How Ethnic Framing Affects Political Support for Welfare Policies: A Field Experiment in Greater Copenhagen
Research question/goal:
Strong welfare states backed by broad public consensus are a hallmark of European societies. However, recent years have seen growing concerns regarding a decline in public support for generous social policies, attributed to increased ethnic diversity. Specifically, there are arguments suggesting that, because ethno-racial minorities are often perceived as 'undeserving' welfare beneficiaries, growing diversity may undermine public backing for social welfare spending and/or spur efforts to exclude minorities from welfare programs (i.e. 'welfare chauvinism'). Yet, social science research on this topic has so far yielded no clear conclusions. Previous research has overwhelming relied on correlational analyses of welfare attitudes as captured in survey data. Importantly, scholars increasingly recognize (i) the inability of these methods to identify the causal effects of diversity, and (ii) the sensitivity of published results to researchers’ analytical choices. To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel field experiment on welfare support in Denmark.
[With: Merlin Schaeffer, University of Kopenhagen]
