather minor. Consistent welfare attitudes are not exclusive to highly sophisticated individuals. These results validate the effort of implementing more fine-grained indicators of social policy preferences (and other policies) across the population.