Welfare Solidarities in the Age of Mass Migration: Evidence from European Social Survey 2016

Welfare opinion research has traditionally viewed migration as a potential hazard for welfare solidarity. In this article, we argue that while increased presence of foreigners can indeed make some people less supportive of public welfare provision in general or trigger opposition to migrants’ social rights, the link between migration and solidarity is not universally a negative one. Instead, many people can combine support for migration with high preferences for comprehensive social protection; others can endorse migration even as they are not particularly supportive of an all-encompassing welfare state. Based on this line of reasoning we construct a taxonomy of four ideal types of welfare solidarity that are present in contemporary European welfare states. To illustrate the usefulness of this heuristic tool we apply Latent Class Factor Analysis to European Social Survey round 8 data. We find that majority of Europeans (56%) combine strong support for both migration and the welfare state (extended solidarity). However, exclusive solidarity (aka ‘welfare chauvinism’) is also widely spread as over a quarter of respondents (28%) oppose migration while expressing strong support for the welfare state. People who oppose migration and have relatively low preference for the welfare state (diminished solidarity) represent a small minority (5%), indicating that the fears of Liberal’s Dilemma (a political trade-off between support for migration and the welfare state) may be exaggerated. A little more than a tenth (11%) of Europeans endorse migration, but express relatively low support for the welfare state, which we assume to be a reflection of cosmopolitan solidarity. Further, we explore how the individual propensity to hold one of the solidarities is influenced by a range of individual socio-economic characteristics and contextual factors.