Uncovering the Pandora Box: Different Rationales at the Bases of Welfare Chauvinism and Migrants’ Disentitlement

This paper investigates the following research question: • How is the “welfare chauvinism” discourse promoted in respect of different types of social policies, in Western European countries? This work builds on the literature about political parties and the political discourse generally defined as “welfare chauvinism” (cft. Andersen and Bjørklund 1990; Careja et al. 2016; Ennser 2016; Lefkofridi and Michel 2014), i.e., the promotion of a logic of disentitlement to social rights towards migrants. Such a logic entails either restricting or denying the access to social benefits and services. Relying mostly on quantitative tools, the relevant pieces of literature have outlined a positive correlation between populist radical right parties and the promotion of the disentitlement logic (Akkerman and De Lange 2012; Chueri 2019). Besides, further research has highlighted that several mainstream parties adopt welfare chauvinist positions too (Sainsbury, 2012). However, while outlining these correlations, the aforementioned contributions are not able to understand deeper the causal mechanism at play. Indeed, it remains unclear how these party promote such a disentitlement logic, i.e., which types of rationales they rely on. Therefore, my paper aims at opening up the blackbox of the causal mechanism. Namely, I want to understand deeper the rationales underpinning the logic of migrants’ disentitlement. I focus especially on parties’ governmental action rather than their electoral manifestos. Relevant research has highlighted that parties usually relies on two main rationales to promote the logic of disentitlement, i.e., either the shared identity (Ennser 2016; Jørgensen and Thomsen 2016) or the reciprocity principle (Michel 2017; Keskinen, Norocel and Jørgensen 2016). Starting from that, I go further and I argue that the rationales used to promote the disentitlement logic are linked to the type of social benefits and services a policy envisages: universal benefits, means-tested or insurance-based. Being insurance-based benefits taxes dependent, I expect political parties to promote rights’ restriction for migrants by recalling the reciprocity principle, i.e., by arguing that migrants have not contributed enough to a country’s economy and taxation system. Conversely, this cannot be argued for means-tested or universal type of benefits. These are indeed need-dependent and not linked to one’s tax contributions and conditions in the labor market. Thus, I expect parties to promote rights’ restriction relying on the shared identity principle, which grants social rights exclusively to the members of a well-defined and limited national community. I conduct a comparative multiple cases analysis (Yin 1984; Seawright and Gerrig 2008). Namely, I compare several Western European countries where governmental parties have promoted a disentitlement logic towards migrants. The comparative perspective aims at outlining whether such a logic is linked to the different types of policies or, in some cases, it is not. That is also useful to highlight differences between left and right-wing parties’ logic of disentitlement. The focus is on the years following the 2011 refugee crisis when the debate about migrants’ reception and rights’ entitlement grow. I analyze both primary qualitative data (parties’ action plans, policy handbooks, key laws) and secondary ones (interviews with governmental officials and social workers).