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Social Welfare Attitudes and Immigrants as a Target Population: Experimental Evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2020

Jake Haselswerdt Open the ORCID record for Jake Haselswerdt [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

What makes some Americans assume that social welfare programs will benefit immigrants rather than native-born Americans? How do these assumptions shape their attitudes about policy? Recent observational research has shown that immigration attitudes and social welfare attitudes are strongly correlated, but we lack evidence of exactly how this relationship works. In this pre-registered survey experiment, I study respondents’ assumptions about beneficiaries of a generic social welfare policy, and test the effects of different “threat” primes on the assumption that the policy benefits immigrants rather than native-born Americans. I find that a prime constructing immigrants as a fiscal threat increases the likelihood that a respondent will make this assumption, while a prime emphasizing cultural or demographic threat has no significant effect. These effects vary by geographic context, but not by relevant attitudes. Attitudes about immigration become an important predictor of policy approval when this assumption is triggered.

Type
Special Section: The Politics of Immigration
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 442 - 459
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

*

Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KHZER5

The author would like to thank Maureen Eger and Yunju Nam for feedback and comments on this project, and Kate Perry and Grace Yousefi for research assistance. The author also thanks the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

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Haselswerdt Dataset

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KHZER5
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Haselswerdt supplementary material

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