While a mounting body of empirical research has shown growing immigration reduces natives’ support for the welfare state (see e.g. Alesina et al., 2022; Dahlberg et al., 2012; Eger, 2010; Stichnoth, 2012), the micro-level drives of this observed effect are still poorly understood. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by investigating the role of claimants’ ethnicity and phenotype as potentially independent drivers of natives’ support for welfare provision, as well as the mediating role of political ideology in this process. Claimants’ phenotype, in particular, has long been neglected by (continental) European scholars, who have traditionally considered immigrants’ religion and cultural background as the main determinant of natives’ prejudice and discrimination.

To frame our research design, we draw upon social identity theory, proposing a simple theoretical model where ingroup welfare favoritism depends on three factors affecting perceived similarity: 1) claimants’ ethnicity (cultural distance), 2) claimants’ phenotype (phenotypic distance) and 3) voters’ political ideology. According to social identity theory, people mentally categorize others in terms of ingroup and outgroup, and this mental process, which is largely automatic, shapes interactions among members of different groups (Tajfel and Turner, 1986). Crucially, group identification and group cohesiveness are enhanced by perceived ingroup similarity (Turner et al., 1987), which in turn promotes favoritism towards the ingroup when redistributing scarce resources (Muñoz and Pardos-Prado, 2019). This is why perceived cultural distance (and, as we shall postulate, also phenotypic distance) are likely key for ingroup-outgroup identification (Chambers et al. 2013). One overarching proposition follows from the preceding discussion: immigrant-background individuals perceived as closer to the native ingroup will garner greater levels of support as potential welfare recipients than individuals of comparable socioeconomic characteristics but who are perceived as more distant.

To empirically test our hypotheses, we carried out a pre-registered online survey experiment (N = 2,386) in Spain, targeting a representative sample of Spanish citizens. Our experiment exposed respondents to randomized vignettes portraying a (fictitious) potential welfare beneficiary of a means-tested rental-housing subsidy program. All qualifying characteristics are fixed across vignettes. The ethnic background (treatment 1) and phenotype (treatment 2) are randomly varied. We consider three ethnicities (signaled using ethnic-sounding names and surnames): Spanish native, Latin American and North African; and two phenotypes (signaled using AI-generated photographs): “visible” (Afrocentric or “black”) and “non-visible” (Eurocentric or “white”).
Our results suggests claimants’ ethnic background plays a significant role in explaining natives’ redistributive preferences. In line with our expectations, when Spanish natives are primed with a potential welfare beneficiary of North African-origin (regardless of his phenotype), their support for the social policy significantly decreases compared to when they are primed with an otherwise identical Spanish-native claimant (or Latin American). In other words, we find an ethnic penalty for NAF claimants –generally perceived as culturally distant in Spain– but not for LATAM claimants –culturally close. This effect is identified among right-wing and non-ideological individuals, but not among left-wingers. Contrary to our expectations, second-generation immigrants welfare claimants’ phenotype does not significantly influence natives’ support for the rental assistance policy.