There has been a dramatic rise in voting for populist parties in Europe over the past twenty years. There are clear material and non-material sources of this backlash against political and economic integration, which is part of the broader global trend. We assess the role of government social policy in dampening or provoking populist sentiment, on two different dimensions. First, we ask whether the existence of a broader and deeper social safety net mitigated the political discontent that took the form of populist voting. Here we examine a panel of 187 elections from 1990 to 2017 and find evidence that populist parties fared worse where countries spent more on social support, especially for labor market programs that provide income to workers experiencing unemployment or early retirement from the workforce (“passive labor market” policies). This suggests that “compensatory” social spending did work to dampen support for populism. Second, we ask whether cuts to government support for those facing economic distress, largely undertaken with reforms in the 1990s and early 2000s, stimulated populist discontent. Here we add an analysis of pooled cross-sectional data from eight waves of the European Social Survey. We find that cuts to social spending, especially spending on passive labor market policies, were strongly associated with increased support for populist parties. The effect was stronger among those individuals who had experienced unemployment and among those facing adverse economic circumstances. This suggests that the welfare and labor-market reforms of the 1990s and early 2000s may have alienated vulnerable segments of the population and driven them toward populist political parties.