Welfare Legitimacy: A Matter of Frames?

Welfare states and social policies are at a critical juncture (Greener, 2018). Esping-Andersen and Palier (2008), for instance, argue that children, women and elderly people should be the focus of future reforms. However, as public policy, public issues or media scholars have establish (e.g. Neveu 2015), the first struggle lies in the debates to impose the narratives able to legitimise reforms: if unemployment problems ensue from workers’ qualifications rather than from a lack of quality job, then the solution is to train worker instead of changing work conditions. As Schneider and Ingram (1993) argued, to understand how (un)democratic policy designs may be promoted and implemented one needs to look at how beneficiaries and goals of the policy are framed. In this regard, media coverage about policies is determinant. Citizens look for political information through media (de Vreese et al., 2017). Thus, media coverage about policies may orientate citizens’ judgement about them and may ultimately have (de)legitimizing effects regarding citizens’ assessment of the different policy options. Analysing discourses and narratives conveyed by newspapers and TV bulletin about social policies, and their influence on citizens’ discourses, helps to observe whether and how citizens use the frames. Methodologically, a longitudinal perspective analysing frames in media coverage and their (non)use by citizens to express their opinion is adopted. Data are collected media content and secondary analysis understood as using pre-existing qualitative data to investigate new questions or verifying previous findings (Heaton, 2004). What is more, the comparative design (France, Belgium, the UK) helps to broaden the scope and to analyse whether frames are national or “Europeanised”. This perspective could shed light on the fact that: citizens are more interested in policies outcomes than in legitimacy or transparency debates and; despite this, they assess policies on the basis of ex-ante debates rather than on policies.