68 Chapter 4 whether these changes in support involve changes in policy responses and thus necessary spending consequences at the country-level. Furthermore, while micro-level theories on attitudes may explain why anti-immigration attitudes and support for welfare state retrenchment are linked, most macro-level studies do not find evidence of clear reductions in social spending or the generosity of welfare states in Europe (Fenwick, 2019; Gaston & Rajaguru, 2013; Lipsmeyer & Zhu, 2011; Römer, 2023; Soroka et al., 2016). A crucial theory at the macro-level is the embedded liberalism hypothesis which argues that governments will compensate citizens for accepting extra risk in the face of more open markets. It was initially coined by Ruggie (1982) to explain why governments committed to free trade would need to provide greater social protection to their citizens. However, the explanation can be extrapolated to also explain why governments may consider compensating those who are exposed to greater labour market risk as a result of increasing immigration and labour mobility. Rodrik (1998, 2011) follows this argument and argues that the only way to preserve the legitimacy of markets is to protect citizens from the risks that comes with them. Stating “if you want markets to expand, you need governments to do the same” (2011, p. 18). For immigration and supporters of more open or more liberal borders, these internationalist principles can arguably then be resolved through a commitment to greater redistribution and other social policies. In line with this reasoning, Naumann and Stoetzer (2018) found that people who are exposed to more labour market competition from immigrants also have stronger preferences for redistribution. For European and other OECD countries, a few studies have sought to analyse this link between immigration and welfare state effort at the macrolevel. These studies provide somewhat conflicting evidence, likely because they use different measures for welfare state effort and for immigration. The studies by Soroka et al. (2006) and Gaston and Rajaguru (2013) rely on total social expenditures. In an updated article, Soroka et al. (2016) go a step further and disaggregate expenditures into various welfare state programmes, likewise Röth et al. (2022) use spending on different programmes as their dependent variables. Fenwick (2019) takes a broader approach and uses two different measures to express welfare state effort, total social expenditures and a welfare state generosity index, and Römer (2023) adopts a similar approach by analysing both total social expenditures and generosity indices for unemployment benefits and pensions. In contrast, Lipsmeyer and Zhu (2011) provide a more specific analysis and focus solely on unemployment replacement rates, as does Taschwer (2021) who exclusively examines minimum income benefit replacement rates. Common ground in this group of studies is, however, that they all use aggregate indicators of migration even though different types of movement yield different economic, societal, and political impacts and can therefore be expected to contribute to welfare state reform in different ways.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw