Attitudes toward asylum policy in a divided Europe:Diverging contexts, diverging attitudes?

The large inflow of asylum-seekers in recent years has heralded a diversification in adopted asylum policies across European societies. Although a growing body of research has addressed these versatile approaches and their implications for the European integration project, insight into the social basis of these restrictive or open asylum policies remains underdeveloped. Hence, the current study provides detailed insight into public preferences for asylum policies and offers a new understanding of how these attitudes are affected by diverging socio-economic realities across Europe. In addition, this paper considers the role of individual factors that coincide with publicly adopted frames in contemporary asylum debates. In particular, to explain how contextual differences reflect on opinion climates, the impacts of the policy, economic, and migratory context are studied. On the individual-level, we focus on threat perception and human values, which represent humanitarian, economic, and cultural frames. To explore these relations, data on 20 countries from the European Social Survey Round 8 (2016) are analyzed through a multilevel structural equation modeling approach. Results indicate that, on the contextual-level, only unemployment rates have a significant impact and, rather surprisingly, lower unemployment rates provoke a more negative opinion climate. Yet, this relationship seems to be largely driven by some specific countries that are characterized by large unemployment rates and relatively positive opinion climates simultaneously. The migratory and policy context, on the other hand, do not influence attitudes toward asylum policy. This indicates that it is not necessarily the countries facing the largest inflow of asylum-seekers or issuing the most positive decisions on asylum applications that have the most restrictive opinion climates. As shown by the important roles of human values and threat perceptions, which represent widely adopted frames, public discourses seem much more important in explaining attitudes toward asylum policy across Europe

De verzorgingsstaatkritiek van de verliezers:De invloed van maatschappelijk onbehagen

This contribution argues that neither the self-interest framework, nor theories about cultural dispositions are sufficient to fully explain why socio-economically vulnerable groups express more criticism on the welfare state. We highlight the importance of social experiences as a source of this discontent with the functioning of the welfare state. First, this dissatisfaction is embedded in a broader welfare populism that pits the hard-working people against the deceitful elite and welfare abusers. Second, we argue that welfare populism arises as a result of experiences of resentment that are the result of the restructuring of relative group positions. We differentiate between four types of discontent: economic insecurity, relative deprivation, social distrust and powerlessness. Using structural equation modelling, we test whether these experiences mediate the relationship between the social structure and welfare state criticism. The results indicate that relative deprivation consistently leads to more economic and moral criticism, and lowers perceptions of the positive social consequences. Social distrust, moreover, stimulates a higher level of moral criticism. This study illustrates that resentment can partly explain the paradoxical findings on the relationship between social class and welfare state criticism

The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative: Investigating Immigration and Social Policy Preferences. Executive Report.

In an era of mass migration, social scientists, populist parties and social movements raise concerns over the future of immigration-destination societies. What impacts does this have on policy and social solidarity? Comparative cross-national research, relying mostly on secondary data, has findings in different directions. There is a threat of selective model reporting and lack of replicability. The heterogeneity of countries obscures attempts to clearly define data-generating models. P-hacking and HARKing lurk among standard research practices in this area.This project employs crowdsourcing to address these issues. It draws on replication, deliberation, meta-analysis and harnessing the power of many minds at once. The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative carries two main goals, (a) to better investigate the linkage between immigration and social policy preferences across countries, and (b) to develop crowdsourcing as a social science method. The Executive Report provides short reviews of the area of social policy preferences and immigration, and the methods and impetus behind crowdsourcing plus a description of the entire project. Three main areas of findings will appear in three papers, that are registered as PAPs or in process

Attitudes towards asylum policies in a divided Europe: A multilevel analysis

status: publishe

European Citizens’ Opinions Towards Immigration and Asylum Policies: A Quantitative Comparative Analysis

status: publishe

Attitudes towards asylum policy in a divided Europe: Diverging contexts, diverging attitudes?

status: publishe

The welfare state criticism of the losers of modernization: How social experiences of resentment shape populist welfare critique

This article aims to explain the paradoxical finding that socio-economically vulnerable groups express more economic, moral and social criticism of the welfare state. As these groups generally benefit more from the welfare state and hold more egalitarian world views, their stronger criticism cannot be explained by the traditional frameworks of self-interest and ideology. As an alternative, we highlight the importance of social experiences of resentment as a source of discontent with welfare state performance. Our contribution argues that the dissatisfaction is embedded in a broader welfare populist critique that pits the hard-working people against the deceitful elite and welfare abusers. This welfare populism emerges from experiences of resentment related to the restructuring of group positions in the process of modernization. We differentiate between three types of discontent: economic status insecurity, group relative deprivation and social distrust. By applying structural equation modelling, we test whether resentful experiences mediate the relationship between the social structural position and welfare state criticism. Results indicate that relative deprivation consistently leads to more economic, moral and social criticism. Social distrust, moreover, stimulates a higher level of moral criticism. This study illustrates that resentment is indeed an important element for understanding the paradoxical relationship between social class and welfare state criticism

Tewerkstellingsstimuli voor doelgroepen in het Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest. Analyse van het koppelen van de “doelgroepenmaatregelen” RSZ en RVA, DIBISS (RSZPPO) en POD MI

nrpages: 77status: publishe

De verzorgingsstaatkritiek van de verliezers: De invloed van maatschappelijk onbehagen

This contribution argues that neither the self-interest framework, nor theories about cultural dispositions are sufficient to fully explain why socio-economically vulnerable groups express more criticism on the welfare state. We highlight the importance of social experiences as a source of this discontent with the functioning of the welfare state. First, this dissatisfaction is embedded in a broader welfare populism that pits the hard-working people against the deceitful elite and welfare abusers. Second, we argue that welfare populism arises as a result of experiences of resentment that are the result of the restructuring of relative group positions. We differentiate between four types of discontent: economic insecurity, relative deprivation, social distrust and powerlessness. Using structural equation modelling, we test whether these experiences mediate the relationship between the social structure and welfare state criticism. The results indicate that relative deprivation consistently leads to more economic and moral criticism, and lowers perceptions of the positive social consequences. Social distrust, moreover, stimulates a higher level of moral criticism. This study illustrates that resentment can partly explain the paradoxical findings on the relationship between social class and welfare state criticism