The global financial meltdown of September 2008 has plunged Europe into its most severe economic crisis since the 1930s. During this crisis, European welfare states have proven to be useful buffers that protect citizens from external economic shocks. At the same time, deficits in the national budgets have raised questions about the financial sustainability of current welfare regulations, and have consequently revived the call for welfare reform.

These developments bring the question of welfare state legitimacy and social solidarity to the fore. This paper aims at enhancing scientific understanding of how egalitarian attitudes (i.e. one of the crucial dimensions of welfare legitimacy - van Oorschot & Meuleman 2012) change in times of economic downturn. For this purpose, we analyze over twenty waves from the Dutch repeated cross-sectional survey 'Cultural changes in the Netherlands' (1975-2010). Egalitarian attitudes are measured by means of three items gauging the preferred degree of equality of income and possessions. A crucial advantage of this data source is the wide time range, which makes it possible to distinguish between severe economic crisis and normal business cycles. In order to disentangle various drivers of attitude change -i.e. age, cohort and period effects- we employ the mixed models approach to age-period-cohort analysis proposed by Yang & Land (2006).

The results are indicative of both age and period effects, while cohort differences seem to be virtually absent. Individual-level as well as contextual variables are used to explain (trends in) egalitarian attitudes.