The rise of populist attitudes among the European electorate and the success of populist parties during the last decade go hand in hand with the decline of the social democratic parties, i.e. the main building block of the political coalition supporting welfare policies. Welfare states fulfill two interconnected goals: the provision of a safety net (insurance) and the development of a fiscal system able to fund equalization mechanisms (redistribution) (Rehm 2009, Rehm, Hacker and Schlesinger 2012). Mainly social democratic parties capitalized the discourse and the consequences of implementing such a model in the postwar era, building a broad coalition of voters (Esping Andersen 1990, Steinmo 1993, Garrett 1995). The massive transformation of occupational structures that comes with deindustrialization, the long-term consequences of globalization and the short-term consequences of the Great Recession have uncovered the weaknesses and the inability of the Welfare State to deliver its promises. And as its main credit takers, social democratic parties are paying the consequences of such a failure. We aim to understand the decline in social democratic parties’ vote share by providing an analysis of the members of the social democratic coalition both historically and currently using survey data. Our intuition is the following: the promises of the Welfare State attracted a heterogeneous group of voters that were guided by the aforementioned goals (on the composition of the welfare coalition see Gingrich and Hausermann 2015). Our working hypothesis is that three groups of voters formed the postwar social democratic coalition: those seeking insurance, those seeking redistribution and those seeking both at the same time, and that each of them has a different set of material and ideological attitudes regarding welfare deservingness. The segmentation of these attitudes is what could potentially explain the decline of the welfare support coalition, inevitably shedding light on the formation of populist attitudes among European voters.