Welfare Chauvinism Research Articles

Nordic welfare chauvinism: A comparative study of welfare chauvinism in Sweden, Norway and Finland

This study analyses welfare chauvinist attitudes in the generous welfare states of Sweden, Norway and Finland. We find that strict forms of exclusionary welfare chauvinism are near non-existent. However, Finland, Norway and Sweden are in the top tier in Europe when it comes to beliefs that immigrants need to obtain citizenship before being given equal rights to social benefits. This may indicate a future turn in social policy when it comes to inclusion of non-citizens, with significant implications for social workers. We further analyse welfare chauvinism by exploring socio-economic factors, satisfaction with the country, and attitudes towards both benefits and immigrants.

Migrants’ Experiences With Limited Access to Social Protection in a Framework of EU Post‐National Policies

It has been argued that nation‐states confront migrant protection with a highly diverse array of measures ranging from excluding strategies (often labelled as “welfare chauvinism”) to more inclusionary, post‐national approaches. While exclusionary strategies are often guided by nativist principles such as citizenship, post‐national approaches of social protection are usually based on residence. Building on an international comparative project with a focus on free movement within the European Union, and involving four pairs of EU member states, this article argues that the extremes of these two ways of understanding nation‐state approaches to migrant social protection are not mutually exclusive, as has been discussed so far, but, instead, are intertwined with one another. While there is a common (and globally unique) framework on the EU level for the coordination of mobile citizens’ social protection, EU member states determine their strategies using residence as a main tool to govern intra‐EU migration. We differentiate between three main intertwining strategies applied by nation‐states in this respect: generally, selectively, and purposefully gated access to social protection. All three potentially lead to the social exclusion of migrants, particularly those who cannot prove their residence status in line with institutional regulations due to their undocumented living situations or their transnational lifestyles.

Preferences for Redistribution, Welfare Chauvinism, and Radical Right Party Support in Central and Eastern Europe

Why do supporters of radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe hold economically left-wing policy preferences? In this article, the author argues that this can be explained by welfare chauvinism. First, in ethnically heterogeneous societies, minority groups provide a plausible scapegoat for the grievances emphasized by radical right parties. Therefore, the majority population is sensitive to shifts in the status quo which accrue from policy changes that give minorities greater benefits. Support for redistribution will therefore be lower in more ethnically diverse countries. The salience of shifts in the ethnic group hierarchy also means that objective economic insecurity is less likely to intersect with redistributive preferences. Second, radical right supporters will prefer welfare policies that restrict eligibility to the majority population. This allows radical right parties to combine leftist economic policies with more authoritarian values. The empirical results confirm these expectations. This research contributes to our understanding of the attitudinal bases of radical right party support in Central and Eastern Europe.

Thirty years of welfare chauvinism research: Findings and challenges

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.

Of Tax, Crime, and Happiness. An Interdisciplinary Research Review on Social Inequality

This article reviews research literature on inequality from economics, sociology and political science from a historiographic perspective. The literature covered here mainly focusses on the development of Western societies between 1970 and 2010 and is organised in terms of research concepts such as tax competition, educational attainment gaps, educational assortative mating, opportunity hoarding, happiness inequality, politics of resentment, welfare chauvinism and nature versus nurture.

The rise of anti-establishment and far-right forces in Italy: Neoliberalisation in a new guise?

Over the last decade, the succession of financial crisis, neoliberal reform processes, and emergence of anti-establishment and far-right political forces has become a familiar pattern across Europe. But in few countries has it been as striking as in Italy. After the 2018 national elections, the anti-establishment Five-Star Movement (M5S) and the far-right League joined forces to form a government characterised by its rejection of past neoliberalising reforms and by its defiant stance towards European Union fiscal rules. The League’s victory in the latest European elections confirmed its ascendance and its centrality in the Italian political landscape. This article examines these developments in light of the recent trajectory of the Italian political economy and investigates whether the rise of these parties, and particularly the League, marked a break with the post-2011 neoliberalisation process. Analysis of the M5S-League government’s action indicates that these forces can further neoliberalisation processes together with a mix of anti-migration and welfare chauvinist measures. Moreover, an investigation of the political-economic project of the League shows that far-right parties can advance ‘nation-based’ neoliberalisation processes.

Migrants’ Experiences With Limited Access to Social Protection in a Framework of EU Post‐National Policies

It has been argued that nation‐states confront migrant protection with a highly diverse array of measures ranging from excluding strategies (often labelled as “welfare chauvinism”) to more inclusionary, post‐national approaches. While exclusionary strategies are often guided by nativist principles such as citizenship, post‐national approaches of social protection are usually based on residence. Building on an international comparative project with a focus on free movement within the European Union, and involving four pairs of EU member states, this article argues that the extremes of these two ways of understanding nation‐state approaches to migrant social protection are not mutually exclusive, as has been discussed so far, but, instead, are intertwined with one another. While there is a common (and globally unique) framework on the EU level for the coordination of mobile citizens’ social protection, EU member states determine their strategies using residence as a main tool to govern intra‐EU migration. We differentiate between three main intertwining strategies applied by nation‐states in this respect: generally, selectively, and purposefully gated access to social protection. All three potentially lead to the social exclusion of migrants, particularly those who cannot prove their residence status in line with institutional regulations due to their undocumented living situations or their transnational lifestyles.

‘Exclusionary welfarism’: a new programmatic agenda for populist right-wing parties?

ABSTRACT This article introduces a novel analytical framework to compare the changing positions of five populist right-wing parties in the field of welfare policies. Results outline that a novel programmatic approach on the socio economic dimension materialised, which clearly departs from traditional right wing ideologies. We call it ‘exclusionary welfarism’, characterised by (i) high salience of welfare issues, (ii) strong support for welfare state expansion, (iii) low support for the role of the market in welfare provision and (iv) the adoption of a chauvinistic stance in social policies. Furthermore, different profiles of exclusionary populist parties emerge. In fact, if both the salience of welfare issues and welfare chauvinism are shared across all parties’ manifestos considered here, the analysis shows high heterogeneity and varieties of exclusionary populist approaches among populist right-wing parties for what concerns the roles of the two main institutional spheres in welfare provision: state and market.

Parties Matter: The Consequences of PRR Parties in Subnational Governments on Health Policy

AbstractAlthough the research surrounding PRR parties has increased over the years, health policies, an important part of the welfare system, have generally been neglected. Using an in-depth case-study approach, this article analyses the health policy consequences of PRR parties in Austrian and Italian subnational governments over time, thereby expanding the units of analysis while also looking at an understudied level of government. The findings indicate a propensity towards neoliberalism, combined with accents of welfare chauvinism in Austria and a strategy of shutting down the Freedom Party of Austria. In the case of Italy, both regional cases mark a desire for welfare chauvinism but an inability to restrict healthcare access directly. In all four cases (except Burgenland), the PRR parties are consistently chauvinistic (despite seeming to prefer welfare to liberal chauvinism, they typically implement the latter for health policies) and any factor of generosity comes from a social democratic coalition partner or not at all.

Welfare chauvinism among co‐ethnics: Evidence from a conjoint experiment in South Korea

AbstractThis paper asks whether welfare chauvinism applies to co‐ethnic migrants. Existing research on welfare chauvinism, the view that welfare provision should be restricted to native‐born citizens and that migrants should be excluded from provision, has largely focused on ethnic difference as a main motivation, but little attention is given to whether native‐born citizens discriminate among co‐ethnics. Using a choice‐based conjoint experiment and various framing interventions, this paper considers whether South Koreans discriminate against co‐ethnic migrants in providing social housing. It also considers whether public cost and recipient contribution requirements affect discrimination. We find that co‐ethnics are subject to welfare chauvinism, with applicants from more developed and culturally similar origins more preferred, but we do not find that the cost structure motivates discrimination based on origins. Accordingly, this paper expands the literature on migration and welfare states to better consider non‐Western societies with high levels of co‐ethnic migration.

Varieties of Dependency, Varieties of Populism: Neoliberalism and the Populist Countermovements in the Visegrád Four

The rise of populism has cast doubt on the sustainability of the marriage of liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism. There is an urgent need to understand how neoliberal developmental bottlenecks foster populist social coalitions. This essay analyses how the combination of dependent development and various structures of dependency governance have contributed to different levels of socio-economic disintegration, engendering different populist countermovements in Central and Eastern Europe. These processes fostered exclusionary neoliberal populism with strong illiberalism in Hungary, welfare chauvinist populism with weak illiberalism in Poland, technocratic neoliberal populism without illiberalism in the Czech Republic and entrenched neoliberal populism with contained illiberalism in Slovakia.

The exclusion of migrants and refugees from welfare programs in Austria: the “legitimizing explanations” across different policy areas

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.

Welfare chauvinism across benefits and services

The article theorises how covering social risks through cash transfers and in-kind services shapes public attitudes towards including/excluding immigrants from these programmes in Western European destination countries. The argument is that public attitudes are more restrictive of granting immigrants access to benefits than to services. This hypothesis is tested across ten social protection programmes using original survey data collected in Denmark, Germany and the UK in 2019. Across the three countries, representing respectively a social democratic, conservative and liberal welfare regime context, the article finds that the public does indeed have a preference for easier access for in-kind services than for cash benefits. The article also finds these results to be stable across programmes covering the same social risks; the examples are child benefits and childcare. The results are even stable across left-wing, mainstream and radical right-wing voters; with the partial exception of radical right-wing voters in the UK. Finally, the article finds only a moderate association between individual characteristics and attitudinal variation across cash benefits and in-kind services.

Taking back control of the welfare state: Brexit, rational-imaginaries and welfare chauvinism

Brexit is about more than the UK exiting the EU. For the Conservative Party, it is about reacting to the challenge from the radical right, both in terms of the electoral threat from UKIP and a long-term internal struggle between moderate Conservatives and the more radical Eurosceptic faction within the party. We ask to what extent Brexit could also be considered as the mobilisation of specific welfare chauvinist discourses and practices. Through a combination of Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of key speeches and documents from the official Leave campaign, we demonstrate that, rather than merely reinforcing deservingness along ethno-national lines, Brexit invokes social citizenship to delegitimize EU institutions. The referendum result catalyses a longer-term redrawing of the boundaries of social citizenship, and the ideas of membership that grants access to services and benefits. Brexit is discursively framed to mobilise people to consent to this redrawing of boundaries.

The Welfare Is Ours: Rural-to-Urban Migration and Domestic Welfare Chauvinism in Urban China

ABSTRACT This study seeks to investigate whether welfare chauvinism exists in a large country with tremendous regional disparities and massive internal migration. Set in the context of coastal Guangdong Province, it examines Chinese people’s attitudes toward welfare entitlements for rural-to-urban immigrants. The study finds that chauvinistic attitude does not fracture along the lines of intergroup competition in the labor market; instead, it stems primarily from perceived competition over scarce welfare resources. Normative values and generalized trust powerfully mitigate welfare chauvinism. The larger relative number of migrants in the local community substantially increases the appeal of chauvinism, thus suggesting the occurrence of negative intergroup interactions. The empirical evidence is discussed against the broader context of rural-to-urban immigration in China and the developmental logic of its social policies.

Surplus to the city: Austerity urbanism, displacement and ‘letting die’

Urban scholars have traditionally associated displacement in cities of the global North with gentrification, generally understood as a class-based process of neighbourhood change. This article expands this scalar focus and adopts the larger scale of the local authority district (in this case the London borough) as its epistemological starting point to study the displacement of homeless people by the local state. Participatory action research was undertaken with housing campaigners in the East London borough of Newham to explore who is being displaced, their experiences of displacement and the impacts of displacement on their lives. Empirically, the article argues that displacement in this case is a product of national welfare state restructuring – or ‘austerity urbanism’ – implemented through a localised regime of ‘welfare chauvinism’ in which some groups are framed as economically unproductive and therefore undeserving of access to social housing. Displacement has the effect of reinforcing the surplus status of these groups by separating them from employment, education and care networks and eroding their physical and mental health. The article draws on research on the biopolitics of surplus populations in the global South to develop an original theorisation of the relationship between welfare state restructuring and displacement. This theorisation reveals that displacement is the spatial expression of a biopolitical shift away from the logic of ‘making live’ associated with the post-war welfare state towards a logic of ‘letting die’ more traditionally associated with postcolonial contexts.

Policy Experts Negotiating Popular Fantasies of ‘Benefit Tourism’ Policy Discourses on Deservingness and Their Relation to Welfare Chauvinism

Welfare provision as a border control strategy is often discussed in relation to irregular migrants and refugees. However, this article focuses on EU migrants. Using discourse theory, it explores interviews with policy experts from four migrant-receiving EU countries. The aim is to identify policy discourses on deservingness articulated in relation to intra-EU migrants from four member states in Eastern Europe, to detect mechanisms that generate these discourses and to reveal how they relate to welfare chauvinism. The article uncovers contesting logics that move policy experts toward welfare-chauvinist assumptions, which might contribute to the discursive welfare exclusion of EU migrants.

The Missing Link: Network Influences on Class Divides in Political Attitudes

AbstractPrevious research provides a detailed picture of class differences in political attitudes. Less is however known about the social structures that enforce this political divide across social classes. This article contributes towards filling this gap by considering how the class profile of personal social networks influences political attitudes. We propose a general framework for incorporating an individual’s social network into class analysis of political preferences. Using Sweden as a case, we empirically evaluate our approach using a population survey with information about the respondents’ own employment situation, egocentric networks, and political attitudes in terms of redistribution and welfare chauvinism. We find that there is considerable class segregation in social networks as individuals tend to have more ties within their own and neighbouring class positions. Concerning political preferences, results show that: (i) a substantive part of the class–attitude relationship is shaped by a person’s social network; (ii) the class profile of networks influences attitudes over and above one’s own class position; (iii) class segregation in networks fortifies class divides in political attitudes. We thus conclude that social networks constitute a (hitherto) ‘missing link’ in class analysis of political preferences that merits careful consideration in theoretical models of contemporary politics.

Left-Wing Xenophobia in Europe.

Given rising populist nationalism and multiplying meanings of “right” and “left,” this paper assesses whether Europeans who identify as extremely left-wing on the political spectrum hold anti-immigrant attitudes. In contrast to right-wing xenophobes, we further examine whether the political left, who conventionally emphasize class conflict, oppose immigrants less for cultural reasons and more for materialist reasons. We also consider whether socioeconomic status and values traditionally associated with the political left—favoring redistributive policies, egalitarianism, or social rights to benefits and services for immigrants—temper left- more than right-wing xenophobia. We find that a surprisingly large share of those who identify as far left do express extremely xenophobic attitudes, and we profile them in contrast to far right xenophobes. With logistic regression analysis of nine waves of the European Social Survey (2002–2018), we find that, all things equal, socioeconomic status influences far left xenophobia more than far right xenophobia, but inegalitarian values, less support for redistributive policies, and welfare chauvinism can only partially account for far left xenophobia and unexpectedly do not distinguish it from far right xenophobia. This implies that far left parties might adopt anti-immigrant policies to try to retain their loyal voters, even though such policies do not comport with broader left-wing values and may increase racial and ethnic inequality. Controlling for demographic and attitudinal differences reduces the probability of xenophobia among the far left by about sixty percent, but there remains some residual anti-immigrant attitudes among this group still to be explained.

Back to the familialist future: the rise of social policy for ruling populist radical right parties in Italy and Poland

This article contributes to the emerging studies of populist radical right parties’ social policies by looking at two cases, Italy and Poland, where such parties have been in office without the constraint of mainstream pro-market coalition partners. The comparison of two cases with different historical/institutional paths and economic conditions shows how important high-visibility, high-expenditure social policies can be for populist radical right parties (PRRPs) once in government. More specifically, the analysis of pension and family policies reveals important parallels in the revamping of familialistic aspects of the welfare state, despite demographic and economic pressures. The findings demonstrate that social policy is more important and less focussed on welfare chauvinism than assumed by the literature on PRRPs. This is explained by PRRPs’ electoral expansion strategy towards more deprived groups, which in countries with a strong conservative Catholic presence is achieved through ideological repertoire expansion towards familialism, which can address both the material and cultural interests of the new electorate.