Economic Inequality and Selective Solidarity: Experiments on Welfare Support

• In Event: Persuading the Public

Abstract

Economic inequality and immigration are central challenges for many post-industrial democracies. With welfare states under significant fiscal stress, a fundamental issue for OECD countries concerns the allocation of limited welfare resources among competing groups. Relying on original experimental data from Europe, this study asks: how does economic inequality affect citizens’ support for welfare programs benefiting ingroup and outgroup members, defined in terms of natives and immigrants?

Existing scholarship has explored the separate impact of economic inequality and immigration on preferences for redistribution. Still lacking, however, is a good understanding of how the economic context and communal identity interact to shape welfare support. Furthermore, while recent work has explained that redistributive policies can be divided into those that take away from the rich and those that give to the needy, much of the literature on welfare preferences has focused on general support for redistribution. As a result, it is not clear what groups can benefit from potential increased willingness to help under inequality. To address these questions, this paper develops a theoretical framework and provides evidence that economic inequality generates community-motivated selective solidarity. A social affinity model of welfare preferences emerges, with economic inequality producing opposite effects on citizens’ willingness to support welfare policies targeted at natives and immigrants.

The analysis relies on data from an original survey experiment conducted with a nationally representative sample of 1,275 Italian residents. The experiment randomly assigned respondents to either the inequality treatment or the control group. The treatment condition provided survey respondents with interactive written information, plots, and pictures that increased awareness of economic inequality. I then measured support for welfare policies targeted at different social groups with both attitudinal questions and a behavioral task. The behavioral task consisted in the possibility to write a message to elected officials in favor of specific welfare policies. Respondents were informed that the messages would actually be delivered at the end of the study.

The experiment demonstrates that inequality strongly increases support for a tax increase on the rich to promote redistribution, but produces differentiated effects on support for welfare policies depending on the receiving groups. In particular, a strong divide emerges between natives and immigrants, and further divisions arise within the community of native citizens. On the one hand, inequality generally increases support for low-income natives and the native middle class. Subset analysis reveals however that the positive impact on help for the middle class disappears among lower income citizens. On the other, inequality decreases support for low-income immigrants, especially among socially conservative citizens and individuals with higher job security. Finally, the unemployed, who are perceived as socially more distant by many respondents, do not benefit from increased support under inequality: while the impact is null for native unemployed, immigrant unemployed actually face increased opposition.

The experiment also shows that the causal mechanism explaining selective solidarity lies in the inequality-induced perception of resource scarcity and the resulting deservingness considerations about potential welfare recipients. On the one hand, economic inequality stimulates the opinion that immigrants have received more than what they contributed to society. On the other, inequality strengthens the belief that low-income natives and, to a lesser extent, the native middle class have received less than what they would have deserved.

This study offers several contributions to the literature. It proposes a social affinity model of welfare preferences under economic inequality and develops the concept of selective solidarity. By exploring the role of identity-based ingroup/outgroup boundaries, it brings together diverse work on welfare support that has separately focused on economic inequality and immigration. The causal mechanism analysis also brings together different streams in the welfare literature focused on deservingness heuristic, attributional theory of poverty, and racial stereotypes. Finally, this paper complements previous survey analyses by crafting an experiment in which a behavioral task measures relatively demanding effects induced by inequality. More broadly, this analysis is important in times of growing economic inequality and numbers of immigrants in many European countries and the US. Understanding the conditions under which citizens become more supportive of outgroups is the first step toward more inclusive societies.

Author

• Gabriele Magni, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill