Is all Social Policy Subject to Welfare Chauvinist Claims? Explaining Variation in Welfare Chauvinism across Policy Areas

The socio-economic views of the populist radical right have been a matter of scholarly debate for as long as these parties have played a relevant part in European politics. Early accounts depicted them as promoting a neoliberal agenda and welfare retrenchment. This view was later challenged, and a more centrist economic position was diagnosed as an essential element of these parties’ ‘winning formula’. More recently, welfare chauvinism – the application of nativist principles to social policy – has emerged as a central concept in defining populist radical right ideology. This paper seeks to advance this debate by asking whether we can explain variation in the extent to which populist radical right parties employ welfare chauvinist appeals across social policy areas. It theorizes that the organizing principles of existing welfare institutions shape the extent to which nativist arguments will be deployed in social policy debates. More specifically, it suggests that nativist thinking is more at odds with universal and means-tested benefits than with social insurance programs. This is because in most European societies social insurance programs tend to create less native-to-nonnative redistribution than other types of benefits. Therefore, insurance-type elements of the welfare architecture should be less likely to become targets of welfare chauvinist rhetoric. This claim is tested with a quantitative content analysis of social policy documents published by the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ).