Cross-sectional and Temporal Differences in Risk Exposure and Occupational Insecurity: Can the New Workforce Inequalities be Determinants of Perceptions of Immigration?

The changing levels and structures of inequality, since the 1980’s, point to the observation that there has been an important increase in inequality beyond the commonly measured indicators of real wage inequalities or distributions. Highly visible in the context of global economic recession, these new forms of deprivation and inequalities had important consequences and implications for public preferences, voting behaviour, and perceptions (Beramendi et.al. 2015). Previous studies on the topic paint a pessimistic picture in that immigration may be unsustainable in any variety of national political economy in terms of favourable perceptions from natives. In addition to this, significant amount of empirical work attempt to show that material interests and economic threats have much less explanatory power than socio-cultural explanations in understanding immigration perceptions. In this regard, the main question to be explored in this research is “how and to what extent variation of immigration perceptions in European countries can be explained through changing welfare and labour institutions?” The research proposed here takes into account a. the changing dynamics of institutional structures of welfare and labour institutions, b. individual level exposure to risks and insecurity at the turn of institutional reforms, globalization, and crises c. how, the often neglected, effect of inequalities could play a key role in mitigating native perceptions of immigration. It is predicted that higher risk and lower protection will yield less favourable perceptions of immigration. The theory also predicts a negative relationship between favourable perceptions and increase in structural low-end inequality in a country. As part of a larger research project, this paper here will focus on the research objective a. on the country level factors of cross-sectional inequality dynamics and institutions, present evidence from aggregate trends, and examine within country dynamic changes through structured and focused comparative qualitative cases. The research design is temporally scoped to cover a time frame of early 1990’s to late 2010’s. The comparative cases will have both a cross-national and temporal dynamic element. The country cases that will be used to draw empirical evidence are France and Denmark (with the potential inclusion of United Kingdom). The Paper takes stock from the earlier works on the insider vs. outsider divide (Rueda 2005; Schwander and Häuserman 2013), the effects of risk inequality (Rehm 2016), and native preferences of redistribution in theorizing a new approach to understand perceptions of immigration of native populations in industrialized European capitalisms. It, therefore, aims to bring forward an original analytical link from the larger literature on comparative political economy in understanding one of the most pressing conflictual tendencies facing societies in developed countries today; between diversified nature of host country work conditions and institutions and native tendencies of anti-immigration. Overall, the research aims to put forward corrections to both the extensive literature on perceptions of immigration and the studies on the effects of welfare and labour market institutions.