Does the left still own social policies? The effect of incumbent partisanship on citizens’ perceptions of public spending in Spain

Abstract

To what extent do people still regard welfare policies as a policy issue owned by left-wing parties? To answer this question, this article studies the extent to which people use government partisanship (right/ left) as a shortcut to infer how much public money is allocated to different policy domains and, subsequently, to develop a stance concerning the adequacy of public budgets. We use Spain as a case study, and we build a large database merging 22 representative public opinion surveys (1993 to 2019) with budgetary data by year and policy sector. We find that people use government partisanship as a shortcut to evaluate the level of public spending on social areas: when there is a left-wing party in government, people tend to believe that enough money is being spent on welfare. When there is a right-wing party in government, people tend to consider social expenditure as too low. This relationship holds independently of the actual level of public expenditure and of the economic situation, but it does not hold for expenditure on non-social areas. That is, in Spain the left still ‘owns’ social policies, since people believe these policies are better funded when a left-wing party is in office no matter what the real level of social expenditure is.