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The relationship between ethnic diversity and social solidarity has become increasingly tenuous with the advance of globalization. Immigrant access to the welfare state has been a salient issue throughout the West recently, most especially in Europe after the enlargement of the European Union eastwards in 2004 and the migration crisis of 2015 (Reeskens and van der Meer 2018). Migration and diversity have been attributed with stimulating welfare chauvinism, which has led to a burgeoning body of research into this line of political inquiry (Kitschelt 1997). Previous research has largely focused on the national identity of the majority population by measuring the nature of their identification with the nation. However, this focus is inadequate because it leaves out how the majority population perceives the relationship of immigrants to the nation. If immigrants are perceived by the majority as being less committed to the national community, they are likely to suffer from “membership penalties” (Banting et al. 2022; Harell et al. 2021). When immigrants are perceived as less deserving, then their claims-making can be seen as less legitimate than native-born citizens. Although immigrants are less likely today to be formally excluded from the nation as pathways to citizenship are available, they continue to be subject to a form of hierarchical inclusion between an ethno-national core and penalized outsider minority (Antonsich and Petrillo 2019), at least in some cases and by some native-born citizens. Membership penalties imposed by the majority are likely to surface over support for redistribution. This is because welfare state support relies on a sense of community membership, which typically has been tied to notions of nationhood (Marshall 1950). Recent research shows that people are more willing to redistribute benefits when they perceive others in society as equally committed to the national community (Harell et al. 2021). Despite a large experimental literature that shows that immigrants and racialized minorities are less likely to be seen as deserving of welfare (Ford and Koostra 2017; Harell, Soroka and Iyengar, 2016) little work looks at how cues of membership influence attitudes toward redistribution. The aim of this project is to better understand how individual behavior by immigrants can influence perceptions of commitment to the national community, to test the extent they matter for support for redistribution compared to common indicators in the literature, such as economic situation and racial prejudice. To do so, we draw on a unique cross-national survey, with an embedded social media experiment that manipulates cues about commitment to the host society, the immigrant's racial background, and their employment status. This preregistration plan only focuses on the social media experiment embedded within the larger study.

Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-ppq-10.1177_13540688211011924 for Inequality, policy polarization and the income gap in turnout by Matthew Polacko in Party Politics

Supplemental material, Supplemental_Information for Party Positions, Income Inequality, and Voter Turnout in Canada, 1984-2015 by Matthew Polacko in American Behavioral Scientist