Authoritarianism, Prejudice, and Support for Welfare Chauvinism in the United States

This article examines the role of authoritarianism in shaping individual policy support for creating a waiting period before legal immigrants can access welfare programs. I use logistic regression models to analyse the opinions of non-Latino whites from the 1992 American National Election Study (ANES). I find that authoritarianism is related to a waiting period before immigrants can access welfare benefits, despite a significant number of non-authoritarians also preferring a waiting period. This effect is robust with the inclusion of several traditional predictors of welfare attitudes.