Immigration or Welfare? The Progressive’s Dilemma Reconsidered

• In Event: 066 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Citizenship and Inclusion

Abstract

In recent decades, immigration rates across Europe have steadily increased, generating concern that increasing ethnic diversity will ultimately reduce political support for the redistributive welfare state. The tension between a liberal immigration policy and robust welfare state—or put differently, between diversity and solidarity—has been called the progressive’s dilemma. Previous cross-national research on the link between immigration and the welfare state has focused exclusively on the hypothesized relationship between the size of the foreign-born population and support for redistribution. In doing so, these studies have neglected the fact that people vary in their response to immigration itself and failed to consider the possibilities that qualitatively different sets of attitudes exist. In this study, we aim to fill this gap by studying attitudes towards immigration, the welfare state, and immigrants’ access to it. Using latent class analysis (LCA) and data from the European Social Survey (ESS, 2008), we examine attitudes towards redistribution, immigration, and immigrants’ social rights across 24 countries. Our results reveal a number of clusters with unique combinations of attitudes. Moreover, we find that the salience of these different sets of reasoning varies considerably within and across countries. Although most of these attitudinal profiles provide evidence of the progressive’s dilemma, objective measures of immigration are not associated with the prominence of these clusters cross-nationally. We find that immigration does not automatically lead to exclusionary or anti-welfare attitudes, and that the most exclusive attitudes are actually most salient in countries with relatively less immigration.

Authors

• Joakim Kulin, Stockholm University

• Maureen A. Eger, Stockholm University

• Mikael Hjerm, Umeå University