This project examines the impact of perceptions about the quality of government on support for state sponsored redistribution. While existing scholarship has identified a number of factors that shape welfare state attitudes, individual evaluations of institutional quality have received little attention. This omission is problematic because many countries around the world suffer from severe governance problems. I seek to address this gap by studying the way in which exposure to information about institutional inefficiency affects views on the role of the state in alleviating socio-economic inequality. To do this, I run a survey experiment embedded in a conjoint experiment in the United Kingdom and Denmark. This empirical strategy allows me to explore how respondents’ support for state-sponsored redistribution changes in response to their being primed to think about the quality of the institutional apparatus in their country. I proceed to assess whether perceptions about the quality of government affect citizens’ preferred policy interventions and policy designs. Crucially, I also examine the interaction between perceptions about institutional quality and economic insecurity. In a last step, I check what other forms of inequality- alleviating policies citizens embrace.