Threatening for whom? National boundary-making, immigration, and support for the welfare state

Abstract Existing literature has found that there is a negative effect of increased immigration on native support for redistributive policies. In this paper, I refocus the debate from ’immigrants’ to ‘natives’ and I argue that this negative effect is moderated by how strongly the ‘nation’ is understood as an ethnic category by natives. Using data from 30 European countries and 270 regions, I show that the negative association between the share of immigration and support for welfare is driven by those who imagine the nation in ethnic terms. Moreover, I show that this is not purely driven by a desire to protect natives in the face of all newcomers, but rather ethnic nationalists’ support for welfare policies is only sensitive to non-European foreign-born populations, even after controlling for the education level of these populations. This suggests that ethnic nationalism, more than xenophobia, is the mechanism behind this solidarity retraction. These findings have important consequences for understanding how the rise of the right-wing in Europe, which activates ethnic nationalism, can have consequences for the European welfare states, and in turn, for national cohesion and solidarity.