Welfare Chauvinism Across Benefits and Services

The redistribution of welfare resources to immigrants is widely debated, and welfare chauvinism increasingly polarizes Europe. Previous studies have treated welfare chauvinist attitudes as something that is applied uniformly across different welfare programmes. This both holds true for the previous theoretical debates and empirical studies. The political rhetoric of the radical right-wing parties is also geared to pose the question in this one-dimensional way. It is about “them” having access to “our” (whole) welfare state. This paper theorizes how welfare chauvinism is shaped by welfare programme structures in North-Western European destination countries. The main argument is that the public is more restrictive for granting immigrants access to benefits than to services. This hypothesis is tested across ten social protection programmes in Denmark, Germany, and the UK using newly collected survey data based on online panels in 2019. Across the three countries, representing respectively a social democratic, conservative and liberal welfare regime context, the paper finds that the public indeed has a preference for easier access for in-kind services than for cash benefits. The paper finds the same pattern for cash and in-kind services covering the same social risk; the public is particularly restrictive when it comes to transferring cash benefits to children living outside the state. Finally, the paper finds these results to be stable across left-wing, mainstream, and radical right-wing voters in all three countries.