Welfare chauvinism across benefits and services

Abstract

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.

Populist radical right rhetoric increases discrimination towards minorities: Welfare ethnocentrism and anti‐Roma attitudes

“…As Ennser‐Jedenastik (2018) shows, while universal or means‐tested programmes – organized according to equality and need principles – are at odds with nativist worldviews in theory and/or in practice, the same does not necessarily occur with programmes organized according to equity principles – such as pensions or unemployment benefits. Furthermore, among the former, differences have also been detected between cash versus in‐kind benefits or services (Eick & Larsen, 2022; Ennser‐Jedenastik, 2022). Future studies about how exclusionary rhetoric around social programmes triggers discriminatory intentions ought to explore these variations.…”

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

“…as a result, the radical right have been able to compete directly with social democratic parties in Cee without de-emphasizing the economic dimension as RRPs have had to in Western europe. 103 This has likely contributed to the significant weakness of social democratic parties across Cee where they have been in electoral decline for much of the past decade. 104 It is also notable that one of the few social democratic parties that has been successful in Cee is Smer, which consciously courted nationalist individuals with a "patriotic" agenda that was combined with a left-wing economic platform.…”

Migrants and Welfare States

“…In practice, it comes down to spe-cific benefits and services. Asked directly about access to specific schemes, the public of the Northern European countries (including the voters of the anti-migration parties) largely wanted to uphold existing access rule, including migrants' free access to service provisions (Eick and Larsen, 2021;Larsen, 2020). The classic contribution-based benefits found in Germany are also somewhat sheltered from public opposition as there is link between taking out and putting in (Ruhs and Palme, 2018); see below on free-riding.…”