Does Immigration Reduce the Support for Welfare Spending? A Cautionary Tale on Spatial Panel Data Analysis

Abstract

There has been a long-lasting debate over whether increasing ethnic diversity undermines support for social welfare, and whether this conflict thesis applies not only to the United States, but also to European welfare states. In their 2016 ASR article, Schmidt-Catran and Spies analyzed a panel (1994 to 2010) of regional units in Germany and concluded that this thesis also holds for Germany. We argue that their analysis suffers from misspecification: their model specification assumes parallel time trends in welfare support in all German regions. However, time trends strongly differed between Western and Eastern Germany after reunification. In the 1990s, Eastern Germans’ attitudes adapted to a less interventionist Western welfare system (“Goodbye Lenin effect”). When allowing for heterogeneous time trends, we find no evidence that increasing proportions of foreigners undermine welfare support, or that this association is moderated by economic hardship (high unemployment rates). We conclude with some general suggestions regarding the conceptualization of context effects in spatial analyses.

Different samples, different results? How sampling techniques affect the results of field experiments on ethnic discrimination

“…We decided to exclude Eastern Germany because the rental market as well as attitudes toward foreigners still strongly differ across both parts of Germany. To adequately capture these heterogeneities, one would have needed quite complex regression techniques (Auspurg, Brüderl, & Wöhler, 2019a). However, it is noteworthy that our substantive results still hold when including Eastern Germany.…”

Immigrant Sanctuary Policies and Crime-Reporting Behavior: A Multilevel Analysis of Reports of Crime Victimization to Law Enforcement, 1980 to 2004

“…Estimates derived from hybrid modeling strategies, similar to other procedures that focus on within-unit effects, assume that outcomes across comparison groups have common or parallel time trends (Auspurg, Brüderl, and Wöhler 2019;Schmidt-Catran and Spies 2019). For the present study, the assumption is that patterns in the crimereporting behavior of Latinos residing in MSAs that adopted sanctuary policies during the study period are equivalent to the patterns of other groups prior to any changes in policy (Kahn-Lang and Lang 2020).…”

Does the immigration issue divide the left’s attitudes towards social welfare? A study on public support of social benefits and services in the Nordic countries

“…For instance, Schmidt-Catran and Spies (2016) remark more specifically that citizens become more reluctant to support social welfare when the proportion of immigrants increases (cf. Auspurg et al, 2019). This effect is particularly strong in the initial phase of immigration.…”