oa Welcome to the club?

Welcome to the club? A comparative analysis of the relation between integration policy and welfare chauvinism.

This article contributes to research on welfare chauvinism, i.e. the opinion that access to social security should be granted exclusively to people who belong to the own ethnic-cultural group. Whereas previous research has focused mainly on individual explanations for welfare chauvinism, such as education or authoritarianism, the current paper scrutinizes the relationship between national policy – and more specifically integration policy – and welfare chauvinism. For this purpose, we use three theoretical frameworks that lead to opposing hypotheses. Ethnic competition theory, on the one hand, suggests that more generous integration policies can induce welfare chauvinistic attitudes in the native population, whereas policy feedback and policy responsiveness mechanisms, on the other, predict that a more generous integration policy could lead to a decrease in welfare chauvinism. To test these hypotheses, we use data from the European Social Survey (ESS) and the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) for 23 European countries. The results support policy feedback and policy responsiveness. More generous integration policies go hand in hand with lower levels of welfare chauvinism.