The trade-off between admitting and paying: Experimental evidence on attitudes towards asylum responsibility-sharing
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14651165231156525 |
| Author | Cornelius Wright Cappelen,Hakan G. Sicakkan,Pierre Georges Van Wolleghem |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The trade-off between
admitting and paying:
Experimental evidence on
attitudes towards asylum
responsibility-sharing
Cornelius Wright Cappelen
Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen,
Norway
Hakan G. Sicakkan
Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen,
Norway
Pierre Georges Van Wolleghem
Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen,
Norway
Abstract
The concentration of the world’s refugees in developing countries calls for international
collaboration on the matter. In the face of concerns voiced not only amongst politicians
but also the public, we investigate how people trade-off the two most prominent
responsibility-sharing mechanism. We conduct a survey experiment in 26 countries ask-
ing whether people would rather: (a) admit more asylum seekers and (b) provide finan-
cial assistance to the host countries. We find that most respondents prefer admitting
asylum seekers over paying. We also establish significant individual-level heterogeneity
that sheds new light on people’s attitudes towards asylum seekers. Importantly, we
report on the effect of welfare chauvinism and nativism on the willingness to admit
rather than to pay.
Corresponding author:
Pierre Georges Van Wolleghem, Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, Postboks 7802,
5020 Bergen, Norway.
Email: pierre.vanwolleghem@uib.no
Article
European Union Politics
2023, Vol. 24(3) 470–493
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165231156525
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
Keywords
Attitudes to refugees/asylum seekers, inclusive citizenship, nativism, responsibility/
burden sharing, welfare chauvinism
Introduction
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people fleeing wars, violence, persecu-
tion, and human rights violations in 2020 rose to nearly 82.4 million people (UNHCR,
2021). A substantial number of these found refuge in developing countries that often
lack the means to accommodate and help them. Because of the uneven distribution of
asylum claims, concerns are increasingly being voiced that the first border crossed
cannot be the exclusive principle of responsibility. It should be an ambition to achieve
a more equitable sharing of international responsibility in refugee issues (Doyle, 2018).
Fundamentally, there are two broad mechanisms for international responsibility
sharing in refugee issues: the provision of financial assistance to host countries, and
the admission of refugees, most commonly through resettlement (Dowd and McAdam,
2017). In other words, a country can either provide financial help to ensure that other
countries can guarantee basic rights and decent living conditions for refugees, or else
admit more asylum seekers from countries already hosting comparatively large
numbers of them. The objective of this article is to examine how people trade-off
these two mechanisms. In a situation where a country handles fewer asylum application
cases compared to many others, would citizens of that country –in the pursuit of respon-
sibility sharing –prefer that their country admits more applicants or else that their country
pays a financial solidarity contribution to another country that handles these cases
instead?
The question of how people trade-off financial assistance against admission of asylum
seekers has not previously been studied but is of vital interest. Importantly, responsibility
sharing has received increased attention during the past decade, due particularly to the
imbalance in state responsibility. The obligations that states have towards refugees in
their own territory, as well as at their borders, are well defined, while their obligations
to support refugees in territories outside their own borders are much weaker and thus
very political. The situation is consequently one in which geography and proximity to
crisis de facto defines responsibility (Betts, 2018). Because this could be argued to be eth-
ically unsustainable, burden sharing today enjoys a prominent place in the public as well
as the political discourse. Furthermore, the issue of responsibility sharing in the context of
the European Union (EU) has received considerable scholarly attention (e.g., Bansak
et al., 2017; Bovens et al., 2012; Kaufmann, 2021; Zaun, 2018).
The relocation of asylum seekers has been at the heart of fierce controversies in the
EU. The uneven distribution of large influxes of asylum seekers has created tensions
between member states and exposed the need to reform the Common European
Asylum System in general, and the Dublin Regulation in particular. Importantly, the
European Commission previously proposed a ‘corrective allocation’mechanism to be
triggered when a member state is faced with disproportionate numbers of asylum
Cappelen et al. 471
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