Educational Cleavages on Welfare Chauvinism across Time – Does (Changing) Context Matter?

Academic and public discourse frequently emphasises the educational divisions on the exclusion of immigrants from social rights provision, i.e. welfare chauvinism, across Europe. From the perspective of self-interest, individuals in more privileged economic positions are expected to be less prone to welfare chauvinism. Thus, lower levels of real or perceived competition for rare resources may inoculate the higher educated against the preference to exclude immigrants. Other studies have contended that the role of differences in cultural ideology between the higher and the lower educated is the dispositive factor; the higher salience of pro-democratic and anti-authoritarian attitudes tends to prevent welfare chauvinism among the higher educated. These arguments are compelling, but this paper argues that the relationship between education and welfare chauvinism is more complex and that (changing) contexts matter too. To examine this missing link, I use time series of context indicators and individual-level data from the European Social Surveys of 2008–2009 and 2016–2017 to conduct multilevel analysis across 23 countries. Contrary to current thinking, the results reveal that a considerable proportion of the higher educated holds welfare chauvinist attitudes across European countries. The higher educated were even the main drivers in several countries for the slower decrease or faster increase of welfare chauvinism across time. The educational effect significantly varies across countries but not across time. Furthermore, cross-national variations in the effect of education on welfare chauvinism can be explained by self-interest and cultural ideology patterns. Countries with lower levels of economic affluence and higher levels of authoritarian norms tend to have overall smaller cleavages between higher and lower-educated individuals. Particularly, countries with decreasing levels of economic affluence faced higher levels of welfare chauvinism, particularly amongst the higher educated. For such countries, the results can be explained by the higher-educated individuals tending to feel more economic anxiety and adapting more to societal norms than their lower-educated counterparts. These results pose a puzzle for researchers that argue for higher education as a tool for liberalisation and demonstrate the importance of national contexts on the matter.