The institutional logic of giving migrants access to social benefits and services

Abstract

The article analyses how the programmatic structure of welfare schemes in Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany shape public perceptions of and preferences for migrants’ entitlement to social benefits and services. First, the article finds that despite high complexity and the presence of some severe misconceptions, the entitlement criteria of migrants within existing social benefits and services do shape public perceptions of reality. Second, the article finds that these institutional shaped perceptions of reality strongly influence preferences for how migrants’ entitlement criteria should be. This status quo effect is more moderate among populist right-wing voters, in general, and in the critical case of attitudes to non-EU migrants’ entitlement to social assistance in Denmark. However, in all segments, one finds strong correlations between ‘are’ and ‘should be’, which is taken as indications of clear and sizeable institutional effects.

Thirty years of welfare chauvinism research: Findings and challenges

“…The adoption of a ‘solidarity’ perspective arguably enables them to better account for the diversity in immigrants’ access to social rights as opposed to ‘exclusion’, which suggests a dichotomy. However, it must be noted that apart from very few instances, which indicated that the concept ‘welfare chauvinism’ is ‘loaded’, ‘ambiguous’ or invokes ‘associations’ among readers (Koning, 2013: 3; Albrekt Larsen, 2020: 49; Carmel and Sojka, 2021: 646), these authors do not satisfactorily explain their movement away from this concept. Given that these studies refer to the same phenomenon as the studies which use the term ‘welfare chauvinism’, stem from the same definitional roots and use similar measures, we argue that their use of different concepts should be explicitly elaborated upon.…”

“…While some scholars propose to abandon the term altogether and adopt a different theoretical take (Carmel and Sojka, 2021), others see benefit in studying the phenomenon as defined by Andersen and Bjørklund (1990), but opt for using terms other than ‘welfare chauvinism’. For example, Degen et al (2019) prefer ‘welfare state restrictiveness’, which they associate with ‘whether and under which conditions immigrants should be granted access to social benefits’ (p. 2), and measure with the same ESS item used by many scholars to measure welfare chauvinism, while Albrekt Larsen (2020) uses ‘welfare nationalism’ as a synonym for welfare chauvinism to mitigate for the latter’s perceived normativity, and measure it with an ESS-like item. Other scholars add qualifying adjectives to ‘solidarity’.…”

“…Lefkofridi and Michel (2017) claim that parties promote ‘inclusive’ or ‘exclusive’ solidarity, and define the latter as a ‘strictly restrictive concept of redistributive politics’ (p. 3), in which citizens are generously redistributed to, and non-natives are not. Koning (2019a: 15) uses the concept of ‘selective solidarity’ (see also Albrekt Larsen, 2020; Magni, 2021), which he defines as ‘general support for a redistributive welfare state, but also a desire to restrict its benefits to native-born citizens’.…”

“…However, the term is not without its critics. Carmel and Sojka (2021: 646) argue that welfare chauvinism is an ‘ambiguous’ concept, while Albrekt Larsen (2020: 48) considers it ‘loaded’.…”

Shielding free movement? Reciprocity in welfare institutions and opposition to EU labour immigration

“…There are few publications that have provided a systematic analysis of the determinants of attitudes to free movement in the EU (Blinder & Markaki, 2019b;Larsen, 2020;Lutz, 2020;Meltzer et al, 2020;Vasilopoulou & Talving, 2018), and none of them have analysed the role of welfare institutions. The broader research literature on links between welfare states and attitudes to immigration and access to social rights for migrants (e.g., Sainsbury, 2012) is also relatively limited.…”