Contradictory welfare conditioning—differing welfare support for natives versus immigrants

Abstract

The New Liberal Dilemma predicts that European universal welfare states lose support among natives due to large immigration numbers. This article contributes to the debate regarding the validity of the argument posited by the New Liberal Dilemma by examining the contradictory combination of support for a popular welfare state reform, Universal Basic Income (UBI), and conditionality for immigrants’ access to the welfare state in 20 European countries. Even though UBI is unconditional, two thirds of UBI supporters want to impose significant conditions on immigrants’ access to the welfare state and thus exhibit contradictory and chauvinistic welfare state preferences. UBI supporters consist of different groups of respondents that are chauvinist. Nativists hold strong anti-immigration attitudes and want to exclude immigrants entirely from welfare benefits, while reciprocity chauvinists are willing to grant immigrants access to the welfare state once immigrants prove themselves to be deserving of benefits by paying taxes for at least a year. In contrast to the welfare magnet hypothesis, inconsistent and chauvinist preferences among UBI supporters are least common in rich European countries with large welfare states. On the macro-level, our findings are independent of countries’ engagement with communism and the share of foreign-born people.

Keywords:

• Political economy
• welfare state
• redistribution
• welfare chauvinism
• universal basic income
• immigration

Acknowledgements

First results of this article were presented in the German Economic Institutes’ Brown-Bag-Seminar 2019. We are grateful to all participants for helpful comments and suggestions at this early stage. Furthermore, we would like to thank Max Stockhausen and two anonymous referees for their fruitful suggestions and comments that significantly improved this contribution. Additionally, we would like to thank Lennart Bolwin for his valuable research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Baldwin (1990) for the argument that ethnic homogeneity reduced the opposition against universally organised welfare in the UK and Scandinavian countries.

2 See Agersnap et al. (2019) for a current example of support for the welfare magnet hypothesis.

3 See supplementary material Appendix Table 1 for the descriptive statistics of UBI supporters, non-UBI supporters as well as chauvinistic and non-chauvinistic UBI supporters.

4 See supplementary material Appendix Table 2 for standardized coefficients.

5 See supplementary material Appendix Table 3 for standardized coefficients.

6 Note that the one year ‘membership condition’ is a rather week one that does not include any sort of cultural adaptation signalling.

7 See supplementary material Appendix Table 4 for standardized coefficients.

8 See supplementary material Appendix Table 5 for standardized coefficients.

9 The individual effects observed with respect to the Reciprocity Indicator, the Citizenship Indicator, and the Extreme Chauvinism Indicator from Table 4 are also reproduced after adding contextual controls.

Additional information

Funding

Joel Reinecke is grateful for funding by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung during a visiting research fellowship at the German Economic Institute.

Notes on contributors

Matthias Diermeier

Matthias Diermeier is a PhD candidate at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He is the personal assistant to the director of the German Economic Institute. His research focuses upon populist radical right parties and the economic determinants of their success.

Judith Niehues

Dr. Judith Niehues is head of the research group microdata and method development at the German Economic Institute. Her research focuses upon income and wealth distribution and perceived inequality.

Joel Reinecke

Joel Reinecke is an economics student at Stanford University. His research interests include welfare and development economics.