Intra-EU Labour Migration and Support for the Norwegian Welfare State

In this article, we explore how the recent influx of labour migrants to Norway from EU countries has affected public support for the welfare state. We argue that that intra-EU labour immigration may pose a challenge to welfare state legitimacy. A set of survey experiments is used to measure welfare chauvinistic attitudes towards labour immigrants in an unobtrusive manner and identify potential causal effects of intra-EU labour immigration on attitudes towards welfare spending. We find a high degree of manifest and concealed welfare chauvinism. The tendency is especially strong among women. We also identify a negative effect of intra-EU labour migration on social spending preferences per se, suggesting that tendencies already reported in the United States may have started to surface in Europe as well.