Introduction 7 literature on the welfare state by analysing the effects of immigration on both social policies and social policy preferences. While the chapters can be read independently, they are closely related and have a continuous red thread that is outlined in this introduction. Following the introductory chapter, Chapter 2 of this dissertation is a soleauthored, published article and provides an overview of the macro-level relationship between the stock of immigrants across 16 European countries and the generosity of the welfare state. This article extends previous research (Gaston & Rajaguru, 2013; Lipsmeyer & Zhu, 2011; Soroka et al., 2006; 2016) by taking into account arguments from Scruggs and Allan (2006) and Starke (2006) that studies researching welfare policy change should complement expenditure data with additional quantitative measures. Consequently, specific attention is paid to the ‘dependent variable problem’ and operationalising the ‘generosity’ of the welfare state through two different indicators of welfare state effort: (1) social spending as a percentage of gross domestic product and (2) an index of welfare state generosity (Scruggs et al. 2014). I find that immigration is positive and significantly associated with social spending and has no significant association with the generosity index. As a result, I argue that there is no evidence to support the idea that increasing immigration has led to the erosion of welfare state effort in Europe. Immigration in this chapter is operationalised as ‘foreign-born as a percentage of the population’, a broad measure that is indicative of the stock of immigrants in a country. A key reason this indicator is used is because it is one of the best reported, cross-country comparative indicators for levels of immigration. The drawback is that it lacks depth and cannot provide a more detailed insight into the relationship between types of immigration and the welfare state. Accordingly, the next chapter of this dissertation is assigned to developing more specific indicators for immigration to be utilised in later chapters. Chapter 3 is sole-authored and takes a closer look at data on migration and explores what existing migration data has to offer researchers studying migration related research questions in Europe. The chapter considers the main limitations of currently available migration data, and the solutions employed by other researchers to overcome those constraints. In addition, it presents how I have sought to fill one specific gap in migration data, and consequently the migration-welfare state literature, through the creation of an innovative operationalisation for intra-EU labour mobility using the EU-LFS. I create two indicators to help identify two different sub-flows of
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw