A growing body of literature has in recent years been devoted to study the link between immigration and welfare opinion. A repeated finding is that those segments of the electorate who are most likely to support redistributive welfare policies – voters with low education and low incomes – tend to be hostile to immigrants and favour strict immigration policies. This indisputable regularity that can be observed in all affluent welfare states has inspired the formulation of two potentially competing hypotheses why immigration might negatively affect the electoral support for  redistributive welfare states.

The anti-solidarity hypothesis holds that traditional pro-welfare segments of the electorate will simply demand less redistribution when they perceive that immigrants form an important share of welfare recipients. The policy-bundling hypothesis claims that while the taste for redistribution among these voters is unchanged, they will tend to give priority to anti-immigration sentiments and start to vote for right-wing parties with a policy platform that combines anti-welfare state and anti immigration policies.

However, a policy option that would seem to suit the preferences of voters that combine pro-welfare attitudes with scepticism towards immigrants is the creation of a two-tier welfare system where the most accessible and generous benefits are withheld from (newly arrived) immigrants. In this paper we utilize a unique comparative welfare opinion survey to investigate the support for this kind of welfare chauvinist position among Danish and Norwegian voters.

Our survey data contain questions that are directly intended to measure the support for a more active use of discriminatory regulations to deny immigrants the same access to generous welfare benefits as the general population. We hypothesise that welfare chauvinism will have the strongest appeal among voters with low education and low wages that tend to be caught by the tension between pro-welfare and anti-immigrant views.

A comparison of Denmark and Norway in this respect is particularly interesting because Danish policy makers have for some years embarked on the route towards a two-tier welfare state, while such a policy option has so far not been actively promoted at the elite level in Norway.