Replication Data for: Risky business? Welfare state reforms and government support in Britain and Denmark

Are welfare state reforms electorally dangerous for governments? Only recently have political scientists begun to study this seemingly simple question, and existing work still suffers from two shortcomings. First, it has never tested the reform-vote link with data on actual legislative decisions for enough points in time to allow robust statistical tests. Second, it has failed to take into account the many expansionary reforms that have occurred in recent decades. Expansions often happen in the same years as cutbacks. By focusing only on cutbacks, estimates of the effects of reforms on government popularity become biased. In this paper, we address both shortcomings. Our results show that voters punish governments for cutbacks, but also reward them for expansions, making so-called “compensation” a viable blame avoidance strategy. We also find that the size of punishments and rewards are roughly the same, suggesting that voters’ well-documented negativity bias does not directly translate into electoral behavior.