Suchergebnisse

Why do some governments try to limit immigrants' access to social benefits and entitlements? This book reveals that such efforts have little to do with economic pressures but rather result from a political climate that rewards a punitive approach to immigration and multiculturalism.

AbstractAlthough immigrants' place in welfare state systems is of large relevance to academics and policymakers alike, there have been few attempts to compare immigrants' social rights in different countries at different moments in time systematically. This article presents the results from a comparative policy analysis that maps immigrants' access to seven different social programmes, in 20 different Western democracies, at four different points in time. The main findings are threefold. First, there are large differences in the extent to which different welfare states differentiate in benefit extension between immigrants and native‐born citizens. Second, over the last two decades, many countries have adjusted their welfare systems with the specific aim to accommodate immigrants, whereas many have also introduced punitive barriers that require immigrants to satisfy additional requirements. Third, these developments seem largely driven by politics: in particular, the adoption of punitive barriers has been more common in places where the political climate is more hostile to immigrants. These findings raise important questions about the future of social protection in an era of cross‐border mobility.

"In light of the increase in cross-border mobility and the recent political sensitivity surrounding immigration-related issues, understanding the politics and policies of immigrants' access to welfare programs is more relevant than ever. Systematic analysis of this subject has been held back, however, by the lack of a cross-national index of immigrant exclusion from social benefits over time. The Exclusion of Immigrants from Welfare Programs fills this gap by taking advantage of a novel and original measure called the Immigrant Exclusion from Social Programs Index (IESPI), which includes twenty-five indicators regarding immigrants' access to seven different social programs, for twenty-two countries, at four moments in time. The book includes an assessment of key trends, an investigation of the origins and consequences of variation, and detailed studies of four cases of particular theoretical interest: Norway, Austria, Portugal, and the United States. Presenting a cross-national index to facilitate and encourage systematic cross-country comparisons, this book provides insights and data that will allow researchers to probe such questions as the degree to which countries include or exclude immigrants in developing public policies, why some countries are more exclusionary than others, and what the future consequences of this exclusion might be."--

This case brief discusses the methodology underlying an investigation of how political parties and voters think about the relationship between immigration and the welfare state. To investigate the views of political parties, the study analyzes the manifestoes that the major political parties in 15 West European countries used in their last election campaign. To measure the views of voters, the study relies on existing survey research that has been done in those countries at around the same time. By relying on data that was already collected, this research was able to make an original contribution without having to go through the time-consuming process of conducting interviews or field research. On the other hand, the researcher had to navigate hurdles that beset much unobtrusive research, in particular finding second-best solutions when perfect data are not available, distinguishing manifest from latent content, and ensuring reliable measurement from one case to another.

AbstractAlthough new institutionalism has long been criticised for presenting overly static accounts of social reality, that critique is becoming increasingly unwarranted. In recent years, historical, ideational and rational choice institutionalists have produced a rich body of literature on mechanisms and processes of institutional change. This article reviews this emerging literature and concludes that the most promising avenue for future research is to further explore the potential for combining insights from the three subtypes of institutionalism. In the hopes of encouraging future studies of institutional change to engage more explicitly in theoretical integration, this article proposes a sequential approach to combining insights from different traditions and providing comprehensive accounts of exogenous and endogenous processes of institutional change.

While the subject of populism receives increasing scholarly attention from both political scientists and criminologists, so far these two bodies of literature have existed mostly in isolation of each other. This paper aims to connect them by investigating whether parties that political scientists describe as populist are likely to evince positions on criminal justice that criminologists describe as populist. Relying on a secondary data analysis comparing mainstream right-wing and populist right-wing parties for 131 elections in 24 countries since 1973, this paper concludes that the populist right on average expresses slightly more support for penal populism than the mainstream right, but that its positioning is crucially shaped by considerations relating to issues of immigration and multiculturalism. These findings suggest that most contemporary populist parties on the right primarily pursue a nativist agenda and will only invoke penal populism when it fits this overall strategy.