Causes of Inclusion and Exclusion: Immigrant Welfare Rights in Global Comparison

Consensus and Conflict Department

Project head: Dr. Friederike Römer

Project team members: Samera Bartsch Svenja DirschbacherDr. Jakob Henninger Mara Junge

Running time January 2022 until December 2025
Status Current project

The project examines the social rights of immigrants in national welfare states on a global scale. It focuses on the role that political parties and civil society actors play in shaping processes of inclusion and exclusion, while also considering contextual factors such as welfare state institutions, immigration regimes, and political regimes. At the core of the project is a policy dataset (ImmigSR) which maps the social rights of immigrants across 48 countries in five world regions for the years 1980-2021. It includes information on access to social assistance, unemployment insurance, child benefits, social pensions, and workers' compensation. The dataset allows for hypotheses regarding the influence and interaction of various actor groups and contextual factors to be quantitatively tested based on a more comprehensive database than previously possible. This is complemented by qualitative case studies comparing a pair of countries in the Global South (Malaysia and Thailand) and the Global North (United Kingdom and Switzerland). The selection of cases enables us to compare processes of inclusion and exclusion within and between democracies and autocracies.

Funding: German Research Foundation (Third-party funding)