Development of welfare state morality in international comparison

The starting point for this research project is the provocative thesis of the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, according to which the increasing importance of the welfare state lowers the morale of the welfare state in the long term and thus further undermines the welfare state through unjustified exploitation. In a narrower sense, the morality of the welfare state includes the attitude towards benefit fraud, but in a broader sense also towards legal but socially inadequate behavior. Examples of this are insufficient efforts to end the receipt of benefits or the deliberate creation of one's own neediness.

Lindbeck formulated it as a fundamental dilemma of the welfare state that the more generously the system is equipped, the greater the number of transfer recipients due to false incentives and deliberate exploitation of the welfare state regulations. In addition, he notes that individual social behavior is oriented towards reference groups and that a self-reinforcing process can thus be set in motion, i.e. that the exploitation of welfare state institutions will increase more and more. The aim of this research project was to empirically test this hypothesis on the basis of data from the World Values Survey / European Values Survey for the years 1990, 1999 and 2005. Both the causes of a change in norms and its effects on the financial viability of the welfare state were analyzed.