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01-04-2014

The welfare state, migration, and voting rights

Author: Christine Fauvelle-Aymar

Published in: Public Choice | Issue 1-2/2014

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Abstract

This paper proposes a political economic analysis of public opinion in European Union countries toward migrants from poor countries. By focusing on redistributive policy, the analysis sheds light on specific determinants of public opinion. The theoretical analysis, based on the median voter framework, shows that one of the key variables affecting public opinion is the voting rights of migrants. Where migrants do not have the right to vote, their presence negatively impacts the poorest natives. In countries where migrants enjoy voting rights, they are able to vote on redistributive policy; therefore, the impact of migration on natives’ welfare is fundamentally different. After the theoretical analysis, the paper proposes an empirical analysis of Europeans’ attitudes toward non-Western migrants in European Union countries. This empirical analysis confirms the decisive impact of migrants’ voting rights. It shows that, in EU countries, the more educated natives are significantly less favorable to migrants from poor countries when the latter have the right to vote.

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About 60 % of foreigners in Europe are citizens of non-Western countries (Vasileva 2011).

See Friedberg and Jennifer (1995), Kerr and Kerr (2011) and Okkerse (2008).

For a formal model of the determinant of opinion toward migrants based on this hypothesis, see Söllner (1999).

The impact of migrants on labor market is, however, not totally disregarded in this study since the characteristics of the labor market are introduced, as control variables, in the empirical analysis.

More generally, the literature on immigration policy is beyond the scope of this article. On this question, see, for instance, Thum (2004), Powell (2012) and Scheve and Slaughter (2001).

Many analyses demonstrate that migration may help to ease the financial constraints on the public pension schemes of ageing countries; see, for instance, Rother et al. (2003).

In 2000, nearly 80 % of migrants arriving in the EU did not have a tertiary level of education (Docquier et al. 2007). Moreover, even for a given skill level, the situation of migrants in the labor market is less favorable than that of natives, as a result of a combination of discriminatory practices and the current situation in the European labor market (Peracchi and Depalo 2006).

Practically, this direct effect is not immediate but comes when migrants have acquired the right to vote. Contrary to social rights, voting rights to non-EU citizens are not granted on arrival. More or less restrictive conditions involving length of residence apply in all countries before a migrant can enjoy voting rights.

For an interesting formal presentation, see Mayr (2007).

That was also the case during the transition to universal suffrage. See more on this issue below.

Along the highly debated Borjas’ welfare magnets hypothesis (Borjas 1999). On this debate, see, for instance, the survey by Nannestad (2007).

In this paper, I only consider the political influence that migrants can exercise through their voting rights. In reality, migrants can use other mechanisms to influence public decisions, such as participating in pressure groups and in particular trade unions. In any case, these actions can only increase their influence on public policies and thus amplify the consequences examined in this paper. For such an approach, see Mazza and Winden (1996).

This is the case only for citizens of the Commonwealth countries. Other migrants are not allowed to vote.

The survey used in the empirical study was conducted in 2002–2003 when there were 15 member states. Luxembourg has been excluded from the analysis for the reasons explained below.

These surveys have been conducted in the major European countries (members or not of the EU) since 2002. Funded by research programs of the European Commission and the “European Science Foundation”, they are presented on the website www.europeansocialsurvey.org.

The exact number depends on the country’s size and on the survey response rate.

As explained above, the value of the dependent variable is higher when people are more favorable to the arrival of migrants.

This issue is discussed above.

These other situations include logically the situation where the respondent is working but also all situations in which he/she does not belong to the labor force, owing, for instance, to being retired or pursuing additional years of schooling.

In order to calculate the exact number of migrants, we need to have the nationality at birth. The survey provides information on respondents’ nationality only at the time of the survey. Therefore migrants who have acquired the nationality of their host country since their arrival cannot be identified.

I refer here to the question of the transition to universal suffrage because there seems to be no theoretical analysis of the extension of voting rights to foreigners.

This argument is discussed by Acemoglu and Robinson (2000).

The source of the unemployment rate and of “the size of the foreign population” variable presented below is the Eurostat database available online.

The recent literature on ethnic conflicts suggests that violent conflicts are more likely to happen when a nation is divided into two groups of roughly equal size than when the nation is very diverse, unless one group is dominant (for a synthesis of the debate, see Basuchoudhary and Shughart 2010). Applied to the question of migration, this assumption suggests that an interesting control variable would be a measure of the heterogeneity within the migrant population. However, these data are not available for migrants in EU countries.

The sum of the coefficients in line (3a) is equal to 0.117, the value of the coefficient associated to the Educ variable in estimation 1 of the table.

The sums of the coefficients in lines (3b) and (3c) are not significantly different.

The standard error of the sums of the coefficients in lines (3b) and (3c) are, respectively, 0.006 and 0.005, yielding highly significant estimated coefficients.

We get exactly the same results if these variables are introduced separately in the regression.

We can see that the coefficient associated to Vote ₂ is positive and significant in regression 2, where Vote ₁ is the reference variable.

Available at www.europeansocialsurvey.org.

The results are not presented for reasons of space.

There is no routinized technique to identify influential observations in an ordered logit estimation. I chose here to estimate the model with ordinary least squares and calculated the value of the standardized residuals. I then re-estimated the ordered logit model, excluding from the sample observations whose absolute value of standardized residual was greater than 2 (i.e., 1 040 observations, or a little less than 5 % of the sample).

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Title: The welfare state, migration, and voting rights
Author: Christine Fauvelle-Aymar
Publication date: 01-04-2014
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Public Choice / Issue 1-2/2014
Print ISSN: 0048-5829
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7101
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-012-0024-z

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