Welfare Nationalism and Popular Support for Raising the Child Allowance: Evidence from a Norwegian Survey Experiment

Abstract

Refugee and labour immigration have placed the issue of immigrants’ access to welfare benefits high on the political agenda. This article explores how voter preferences for increases in the child benefit change when respondents are reminded about immigrants’ access to benefits. The survey experiment shows that information about newly arrived immigrants’ access to child benefit has only a small impact on support for increasing the child allowance. By contrast, information about labour migrants’ access to benefits for children living in another European Union country has a strong impact, and the observed sensitivity to this cue is not to the same extent confined to respondents who otherwise support welfare dualism.

What Makes People Worry about the Welfare State? A Three-Country Experiment

“…Our data indicate that especially Norwegian, but also Swedish respondents, are more prone than their German counterparts to react to immigration as a cost-inducing reform pressure. This is consistent with several singlecountry studies showing that exposure to various immigration-related stimuli affects welfare staterelated attitudes in Scandinavia (Aalberg, Shanto and Messing 2012;Bay, Finseraas and Pedersen 2016;Cappelen and Midtbø 2016;Hjorth 2016). But what is more, our results fit with a recent two-country experimental comparison in which Fietkau and Hansen (2018, 136) found that:…”

“…Several studies use experimental designs to examine how attitudes react to different types of exposure to immigration. A reoccurring finding and/or interpretation is that effects exist and are not only due to perceived ‘cultural threat’, racism, and the like, but also to the notion that immigration is an economic reason to worry about welfare state sustainability (Aalberg, Shanto and Messing 2012; Bay, Finseraas and Pedersen 2016; Cappelen and Midtbø 2016; Fietkau and Hansen 2018; Hjorth 2016; Naumann and Stoetzer 2018). 2…”

Welfare chauvinism across benefits and services

“…Hence, we argue that welfare chauvinism across services is lower as services do not violate the basic principle of welfare being for residents living permanently within the state borders. There is already some empirical evidence for the importance of this characteristic for public opinion; through a survey experiment, Bay et al (2016) demonstrated that welfare chauvinist attitudes were fuelled more by the statement that child benefits could be consumed in the country of origin than by the statement that immigrants in Norway would have immediate access to domestic child benefits.…”

“…For the case of child benefit, we follow Bay et al (2016) by specifying the condition of the child respectively being located in the destination country and in the country of origin (child benefit domestic versus child benefit origin). This gives a direct measure of the importance of the recipients being inside or outside the state borders, which is deemed an essential criterion for welfare reciprocity (Christiansen et al, 2005).…”

Healthcare chauvinism during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…These experimental studies consistently show that majority members regard ethnic minorities and recent immigrants as less deserving of welfare (Gilens 1996;Ford 2016; Hjorth 2016; Kootstra 2016; Reeskens and van der Meer 2019). A related line of survey experimental work demonstrates that majority members support for universal welfare policies declines if typical benefits claimants are portrayed as immigrants (Bay and Pedersen 2006;Bay, Finseraas, and Pedersen 2016;Goerres, Karlsen, and Kumlin 2020). By experimentally disentangling length of residence and ethnic background, experimental studies on welfare deservingness demonstrate that immigrants are regarded as less deserving because of both reciprocity concerns and racismalthough the racism uncovered by these studies does not disentangle stereotypes about ethnic minorities being bad citizens (e.g.…”