Work

Citizenship reduces welfare chauvinism - evidence across unemployment benefits, social assistance, and sanctions

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: We examine whether welfarechauvinistic attitudes, the preference for restricting immigrants’ access to welfare benefits, differ by benefit type and whether citizenship attenuates migrant penalties in welfare deservingness. Using a between-subjects multifactorial survey experiment embedded in a probability-based online panel (March 2019; N = 4,890), we asked respondents to evaluate an unemployed benefit claimant on three outcomes: support for earnings-related unemployment benefits, needs-based social assistance, and benefit sanctions. Across outcomes, migrant profiles are judged less deserving than otherwise identical ethnic German profiles. Penalties are of similar magnitude for unemployment insurance and social assistance while sanction differentials are smaller and limited to some, more culturally distant groups. Citizenship, as an institutional signal of integration, attenuates penalties within shared ethnic origin but does not fully close the gap to ethnic Germans, even under favorable deservingness cues.

Source: Scientific Reports

DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-77066-8

Authors: Marvin Brinkmann, Sophia Hamdorf, Elias Naumann

Institutions: University of Mannheim, Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, University of Zurich

Language: English

Topic: Migration, Refugees, and Integration

Subfield: Sociology and Political Science

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Reduced inequalities, Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,690