Economic Inequality and Selective Solidarity: How Inequality Favors Welfare Chauvinism and Far-Right Parties

How can we explain the success of populist radical right parties – more than left-wing forces – in recent decades characterized by growing economic inequality? Inequality and immigration are central challenges in many post-industrial democracies. Existing scholarship has explored the separate impact of inequality and immigration on preferences for redistribution, but lacking is a good understanding of how economic conflict and communal identity interact to shape welfare support under inequality. To understand how macro-level processes influence micro-level behavior, this study brings together separate strands of the literature in political economy and political psychology. Building upon social identity theory in the context of deep economic inequality, I argue that economic inequality generates selective solidarity. By highlighting the contrast between the rich and the rest, inequality erodes beliefs in social mobility and intensifies competition with outgroups. As a result, inequality promotes welfare chauvinism. Willingness to provide welfare support to natives grows, while support for welfare policies benefiting immigrants does not. This helps us explain the success of populist radical right parties who have advocated welfare chauvinism in recent decades of deep economic inequality. I provide evidence for this argument with an original survey experiment conducted with a nationally representative sample of Italian residents; and with cross-national observational analysis, in which I link survey data from 13 OECD countries to contextual socio-economic indicators, including a measure of regional inequality. This work contributes to the study of the role of economic inequality and identity considerations in the politics of welfare.