Research Projects
The impact of foreign birth and ethnic difference on welfare state support: an
experimental study
Principal Investigator: Dr Rob Ford Institute for Social Change, Manchester University
1 April 2011 to 1 December 2011
This project proposes to utilise survey experiments to test whether British citizens are more reluctant to provide welfare state benefits to those who are ethnically or racially different to them. Public support is a crucial ingredient in the persistence of contemporary welfare policies, particularly in an era of austerity and government retrenchment (Brooks and Manza 2007), and there is growing concern that increased social and cultural heterogeneity may erode such public support (Alesina and Glaeser, 2004; Gilens 1999).
In the British political context, where anxieties about immigration and diversity have displaced traditional concerns with income redistribution and welfare state services in the priorities of many white working class voters, it is possible that such a dynamic may be starting to operate. Ethnic and racial diversity has increased rapidly in Britain over the past four decades, with a particular acceleration over the last decade as a result of a new and politically controversial wave of migration. There has also been a sharp increase in public concern about the integration of Muslims into British society (Saggar, 2008). Recent survey evidence has suggested that many such voters now regard the left wing Labour party as a defender of the interests of immigrants and ethnic minorities, but not of traditional working class families (YouGov, 2009), and that the public perceives welfare state provision to be far more generous to new migrants than is actually the case.
At present, though, we have little evidence as to whether the willingness of British
citizens to support the provision of welfare state benefits in three areas is
influenced by the ethnicity, religion or immigration status of the beneficiaries. In
two of these areas we will employ experimental vignettes, which provide a short
story about an individual needing access to each of these benefits, framed around
current debates in the policy area. Within the vignette we will experimentally vary
verbal and visual cues of the claimant’s ethnicity, and whether the claimant is
described as born abroad or native born. The survey will then ask respondents
whether they support or oppose the provision of benefits to this claimant, and
whether they think the provision of state resources in general in this particular
area is too generous or not generous enough. In the third area – training provision – we will ask respondents whether they support the provision of special training
assistance to different groups, defined by economic status, ethnicity, religion,
foreign birth or a combination of these factors.
Draft questions are shown in the attachment. As the vignettes and questions will be identical apart from the randomised variation in the identity of recipient individuals or groups, we will be able to attribute with confidence any differences in response as being due to differences in this identity. We will field these survey experiments on the YouGov Academic Omnibus, a new survey which provides academics with access to a nationally representative sample of respondents from the 300,000 member YouGov panel. The Omnibus survey also gathers data on a range of demographic and political variables, and provides this at no additional cost. This will enable us to conduct a nuanced analysis of the patterns of response to the survey experiments, which will be administered to a sample of at least 1,000 respondents.