The Interplay of Resentment and Compassion in Shaping Redistributive Attitudes in the Face of Mass Immigration: Evidence from Turkey

Contributing to the growing literature on the politics of resentment and studies into the roles of emotions in welfare politics, this research explores the mechanisms of social resentment and compassion, as the two predominant emotions pertaining to justice motives, in shaping public opinion about welfare. Taking advantage of the recent mass immigration experience in Turkey, I deployed a population-based survey experiment that mimicked potential welfare beneficiaries with different ethnic backgrounds and welfare programs with different financial sources. The vignette experiment manipulated the beneficiary's ethnic identity, distinguishing between Turkish, Syrian, and African, and the monetary origin of the welfare assistance that differs from the government or the European Union. I contend that the beneficiary's ethnic identity and fiscal burden shape public opinion about welfare by interacting with sentiments of resentment and compassion. On the other hand, as the sense of justice is a constellation of conflicting emotions, resentment, care, and compassion, I suggest that the regulation of resentment, upward or downward, changes as a function of compassion toward the respective beneficiary group. The present findings revealed that as social resentment escalates, the support for welfare assistance toward immigrants in need decreases compared to the native beneficiary only if the government provides the welfare benefits. Although support for welfare assistance toward immigrant beneficiaries significantly magnifies as compassion toward the respective immigrant group increases, this effect was observed to be more pronounced if the European Union had funded the welfare assistance. When it comes to the interplay of resentment and compassion, the analysis established that the regulation of resentment is highly contingent on to what extent people feel compassion towards the group in question. Uncovering the justice motives-related affective mechanisms underlying public opinion, these findings provide novel insights into the literature on welfare politics. Displaying under which conditions the impact of resentment on political attitudes down-regulates, the current evidence also contributes to our understanding about the mechanisms of resentment in shaping public opinion.