Vrânceanu, AlinaPetrova, Bilyana2025-05-292025-05-292025Vrânceanu A, Petrova B. Welfare policy and immigration attitudes in Western Europe. Eur J Polit Res. 2025 Mar 9. DOI: 10.1111/1475-6765.700060304-4130http://hdl.handle.net/10230/70560Data de publicació electrònica: 09-03-2025How do welfare systems affect natives' attitudes to immigration? The impact of immigration on public support for welfare and redistribution has received considerable scholarly attention, but we know much less about how welfare policies shape citizens' views about immigration. We focus on two mechanisms: an instrumental channel and a values-based approach. Our empirical strategy is two-pronged. Hierarchical models leveraging variation in immigration attitudes and welfare generosity both between countries and over time (2002-2019) suggest that more comprehensive welfare regimes are associated with more positive views of immigrants. Furthermore, a regression discontinuity design drawing on a natural experiment in Denmark reveals that hostility towards immigrants increased following the announcement of a welfare retrenchment reform. Together, these analyses shed light on how the welfare state influences immigration attitudes.application/pdfeng© 2025 The Author(s). European Journal of Political Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Consortium for Political Research. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.info:eu-repo/semantics/article2025-05-29http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.70006Public opinionImmigrationWelfare statesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess