Social benefits for European Union immigrants? A survey experiment on misperceptions
| Published date | 01 June 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14651165241229593 |
| Author | Julian Jäger |
| Date | 01 June 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Social benefits for European
Union immigrants?
A survey experiment
on misperceptions
Julian Jäger
Department of Socioeconomics, Universität Hamburg, Germany
Abstract
Using new experimental panel data for Germany, I investigate the role of income mis-
perceptions for welfare restrictive preferences toward European Union immigrants. A
majority of respondents misperceive their relative income position in Germany and the
European Union and demand that European Union immigrants work and pay taxes before
obtaining equal rights to social benefits. Randomized treatments inform subjects about their
position in the national and European Union income distribution. My results provide evi-
dence that welfare restrictive preferences are formed in the context of misperceived
own income positions: Respondents become more welfare restrictive when they learn
about a higher national or lower European Union income position. Information about
European Union misperceptions has a persistent treatment effect after 3 months, driven
by respondents with larger initial misperceptions, but becomes insignificant after one year.
Keywords
Immigration, income, misperception, welfare
Introduction
What I want is for Europe to have a social triple-A rating: that is just as important as an eco-
nomic and financial triple-A rating.
–Jean-Claude Juncker (2014)
Intra-European Union (EU) immigration has been steadily rising over the last two
decades. Close to 12 million EU citizens of working age now live in a member state
Corresponding author:
Julian Jäger, Department of Socioeconomics, Universität Hamburg, Welckerstraße 8, Mittelweg 177, 20148
Hamburg, Germany. julianjaeger@posteo.de
Data Availability Statement included at the end of the article
Article
European Union Politics
2024, Vol. 25(2) 333–353
© The Author(s) 2024
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165241229593
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other than their country of citizenship, the majority of whom are from Southern and
Eastern Europe, residing in richer countries like Germany or Sweden (Eurostat, 2019).
In accordance with EU law, these citizens obtain social benefits if they comply with quali-
fying periods of contribution through employment. The welfare rights of EU immigrants
have therefore become an important topic in the public debate, representing not only the
breeding ground for anti-immigrant agendas (e.g. Schumacher and Van Kersbergen,
2016) but nurturing also far-reaching political campaigns, such as the Brexit referendum
to leave the Union. The widely ignored question behind this politically exploited debate is
what EU citizens think about the welfare rights of their co-citizens from other member
states. Are they in favor of granting them access to social benefits and if so, under
which conditions? To what extent do the large economic disparities between EU citizens
drive their preferences?
A common theory that relates income inequality to attitudes toward immigrants is
(realistic) group conflict theory. It states that actual or perceived group competition
over scarce resources fosters social identification with one’s in-group and negative atti-
tudes toward potential out-groups (Sherif, 1966; Levine and Campbell, 1972; Böhm
et al., 2020). This in-group bias is particularly strong among citizens with a lower eco-
nomic standing, since they are more likely to compete with immigrants for things such
as housing, jobs, or cultural values (Stephan and Stephan, 2000). Following group con-
flict theory, a lower income position should therefore translate into a higher disposition to
restrict the access of EU immigrants, the out-group, to social benefits. In contrast, eco-
nomic models like the Meltzer–Richard model (Meltzer and Richard, 1981) predict
that richer individuals should be less in favor of redistribution, as they benefit less
from it. In line with this rationale of self-interest, individuals should become more
welfare restrictive with rising income, since they will increasingly bear the cost to the
welfare system that stems from EU immigration (Facchini and Mayda, 2009). Either
mechanism, self-interest or group conflict, might be reinforced by the skewed perceptions
of Europeans who generally overestimate the share of immigrants that are dependent on
welfare, unemployed, or poor (Alesina et al., 2023).
In this article, I analyze the role of perceived income positions for the formation of
welfare restrictive preferences toward EU immigrants in Germany. The study design
follows two relatively new research strands. First, the theories of group conflict and self-
interest both make the (implicit) assumption that individuals know where they rank rela-
tive to their co-citizens. More recent empirical studies reject this assumption and find that
individuals greatly misperceive their own national income position and that these misper-
ceptions affect their redistributive preferences (e.g. Cruces et al., 2013; Karadja et al.,
2017; Engelhardt and Wagener, 2018; Bublitz, 2022; Hvidberg et al., 2023). In line
with this research, I analyze to what extent individuals’income misperceptions also
play a role for their welfare preferences toward EU immigrants. Second, studies on
European comparisons show that individuals use foreign out-groups as a frame of refer-
ence when they evaluate their own living conditions (e.g. Delhey and Kohler, 2006;
Fahey, 2007; Lahusen and Kiess, 2019). Following this research strand, I test if cross-
national comparisons between EU citizens also play a role for the formation of their
welfare preferences toward each other. Combining the misperceptions literature with
334 European Union Politics 25(2)
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