WELFARE CHAUVINISM, A PRIVILEGE OF THE WEALTHY? Clara Lundén A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Political Science, Concentration European Governance. Chapel Hill 2021 Approved by: Dominic Nyhuis Donald Searing Robert Jenkins © 2021 Clara Lundén ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Clara Lundén: Welfare Chauvinism, a Privilege of the Wealthy? (Under the direction of Dominic Nyhuis, Amy Alexander and Gefjon Off) This thesis looks at realistic group conflict theory to explain how socioeconomic status influences welfare chauvinism. It also introduces the concept of a cost-bearing factor, which suggests that individuals who feel like they pay disproportionally for welfare are less willing to extend welfare to immigrants, to explain why social spending may influence welfare chauvinistic attitudes. The study poses that the effect of socioeconomic status may vary depending on a country’s social spending. By using multinomial logistic regression, individual- level data from the eighth round of the European Social Survey and country-level data from OECD are used to look at the relationship between socioeconomic status and social spending as predictors for welfare chauvinism. The results indicate that while the effect of socioeconomic status is partially conditional upon low social spending, there is no proof that the effect of socioeconomic status on welfare chauvinism is conditional upon high social spending. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................................ vi LIST OF GRAPHS ................................................................................................................................ vii LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................................................ viii 1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................... 1 1.2. Aim ................................................................................................................................................ 2 1.3. Structure ........................................................................................................................................ 3 2. LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................................................................ 4 2. 1. Welfare Chauvinism .................................................................................................................... 4 2. 2. Material self-interest .................................................................................................................... 6 2.2.1. Socioeconomic status ............................................................................................................. 7 2.2.2. Social spending .................................................................................................................... 10 3. THEORY ....................................................................................................................................... 14 3.1 Realistic group conflict theory ..................................................................................................... 14 3.2 The conditional factor .................................................................................................................. 16 4. MATERIAL AND METHOD ....................................................................................................... 21 4.1 Material ........................................................................................................................................ 21 4.1.1 Dependent variable ............................................................................................................... 21 4.1.2 Independent variables ........................................................................................................... 22 4.1.3 Control variables ................................................................................................................... 25 iv 4.2 Method ......................................................................................................................................... 28 5. RESULTS ...................................................................................................................................... 31 5.1 Descriptive statistics .................................................................................................................... 31 5.2 Multinomial Logistic Regressions ............................................................................................... 34 5.2.1 Hypothesis 1 .......................................................................................................................... 34 5.2.2 Hypothesis 2 .......................................................................................................................... 40 5.2.3 Hypothesis 3a ........................................................................................................................ 43 5.2.4 Hypothesis 3b ........................................................................................................................ 49 5.3 Control variables .......................................................................................................................... 54 6. DISCUSSION ................................................................................................................................ 57 6.1 Realistic group conflict theory and socioeconomic status. .......................................................... 57 6.2 The cost-bearing factor and social spending ................................................................................ 58 6.3 An interacting effect? ................................................................................................................... 61 7. CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................................ 65 APPENDIX ............................................................................................................................................ 69 REFERENCES ....................................................................................................................................... 83 Literature ............................................................................................................................................ 83 Datasets .............................................................................................................................................. 86 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Theoretical Model ................................................................................................................... 17 vi LIST OF GRAPHS Graph 1. Social spending ....................................................................................................................... 24 Graph 2. Welfare Chauvinism ............................................................................................................... 31 Graph 3. Living on income .................................................................................................................... 32 Graph 4. Social spending, dummy variables .......................................................................................... 32 Graph 5. Controlled crosstabulations ..................................................................................................... 33 Graph 6. Margins plots over Model 3 .................................................................................................... 44 Graph 7. Margins plots over Model 6 .................................................................................................... 49 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Multinomial logistic regressions .............................................................................................. 35 Table A 1. Variable list .......................................................................................................................... 69 Table A 2. Mean estimation table .......................................................................................................... 70 Table A 3. Tabulation of Welfare chauvinism ....................................................................................... 71 Table A 4. Tabulation of Living on Income .......................................................................................... 71 Table A 5. Crosstabulation of Welfare chauvinism and Living on income when High-spend dummy=0(Other) with Chi-square ........................................................................... 71 Table A 6. Crosstabulation of Welfare chauvinism and Living on income when High-spend dummy=1(High) with Chi-Square ........................................................................... 72 Table A 7. Crosstabulation of Welfare chauvinism and Living on income when Low-spend dummy=0(Others) with Chi-square ........................................................................... 72 Table A 8. Crosstabulation of Welfare chauvinism and Living on income when Low-spend dummy=1(Low) with Chi-square .............................................................................