How Have Social Expenditures Affected Public Attitudes Toward Immigration?: International Comparison

Overview: This study examines the association between the size of social expenditure and citizens’ immigration attitudes at between-country level, as well as within-country level. The analysis of cross-country data shows that governments might play a role in alleviating public opposing attitudes toward immigration, through expenditure on social welfare.Proposal text:

Background: With the expansion of globalization, many developed and developing countries have experienced a substantial increase in immigration over the last decades. The large influx of immigrants has driven internal and external changes in socio-economic environment. Research reveals a widespread, ‘anti-immigration sentiment’ among native citizens in the host communities (Macdonald, 2020; Roblain & Green, 2021). Scholars have tried to find determinants on the negative attitudes toward immigration based on labor market competition theory, which argues citizens’ anxiety about competitions in the labor market leads to anti-immigration attitudes (Bearce & Roosevelt, 2019). However, the relationships between market competition and attitudes toward immigration were not clear-cut. On the other hand, the political-economic approach pays attention to welfare systems and government policies as important elements affecting the citizens’ attitudes toward immigration. Thus, this study examines the association between the size of social expenditure and citizens’ immigration attitudes at between-country level, as well as within-country level.

Methods: This study constructed the cross-country panel dataset, which includes 29 developed and developing countries in nine longitudinal studies between 2001 and 2017. The dependent variable, citizens’ immigration attitudes, came from the European Social Survey [ESS] dataset (from Wave 1 to Wave 9). Unweighted means of three immigration indicators were used to measure public immigration attitudes. The scores of the dependent variable range from one to ten, which higher numbers indicate more positive attitudes toward immigration. The independent variable, the size of social expenditure, was drawn from the Quality of Government [QOG] dataset. It was measured by the percent of the total government spending on social welfare. The control variables are openness of society, unemployment rate, population size, nominal GDP, and relative size of labor force, collected from the QOC and the World Bank data. To incorporate between-country variability of public attitudes toward immigration and the trajectory of the attitudes in each country, this study employed the mixed-effect model, which analyzes time varying covariates as the fixed-effect and the country-level differences as the random-effect.


Results: First, there was a significant difference in public immigration attitudes among 29 countries. While Greece showed the most opposing attitudes toward immigration with the raw score of 3.41, Iceland showed the most favorable attitudes with 6.89. The Eta-squared value (η2) was .833, indicating the effect size of between-country variability is large. Second, random-effect model revealed nominal GDP, relative size of labor force, and social expenditure significantly affected public immigration attitudes, controlling for other covariates and latent variables. Particularly, the result indicated that increase in social expenditure might reduce negative attitudes toward immigration at the country level.

Conclusions: This study shows that governments might play a role in alleviating public opposing attitudes toward immigration, through expenditure on social welfare. This study also implies that social welfare might have the socio-political ramifications, which reduces social tension and promotes social integration. Based on the results, we discuss the nexus between social welfare and immigration policies.