Explaining Support for Welfare Chauvinism - How Migrants’ Status and Citizenship Affect Natives’ Preference to Exclude Migrants from Access to Social Assistance and Unemployment Benefits

Globalization, migration and increasing ethnic heterogeneity is one of the big challenges Western societies are faced with. Many theoretical accounts predict that globalization is perceived as a threat and leads to exclusionary attitudes like opposition to migration, anti-immigrant sentiments or welfare chauvinistic attitudes. The rise of populist right-wing parties who strongly advocate such welfare chauvinistic policies are often taken as evidence for this claim. In this article we explore the public legitimacy of welfare chauvinistic policies and examine which factors shape individual preferences to exclude immigrants from national welfare systems. Relying on a factorial survey in the German internet panel, a representative panel study, we explore the following questions: does the degree of welfare chauvinism vary for different migrant groups? Does granting citizenship to migrants reduce welfare chauvinistic attitudes? Do welfare chauvinistic attitudes vary with the type of social policy? Moreover, leveraging the panel structure of our data, we explore whether welfare chauvinistic attitudes have been on the rise between 2016 and 2019 and whether experiencing economic hardship (i.e. losing your job) leads to more support for welfare chauvinism.