Constructing tolerance: how the welfare state shapes attitudes about immigrants

Over the past 30 years, the hitherto rather homogeneous welfare states in Europe have been experiencing a dramatic influx of immigrants, making them much more diverse. The central purpose of the early development of the welfare state was twofold: to bridge class divisions and to mollify ethnic divisions in the vast multiethnic empires of 19th-century Germany and Austria. This research examines the impact of the programmatic and expenditure dimensions of the welfare state on attitudes of natives across modern publics, theorizing that nativist resentment and welfare chauvinism should be reduced in more comprehensive welfare systems. Individual, aggregate, and multilevel analyses reveal that the more comprehensive the welfare state is, the more tolerant natives are of immigrants, indicating that contemporary welfare states have a similar capacity to bridge ethnic divisions as their 19th-century incarnations. Keywords: welfare state; welfare chauvinism; decommodification; nation building; multilevel analysis; public opinion data; prejudice