Effects of Welfare and Labour Market Institutions on European Perceptions of Immigration: Risk Exposure and Occupational Insecurity

To what extent variation of immigration attitudes in European countries could be explained through changing welfare and labour institutions? Previous works on immigration perception have argued that generous social provisions and protected labour markets cannot coexist with immigration. However, in Europe countries with the least developed protection and redistribution have relatively high levels of negative perception and some of the countries with most developed institutions in this regard have lowest. Although this has been linked to the labour market threat and economic threat perceptions, some of the positive perception countries do have relatively low levels of employment protection and/or social spending. Therefore, the puzzle of variance in immigration perceptions is still left largely unexplained.

The effects of previous transformations of welfare and labour market institutions, in the overarching aim of making European political economy more competitive and sustainable had serious externalities. It is the argument of this paper that, one of the most crucial of these was the changing within country inequality levels and the workfare turn in social policy that re-commodified the working life and changed the power resources within labour markets. This in turn led to public demand for conservatism and susceptible environment for right wing politics leading to negative perceptions of immigration both economically and socially as well as a puzzling demand for less immigration. Therefore, the study will present an original theoretical framework from political economy of inequality of Europe to understand perceptions of immigration using risk exposure and occupational risks as its causal mechanisms.