Transnationalism and Welfare Chauvinism in Italy: Evidence from the 2018 Election Campaign

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the factors which explain public attitudes to welfare chauvinism in Italy. The notion of ‘welfare chauvinism’ refers to the idea that foreigners, considered as out-groups, should have limited or even no access to domestic social security benefits. We focus on the role played by individual transnationalism: i.e. direct and indirect ties and connections with people and cultures of other European countries. We postulate that transnationalism dilutes fears and anxieties, fostering pro-opening attitudes. We test the research hypotheses by using original survey data collected during the 2018 Italian elections, in which the issues of welfare benefits and immigration shaped the election campaign.

KEYWORDS:

• Deservingness
• free movement
• immigration
• public opinion
• social security
• solidarity
• welfare benefits
• welfare state

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Allport 1954; Pettigrew 1998; Binder et al. 2009; Pettigrew et al. 2011.

2. Scholars define the two juxtaposing poles of this new conflict in different ways: integration versus demarcation (Kriesi et al. 2008, 2012), transnationalism versus parochialism (Hooghe & Marks 2018) or cosmopolitanism versus communitarianism (de Vries 2018; Teney, Lacewell & De Wilde 2014; Zurn & de Wilde 2016). Even with different nuances, all these notions refer to a new political dimension orthogonal – at least in some countries – to the traditional left/right continuum.

3. See for instance Bechtel, Hainmueller and Margalit (2014); Ciornei and Recchi (2017); Kuhn, Solaz and van Elsas (2017); Vasilopoulou and Talving (2018); Verhaegen (2018).

4. The CAWI is an internet surveying technique whereby respondents fill out online questionnaires. This is a widespread methodology whose main advantages are the reduced amount of resources needed to conduct a survey, shorter fieldwork, and more flexibility in designing the questionnaire. However, the main disadvantage is that, compared to other methodologies, samples tend to be more biased towards younger and more educated respondents who have more access to the Internet. To avoid potential misrepresentations of the Italian electorate, the survey was conducted by an experienced company – IPSOS – with a reliable and large panel of respondents that enabled us to stratify our sample in a proper way.

5. More information on the survey and the original question in Italian are available in the online Appendix.

6. Even considering the dependent variable as a nominal variable and running empirical analysis using multinomial logistic models, the main results do not change. Therefore, for ease of presentation of the results we prefer to employ ordinal logistic models.

7. Cronbach’s alpha equals 0.68 for transnational practices, 0.72 for human capital, and 0.73 for the overall transnationalism index. These three indexes were rescaled in order to vary between 0 and 1.

8. The social stratification of transnationalism was confirmed by a model that regressed the transnationalism score on the socio-demographic factors illustrated. The results are set out in Table A2 of the online Appendix.

9. All analyses were performed using the Stata 16 software.

10. We obtained the same results by interacting transnationalism with other variables referring to the subjective perceived threat of immigration. These variables measured the perceived increase in the number of immigrants in the respondents’ living area (binary) and the perceived economic as well as cultural threat raised by immigration (scales).

11. See the government programme available online at: https://www.ilpost.it/2019/09/05/programma-governo-pd-m5s/.

Additional information

Funding

This essay is part of the research project titled ‘Reconciling Economic and Social Europe: The Role of Values, Ideas and Politics - REScEU’, funded by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (Grant no 340534, P.I. Prof. Maurizio Ferrera).

Notes on contributors

Alessandro Pellegata

Alessandro Pellegata is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan. His main research interests are in the field of comparative institutional analysis and comparative public opinion. Ha was involved in the REScEU research project at the University of Milan. He has published articles in several academic journals, such as Democratization, International Journal of Public Opinion research, International Political Science Review, Italian Political Science Review, Journal of Development Studies Journal of European Public Policy and Social Indicators Research.

Francesco Visconti

Francesco Visconti is a Research Fellow in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan. His main research interests are public opinion, policy agenda, legislative politics, and responsiveness. His articles have been published in the Italian Political Science Review and in the Rivista Italiana di Politiche Pubbliche.