Abstract
Cultural issues, such as identity, the organization of society, and, most importantly, immigration, have become increasingly salient. Concomitantly, the second dimension of political competition, along which these issues are structured, has become increasingly politicized at the expense of questions centered around economic equity, which have traditionally dominated the politics of the post-war 20th century. In this dissertation, I investigate contemporary welfare politics by focusing on aspects particularly likely to have been affected by this changing context. I study welfare preferences and partisan conflict in an age of immigration salience, both at the level of voters and at the level of parties. I zoom in on both the politics of immigrants’ welfare entitlements – an area particularly likely to be affected by the salience of second-dimension issues –, as well as on welfare politics more generally. As such, this dissertation contributes to previous research on welfare chauvinism by widening the focus beyond the most likely proponents of immigrants’ welfare exclusion to its potential opponents. Moreover, it revisits research about the effect of immigration on welfare preferences and about parties’ welfare stances when confronted with realigned electorates by integrating recent arguments from the welfare literature that show conflict in welfare politics is no longer exclusively about how much welfare there should be, but also about what the welfare state should do. Using original survey data and a novel, fine-grained coding of party manifestos, the findings of this dissertation challenge and debunk two narratives popular in both the academic and the public discourses. First, my findings suggest that even in a context of immigration salience welfare chauvinism, the restriction of generous welfare benefits to native citizens, is neither an attractive electoral strategy for the Left, nor a particularly viable reform option in most Western European countries. Since the universalist-minded electorates of all green but also most social democratic parties strongly oppose disentitling immigrants of their welfare rights and prioritize this non-discrimination, leftwing parties have no incentive to and seldom actively campaign on welfare chauvinist stances. Consequentially, the coalition in favor of welfare chauvinism is comparatively small and welfare chauvinist reforms are – although possible – unlikely to become dominant. Second, neither the salience of immigration nor the realignment of workingclass voters to the radical right necessarily imply an erosion of support for the welfare state and an increased likelihood of welfare retrenchment. If anything, these developments change not how much but rather what kind of a welfare state the public and parties want. Specifically, I find the salience of immigration to shift public support from policies protecting against life cycle risks to policies cushioning labor market risks. Moreover, I show radical right parties to have become the main partisan force protecting the traditional, consumptive focus of industrial welfare states against welfare recalibration, that is, against a substitution of consumption policies with social investment policies.
Enggist, Matthias