Globalization, socio-economic status and welfare chauvinism: European perspectives on attitudes toward the exclusion of immigrants

Abstract

This article addresses the question of whether globalization impacts individual preferences to exclude immigrants from national welfare systems ('welfare chauvinism'). Intergroup contact theory and arguments from the 'new cosmopolitanism' debate suggest that cross-border social contacts ('social globalization') foster a willingness to include and accept newcomers. However, group conflict theory suggests that trade openness ('economic globalization') can unleash feelings of insecurity and trigger welfare chauvinism. While these approaches point in different directions, we argue that the impact of globalization on welfare chauvinism differs across socio-economic status groups. Using cross-national data from the European Social Survey 2008/2009, we find scarce support for the hypothesis that social globalization reduces welfare chauvinism in general. However, there is evidence that it diminishes exclusionary attitudes among those with relatively high socio-economic statuses. Moreover, we find no general evidence for an impact of economic globalization on chauvinism, but a positive interaction of intensified engagement with global market forces and higher socio-economic status.

The Impact of the Great Recession on Perceived Immigrant Threat: A Cross-National Study of 22 Countries

“…The only significant interaction involving a country-level covariate is GRI with changes in government expenditures/GDP, which is negatively associated with PIT. This suggests that the state's ability to provide services and resources can possibly offset the negative aspects of the Recession [17,56,57]. This too supports competitive threat theory by indicating that the state has some capacity to alleviate sources of competition created by immigration.…”

“…Many studies have investigated the relationship between economic decline and anti-immigrant sentiment, but their empirical findings are mixed. Some studies provide evidence that economic decline increases anti-immigrant sentiment [12,13], whereas others find no significant relationship [14][15][16][17][18][19]. A few studies have focused more specifically on the connection between the Great Recession and anti-immigrant attitudes, but their findings have also been mixed [4,20].…”

“…Among the 30 country-level interactions, only one was statistically significant-in Model 1, the interaction with changes in government expenditures/GDP is negatively associated with PIT. This suggests that, as the severity of the Recession increases, increasing government expenditures reduce PIT-presumably because increased state capacity to provide spending for public goods and services ameliorates economic competition between natives and immigrants [17,44]. This is shown in Panel A of Figure 1 where countries with government spending that falls one standard deviation below the mean have more sharply upward sloping effects on PIT as the Great Recession becomes more severe than countries one standard deviation above the mean.…”

“…The research has tested competitive threat theory using either unemployment rates or changes in GDP, but their results have not provided a clear-cut picture of country-level economic factors that affect public attitudes toward immigrants. Some research shows that countries with higher unemployment rates or lower GDPs have more pronounced anti-immigrant sentiments [4,12,13], but other studies regarding the effects of the economic conditions on anti-immigrant attitudes are inconclusive [14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. Some of these studies find that one or both of the measures of economic conditions have no relationship with attitudes toward immigrants, despite being consistently in the expected direction.…”

“…Labor productivity indicates the value of GDP divided by total working hours of employed persons. In addition, since attitudes towards immigrants can be affected by state capacity to provide public goods and services [17,44], we develop a measure of government expenditures/GDP, which is the value of all government expenditures as a percent of GDP.…”