Does anti-immigrant sentiment decrease support for redistribution? Evidence from two online experiments

This study examines a relationship that has been implied by years of correlational research: that natives’ support for welfare redistribution declines when benefits are allocated to immigrants rather than natives—a phenomenon known as welfare chauvinism. We conducted two online experiments (N1 = 273, N2 = 1060) involving redistribution to unemployed people through real donations to charity, framed as tax compliance decisions within a simulated reporting task. We employed a between-subject design, randomly assigning participants to treatments that differed solely in the immigration status of the charity-benefit recipients. Drawing from native samples in Italy, Denmark, and the UK, we find that natives’ support for redistribution is not statistically affected by the recipients’ immigration status. This null effect holds across both studies, despite spanning a four-year period (2000–2024) marked by major global events which might have been expected to shift preferences regarding welfare state distribution and immigration, including: the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukrainian refugee crisis, and the increasingly anti-immigrant turn in Italian, Danish, and UK politics. Our findings challenge prevailing theories of welfare chauvinism and invite both replication efforts and reconsideration of long-standing theoretical givens.