Politics of welfare exclusion: Open and concealed welfare chauvinism and public support for social assistance reform

The normalisation of welfare chauvinism

The term ‘welfare chauvinism’ has achieved a certain currency in social science research and is used widely. Yet, the concept is not without its critics, who claim that welfare chauvinism is ‘loaded’ or ‘ambiguous’. This article reviews empirical studies of welfare chauvinism, from the 1990s to the present day, drawing primarily from party politics and attitudes research. We identify differences in how the concept is used, defined, operationalized and measured. We emphasize the importance of a unified language, operationalization and measurement, and identify promising directions for future research.

Social science research has produced evidence of welfare chauvinism whereby citizens turn against social policies that disproportionately benefit immigrants and their descendants. Some policymakers advocate welfare chauvinism as a means to incentivize fast labour market integration and assimilation into the mainstream more generally. These contested arguments about integration incentives can hardly be extended to the case of hospital treatment of an acute COVID-19 infection. On that premise we conducted a pre-registered online survey experiment among a representative sample of the Danish population about healthcare chauvinism against recent immigrants and Muslim minorities during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic of spring 2020. Our results show no evidence of blatant racism-driven healthcare chauvinism against acute COVID-19 patients with a Muslim name who were born in Denmark. However, we do find evidence of healthcare chauvinism against patients with a Danish/Nordic name who immigrated to Denmark only a year ago. Moreover, healthcare chauvinism against recently-immigrated COVID-19 patients doubles in strength if they have a Muslim name. Our findings thus suggest that there is general reciprocity-motivated welfare chauvinism against recent immigrants who have not contributed to the welfare state for long and that racism against Muslims strongly catalyses this form of welfare chauvinism.

In Western European welfare states, research shows that support for welfare chauvinism, or the notion that welfare benefits for immigrants should be restricted, is highest among white, blue-collar working-class voters. On the other hand, higher-educated, middle-class voters are more likely to reject welfare chauvinism and support the inclusion of immigrants into the welfare state. For social democratic parties, this might pose an electoral dilemma between generous welfare states and open borders: They rely on both middle- and working-class constituencies and are ideologically tied both to a universal welfare state and the protection of (national) workers. To what extent does such an electoral dilemma between classes exist for social democratic parties? How do social democratic parties solve this dilemma when in government? In this paper, we postulate that a class divide around welfare chauvinism exists within the electorate for social democratic parties and that these parties’ policies in government reflect these divides: If the social democratic electorate has a high share of working-class voters, they should act more welfare chauvinist than if their electorate is mostly middle class. We test these hypotheses by combining survey and macro-level policy data in 14 Western European countries from 1980 to 2018. We find consistent evidence of the existence of a working-class/middle-class divide regarding welfare chauvinism, even within social democratic electorates. On the macro-level, we find partial evidence that social democratic parties in power respond to the class demands of their electorate: They are less welfare chauvinist when they have a higher proportion of middle-class voters, whereas their working-class vote share does not significantly condition their policies at all, contrary to assumptions in the literature. We therefore conclude that as social democratic parties become parties of the middle classes, the likelihood that they will retrench immigrant welfare rights reduces.

In this paper we examine whether refugee flows are associated with an increase in electoral support for populist-right parties. The empirical evidence on this so far remains mixed. We argue that refugee inflows alone are an inaccurate predictor of the success of populist-right parties. Rather, refugee inflows can lead to a rise in electoral support for populist-right parties where traditional welfare states are expansive—the so called ‘welfare chauvinism’ argument, wherein natives already dependent on high levels of social welfare are likely to see refugees as interlopers who free-ride on welfare and thereby threaten the welfare of locals. Using panel data on 27 OECD countries during 1990–2014 period (25 years), we find no evidence to suggest that refugee inflows per se increase electoral support for populist-right parties. However, a positive effect of refugee inflows on electoral support for populist-right parties is conditional upon a higher degree of social welfare and unemployment benefit spending, which supports the propositions of ‘welfare chauvinism.’ Moreover, support for populist-right parties increase when the degree of labor market regulations and welfare spending is high. Our results are robust to alternative data, sample and estimation techniques.

Summary Welcome to the club? A comparative analysis of the relation between integration policy and welfare chauvinism. This article contributes to research on welfare chauvinism, i.e. the opinion that access to social security should be granted exclusively to people who belong to the own ethnic-cultural group. Whereas previous research has focused mainly on individual explanations for welfare chauvinism, such as education or authoritarianism, the current paper scrutinizes the relationship between national policy – and more specifically integration policy – and welfare chauvinism. For this purpose, we use three theoretical frameworks that lead to opposing hypotheses. Ethnic competition theory, on the one hand, suggests that more generous integration policies can induce welfare chauvinistic attitudes in the native population, whereas policy feedback and policy responsiveness mechanisms, on the other, predict that a more generous integration policy could lead to a decrease in welfare chauvinism. To test these hypotheses, we use data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) for 23 European countries. The results support policy feedback and policy responsiveness. More generous integration policies go hand in hand with lower levels of welfare chauvinism.

The paper analyses and assesses social policy reforms of the conservative, far-right and right-wing populist coalition government in Austria between 2017 and 2019 in the light of the debates about welfare chauvinist, authoritarian and populist social policies. The latter had gained in importance over the previous years due to the upsurge of far-right and right-wing populist parties and the (at least partial) accommodation of mainstream parties to this tendency in many countries. The policies of the government were based on the view that the social problems associated with immigration were (at least) one of the main underlying causes for the problems affecting the Austrian society. The paper shows that the government initiated strategies to tackle these developments via a renationalisation of social policies. The analysis is focused on implemented and planned activities geared mainly towards the (former) margins of the Austrian welfare regime (social assistance, active labour market policies, unemployment assistance, youth integration policies), as well as on the ideological articulations the government uttered to justify these reforms via the combination of welfare chauvinist orientations with centre-right concerns about market dynamics and public finances. Our analysis concludes that nativist/racialised, nationalist and welfare chauvinist social policies transcend the distinction of deserving and non-deserving social groups, which raises the question about the social imaginaries that lie beneath the attempts of far-right political actors to shape societies through the reform of welfare.

We examine whether intra-EU migration affects welfare chauvinistic attitudes, i.e. the idea that immigrants’ access to the welfare system should be restricted. According to the in-group/out-group theory, migration can unleash feelings of insecurity and thus trigger welfare chauvinism. According to intergroup contact theory, welfare chauvinism should decrease when immigration is higher, because contact reduces prejudice and softens anti-immigrant stances. We test these theories using data from the European Social Survey 2008/2009, supplemented with country-level data, and analyse these data using a multilevel ordered logit approach. We find a negative relation between intra-EU immigration and welfare chauvinism, supporting the intergroup contact theory: in countries with more intra-EU migration, welfare chauvinism tends to be lower. Furthermore, the higher the percentage of East European immigrants compared to other EU immigrants, the higher the level of welfare chauvinism.

Summary Welcome to the club? A comparative analysis of the relation between integration policy and welfare chauvinism.This article contributes to research on welfare chauvinism, i.e. the opinion that access to social security should be granted exclusively to people who belong to the own ethnic-cultural group. Whereas previous research has focused mainly on individual explanations for welfare chauvinism, such as education or authoritarianism, the current paper scrutinizes the relationship between national policy ‐ and more specifically integration policy ‐ and welfare chauvinism. For this purpose, we use three theoretical frameworks that lead to opposing hypotheses. Ethnic competition theory, on the one hand, suggests that more generous integration policies can induce welfare chauvinistic attitudes in the native population, whereas policy feedback and policy responsiveness mechanisms, on the other, predict that a more generous integration policy could lead to a decrease in welfare chauvinism. To test these hypotheses, we use data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) for 23 European countries. The results support policy feedback and policy responsiveness. More generous integration policies go hand in hand with lower levels of welfare chauvinism.

The study examines two dimensions of inequality acceptance in Sweden—income differences and welfare chauvinism—as well as their association with populist attitudes. Based on original survey data collected from 2019 to 2022 (three pooled cross-sections, random samples of the adult population), the study reveals substantial social (by class) and political (by partisanship) divides regarding how redistributive ambitious and socially inclusive the welfare state should be, challenging assumptions of strong sociopolitical consensus. Welfare chauvinism is found to be more politically divisive than approval of income differences, with the sharpest divides emerging in the exclusivist conceptions of social rights and welfare deservingness held by voters of the non-mainstream (radical) right-wing party, the Sweden Democrats. The results suggest that conflicts over inclusivist versus exclusivist conceptions of social rights and welfare deservingness could become central in Swedish politics, potentially shifting away from the universalist principles that underpin its social democratic welfare state model.

Immigration has been a major trend in the last decades in Europe. However, immigrant access to the social security systems has remained a contentious issue having gained additional salience in light of the recent asylum-seeking developments. We focus on welfare chauvinism, the idea that immigrants should not participate in welfare resources, as an attitudinal dimension. We seek to answer two primary questions: To what extent are different types of objective and subjective material deprivation related to welfare chauvinism? What is the role of the recent asylum seeker influx? Using European Social Survey data and employing binary and generalized ordered logit models with country fixed effects, we find perceptions of deprivation to be more meaningful than objective factors related to potential job loss, and some relationships depend on the specific type of deprivation. On the country level, in line with the deservingness of asylum seekers as a group, higher levels of asylum seeking are related to lower levels of welfare chauvinism, while GDP per capita is not associated with welfare chauvinism. Finally, the generalized ordered logit model shows that some relationships vary according to the strictness of welfare chauvinism, which would not be visible in a conventional ordered logit model.

The USDA Forest Service has had a longstanding presence in utilization, economics, and social sciences research and development activities. The magnitude and diversity of these activities have changed as the questions and the people asking them have changed over the past century. These changes challenge the social science and utilization research community to develop this collective research agenda for utilization, economics, and social sciences research and development activities conducted by the Forest Service. It sets the context for the utilization, economics, and social sciences research and development activities in the Forest Service. It deals with the need to balance knowledge creation with the constantly changing demand for information that guides various land management decisions and shapes policymaker perceptions in various environmental debates. The research agenda is built around six common themes that will help us create a larger pool of experience from which we can form judgments relative to outcomes and develop tools that can be used to solve a variety of problems. It assumes that the worth of utilization, economics, and social sciences research and development activities will be judged by our ability to create lasting solutions that alter outcomes. Finally, creating and implementing such a research agenda depends on leaders who can advocate for problem selection that recognizes the full integrated nature of contemporary questions, who can synchronize research oriented toward major questions with knowledge creation, and who can serve as defenders of social science research against ideological attacks by emphasizing the true nature of questions and the importance of taking integrative approaches.

Welfare chauvinism is largely understood as the view that the benefits of the welfare state should primarily be given to the native population, and not shared with the immigrant populations. Using a multilevel approach, we analyse welfare chauvinism in Europe and test to see how different contextual and macro-economic conditions may influence welfare chauvinistic attitudes in Europe, with a particular focus on different nuances of unemployment. We also test how individuals’ subjective perceptions of the economic development in their society may influence welfare chauvinism in Europe. The analysis finds that welfare chauvinistic attitudes have increased in strength in Central-Eastern European welfare states, whereas the most exclusionary form of welfare chauvinism is near non-existent in the Nordic welfare regimes. We further find that it is the subjective perceptions of the macro-economic conditions and the strength of far-right populism, rather than the actual objective reality of a society’s economic situation that drives welfare chauvinistic attitudes in Europe.

Europe has faced an increase in immigration during the past decades. This development has triggered public and political debate about the integration of immigrants, which includes immigrants’ access to social security systems. At the same time, a classical anti-immigrant narrative is that immigrants are “free-riders” who receive social benefits without having contributed adequately. Welfare chauvinism in the context of immigration entertains this belief, and refers to the individual perception that welfare state access should remain the preserve of native-born citizens. As such, welfare chauvinism is—in its core—about how group-based social inequality is perceived and justified. This chapter reviews personal and contextual foundations of welfare chauvinistic beliefs in immigrant-receiving societies in Western Europe. First, we focus on matters related to the conceptualization and measurement of welfare chauvinistic attitudes. Second, we review theoretical mechanisms and empirical evidence on individual-level factors that underlie welfare chauvinistic beliefs. This includes individuals’ social status, perceived deprivation, as well as value-related orientations. Third, we examine contextual determinants referred to in the literature. In addition to the presence of immigrants and asylum-seekers, which has been heightened as an influential factor in intergroup conflict approaches, we examine the role of economic, political and institutional factors. Fourth, we conduct an empirical analysis using two waves of the European Social Survey merged with contextual country-level information on economic, immigration-related and policy-related factors. The article concludes by referring to recent conceptual developments and methodological advances (e.g., longitudinal research and experiments), as well as open questions that should be addressed in future research on welfare chauvinism in immigrant-receiving societies.

PurposeThe present article deals with the topic of migrants’ exclusion from welfare benefits in European host countries from the angle of the research on the so-called “welfare chauvinism” (Andersen and Bjørklund 1990, p. 212). More specifically, it explores the political justifications behind welfare chauvinism in the policy debate surrounding some recent chauvinist-oriented social policies. Drawing on that, the article develops a theoretical argument to generate expectations about how politicians use different types of justifications. The fundamental proposition is that the chauvinistic arguments used are shaped by the different types of social programs, i.e. either universal or means-tested programs.Design/methodology/approachQualitative content analysis of several selected parliamentary debates in the period 2017–2019 in Austria is carried out. In order to improve the efficiency of the research, the author relies on MAXQDA, an advanced piece of software for qualitative data analysis, to code the qualitative data and analyze them. The author prefers this to other similar programs as it is considered a valid and reliable tool within the academic research world.FindingsThe article points out that programs design works as an explanatory factor to highlight variations of welfare chauvinist arguments.Originality/valueIt develops for the first time a theoretical argument explaining the presence and variation of welfare chauvinist arguments based on social programs design.