Citizenship reduces welfare chauvinism - evidence across unemployment benefits, social assistance, and sanctions
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.
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BibTeX
@article{brinkmann2026citizenship,
title = {{Citizenship reduces welfare chauvinism - evidence across unemployment benefits, social assistance, and sanctions}},
author = {Marvin Brinkmann and Sophia Hamdorf and Elias Naumann},
journal = {Scientific Reports},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1038/s41598-026-77066-8},
url = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-77066-8},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Citizenship reduces welfare chauvinism - evidence across unemployment benefits, social assistance, and sanctions
AU - Marvin Brinkmann
AU - Sophia Hamdorf
AU - Elias Naumann
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/20
JO - Scientific Reports
DO - 10.1038/s41598-026-77066-8
UR - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-77066-8
AB - 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.
SN - 2045-2322
ER -