Middle-Class Welfare Chauvinism in Western Europe

Attitudes towards welfare chauvinism, or the notion that immigrants’ access to welfare benefits should be restricted, are said to be strongly polarised across socio-economic class lines. Working-class individuals are more likely to hold welfare chauvinist attitudes, explained in various studies either through their precarious economic position, or their cultural capital due to low educational achievement (Kros and Coenders 2019; Mau and Mewes 2012). Yet, studies from other areas of public opinion research show that the effect of class can vary across country and temporal context (Rehm et al 2012). This begs the question as to whether middle-class voters also support exclusionary welfare politics towards immigrants in certain contexts, and why? This paper therefore seeks to deconstruct the determinants of middle-class welfare chauvinism, highlighting two competing hypotheses: The economic risk argument posits that middle-class individuals express support for welfare chauvinism under conditions of objective or perceived material risk, such as their risk of becoming unemployed. The sociotropic argument expects, contrastingly, that middle-class voters care about real or perceived levels of immigrant welfare dependence and the identity of immigrants as “deserving”. I test which of the two hypotheses explains variation in middle-class welfare chauvinism using European Social Survey data from 2008 to 2016, utilising data on regional context to conduct a multi-level regression analysis. This study contributes to a broader research agenda on voter demand for welfare chauvinism and other restrictive immigration policies, with potential repercussions for scholars of party competition and elections working on the supply side of political competition, given the electoral importance of middle-class voters.