Social Benefit Competition, Altruism, and Attitudes Towards Restricting Immigrants' Social Rights

Previous research on attitudes towards restricting immigrants’ social rights has focused on the relative importance of material versus non-material factors. They often find that non-material factors, such as prejudice and cultural capital, are far better predictors and they conclude that material self-interest does not have a strong or consistent impact on these attitudes. Material interests, however, may have been dismissed prematurely as few studies have actually measured whether individuals experience competition for social benefits and services. In this paper, I argue that the relationship between an individual’s income and their attitudes towards immigrants’ social rights is conditional on the degree of benefit competition. If benefit competition is high, poor voters should be more supportive of restrictions in order to secure these benefits for themselves. I also argue that rich voters may support these restrictions for altruistic reasons if they want to secure these benefits for poor natives. To test these claims, I focus on individual attitudes and competition for social housing in the Netherlands. Social housing accounts for 30% of the Dutch housing market and shortages have increased in recent years due to a declining supply and rising demand. This makes it an interesting case to study whether material interests influence attitudes towards restricting immigrants’ social rights. I use regional data on social housing shortages from Statistics Netherlands and panel data on individual attitudes from the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences between 2006 and 2012.