The Political Economy of Immigration and Welfare State Effort: Evidence from Europe 17 H2: Expansion: increasing immigration is associated with increases in welfare state effort – reflected in increases in spending and/or generosity. 2.3 Research Design: Data and Methods To test the hypotheses, data spanning 16 European countries3 for the years 1990-2010 has been collected. The countries in the sample chosen are European countries in the OECD because the more economically developed European countries simultaneously tend to be typical migrant destinations and the ones with traditional, advanced welfare states. However, some European OECD countries are excluded4 despite accessible spending data as no ‘total generosity’ measure is available for these countries in the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset (CWED). For our two dependent variables – social spending and the generosity index – the aggregate measures are used. While this can mask programme specific changes, it provides a useful overview of general associations which has yet to be done in this specific context for the generosity index. 2.3.1 Dependent Variable: operationalising welfare state effort The commonly used indicator to depict welfare state effort is social spending as a percentage of GDP (Allan & Scruggs, 2004). There are clear advantages to this measure – it provides a good indication of the overall generosity of a welfare state as it captures the size of the budget, there is no need to correct for inflation and exchanges rates, and it is well recorded so data is readily available for most European countries over an extended period of time. However, this measure has been criticised for a number of reasons, such as not adequately capturing changes in legislation regarding entitlement criteria, coverage, and duration (Scruggs, 2007). Subsequently, there has been extensive debate over spending’s suitability as an indicator of welfare state effort because it may not adequately reflect policy change (Allan & Scruggs, 2004; Caminada, Goudswaard, & Van Vliet, 2010; Clasen & Siegel, 2007; Green-Pedersen, 2004; Jensen, 2011; Starke, 2006; van Oorschot, 2013; Wang & van Vliet, 2016). To account for the ‘dependent variable problem’, this article uses two different indicators to explore how immigration influences welfare state effort. As is common convention, social welfare spending as a percentage of GDP from the OECD’s Social Expenditure (SOCX) Database (2017d) is used, which is then compared with the welfare generosity index from the 3 Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and United Kingdom. 4 Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
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