discuss institutional norms. Primary ideologies, as used by Wegener and Liebig are what I will call social or political norms at the country-level, and secondary ideologies are those norms found at lower group levels. Therefore, the Wegener and Liebig distinction must be re-interpreted for the purposes of my theoretical perspective by replacing their usage of ideology with my usage of norm.
As suggested in the work of Wegener and Liebig, and others, the range of distributive ideologies throughout a given population might blur the relationship of SES, institutions and ideology with social policy opinions. I propose to deal with this issue by using a theoretical causal model with ideology placed in between SES and institutions on one side and public opinions on the other. But I admit that ideology, institutions and SES are reciprocally related, mutually reinforcing, and that causality is never certain and only theoretical. In the end I hope to control for some of the factors that lead to diverging individual ideologies.
My theoretical framework follows the lead of research done in a US sample from Detroit, where Hasenfeld and Rafferty (1989) find that those with stronger normative beliefs in social rights (to well-being and prosperity) had significantly greater support of specific contributory and means-tested social policies net of other variables in the US. It also follows the work of Blekesaune and Quadagno (2003) in showing that egalitarian ideology increases support of government provision of unemployment and health care across Europe.
organization and the way individuals navigate their social worlds. Although there are many types of groups that distinguish themselves from one another, such as blue or white collar worker, male and female, or young and old, I consider here a group boundary that is especially relevant to social policy. That is the group boundary of ethno-nationalism, what I conceive of as natives versus foreigners.
Festinger (1954) argues that social categorization into a perceived group is an automatic human response to the environment. Individuals see themselves as part of an in-group that comprises of individuals who are similar on some salient dimension or dimensions. The in-group is defined by these dimensions which are different from other groups, identified as out-groups. In-group bias is a tendency of an individual to prefer members of the in-group for social interaction and resource sharing (Tajfel et al. 1971;
Turner 1975; Brewer 1979; Mullen, Brown, and C. Smith 1992). Experiments show that people strongly prefer members of their own group, even when group is randomly assigned and has no consequence for the subject (Tajfel et al. 1971; Brewer 1979).
The reason that in-group bias should be a determinant of public opinion is due to immigration. Western European countries for example are more ethnically diverse now than they have been at any point in their respective histories (Castles and Miller 2003). Of the roughly 70 million immigrants residing on the European continent, by the end of 2008, approximately 75% immigrated to Western Europe which is home to the greatest levels of social policy in the world (United Nations 2010). In-group bias should be strong where foreign-born persons are found in large numbers, enough to constitute a sustained presence of an out-group, or out-groups.
With the exception of a few comparative analyses, the majority of scholarship on the relationship between diversity and public opinion comes from the US case. Gilens (1995) finds that racial stereotypes about black work ethics negatively affect white
attitudes towards social policy. Gilens finds the effect of racial stereotypes is greater than that of individualism and economic self-interest. Other evidence comes from Luttmer (2001), who finds that the race of welfare recipients matters for welfare attitudes towards unemployment insurance. The US literature is unique in the sense that it finds a relationship between race and public opinion toward basic means-tested social policies.
Blacks in the US however are not immigrants. Also, in Europe social policy has broader coverage beyond unemployment or minimum income; in fact the bulk of spending comes from pensions and health care (OECD 2012). Thus, findings from the American case are not directly transferable to the European case where persons who are ethnically different from the majority often are immigrants, and health care and pensions are distributed more generously.
Nonetheless, scholars have hypothesized that similar group dynamics processes may be at work in Europe as in the US, but thus far have mostly failed to confirm this.
Relying on European Social Survey (ESS) data from 17 countries in 2008, Mau and Burkhardt (2009) find only a small effect of immigration on support for redistribution.
Hjerm and Schnable (2012) also rely on ESS data from 18 countries in 2004 and find no effect of immigration on support for redistribution or acceptance of taxation. In comparative analyses of welfare attitudes in 45 countries, Freeze (2011) relies on a number of data sources, including ESS, and finds no clear linkage between ethnic heterogeneity and support for redistribution. Brady and Finnigan (2011) also find little evidence that immigration undermines support for the welfare state. Crepaz (2008) finds no relationship between immigration-generated ethnic diversity and social policy attitudes, but data issues also undermine the validity of his results. Crepaz relies on
“percent foreign” instead of “percent foreign-born.” Both measures are available from OECD, but they do not measure the same thing, and “percent foreign” captures different
populations in each country. Furthermore, for most countries involved, “percent foreign”
is approximately 20-50% smaller than “percent foreign-born.” This means that Crepaz significantly underestimated the size of the first-generation immigrant population.
Some recent research shows that immigration does indeed affect public opinion.
Eger (2010b) finds that immigration-generated ethnic diversity reduces support for social policy in Sweden. Larsen’s (2011) comparison of welfare opinions in the US, Sweden, Denmark, and Great Britain provides further evidence. His results show that although Americans’ general distaste for redistribution is truly “exceptional,” stereotypes about immigrants from non-Western countries affect Europeans’ attitudes about social welfare at least as much as stereotypes about African-American work ethic affects American attitudes. Although his analysis does not include objective regional- or country-level measures of diversity, respondents who report hostility towards living in a neighborhood where at least 50% of the residents are from an ethnic out-group are less supportive of redistribution.
The only current research that demonstrates robust statistical relationships between objective measures of ethnic diversity and public opinion toward social policy come from the US and Sweden. Following the work and ideas of Maureen A. Eger, I suggest that this relative lack of support for in-group bias effects is due to the privileging of the nation-state in comparative political research. All of the aforementioned work on Europe compares countries to each other. A large body of research on group dynamics suggests that diversity in smaller, local contexts should lead to in-group bias (Festinger 1954; G. W. Allport 1954; Tajfel 1970; Horowitz 1985; Barth 1969). Furthermore, many countries are extremely diverse in their regional characteristics, and these differences are lost when measuring diversity at the country-level. Research confirms this. The analyses that employ measures of ethnic heterogeneity at the meso-level in the US and Sweden
demonstrate that diversity reduces public support of social policy (Luttmer 2001; C. Fox 2004; Eger 2010b).
A critical caveat of this hypothesis, based on the work of Eger (2010a), is that in-group bias is not the same as out-in-group hostility. It is not anti-immigrant attitudes that create group based public opinion in opposition to social policy. It is a general bias to prefer the in-group instead of any out-group regardless of the characteristics that define the group boundaries. For example, Protestants could have in-group bias against otherwise phenotypically similar Catholics, or teenagers against adults of the same ethnicity. I do not suggest that racism or prejudice against immigrants or against individuals who are ethnically different does not shape public opinion. These are hypotheses tested elsewhere, and especially supported in the US. Instead, I focus on in-group bias because it is theoretically a factor for all humans and can bridge the diversity experience of a range of countries. Understanding in-group bias may help to build grand theories of public opinion formation, as opposed to racially or ethnically specific theories.
There are many alternative arguments for why diversity should shape public opinion. These include socio-biological fictive kinships or ethnic nepotism (Trivers 1971;
Van den Berghe 1981); psychological impacts of empathy on altruism (Batson et al.
1981); neuroscience of negative responses to ethnic out-groups (Gutsell and Inzlicht 2010); evolutionary reciprocal altruism (Trivers 1971); and social psychological trust in homogeneous group characteristics (Brewer 1979; Alesina and La Ferrara 2000) to name a few examples. I focus on the impact of real or perceived group boundaries, which is what all these studies have in common. A greater proportion of out-group members should activate stronger in-group allegiance and lead to reduced support of social policy, i.e. reduced support of sharing resources with out-group(s).