Deserving and Undeserving Welfare Claimants in Britain and the Netherlands: Examining the Role of Ethnicity and Migration Status Using a Vignette Experiment

Immigrants’ access to and use of welfare benefits have been the subject of heated debate in many west-European countries. In this article, I examine public solidarity with unemployed welfare claimants and focus on how claimants’ ethnic background and migration status affect their perceived deservingness. I use a novel vignette experiment administered among a representative sample of 5,000 respondents from Britain and 4,000 from the Netherlands. Besides ethnic background and migration status, I manipulated six other characteristics of the claimant, such as effort to find a new job, level of need, and work history. I show that the ethnic background of claimants is not a decisive factor of deservingness once these other factors are accounted for. In the Netherlands, and to a lesser extent also in Britain, second-generation ethnic minorities who have a long work history and who make much effort to find a new job are considered as deserving as similar majority claimants. However, this analyses did expose a double standard: ethnic minority claimants who exhibit ‘unfavourable’ behaviour—those who migrated at a later age, failed to look for work, or have a short work history—are punished more severely for this than similar majority Dutch or British claimants.