Countries in the Global South experienced a massive increase in immigration in the past decade, with more migrants ending up there than in the Global North. Within South America, over seven million Venezuelans have left their country since 2015, leading to an extraordinary scale of intraregional migration. During these same years, and due to the expansion of social programs, millions of citizens in the region accessed basic income and better-quality healthcare, many for the first time. This talk studies these dual trends and analyzes whether social policies effectively incorporate immigrants. Failing to provide newcomers with a basic standard of living produces social exclusion. It shows that immigrants have more impediments to accessing the welfare state than citizens, even for universal public health, but especially for targeted social assistance. This derives from a combination of political elites’ views around the degree to which immigrants “deserve” access to different types of policies. The research focuses on the barriers that immigrants face to accessing social policy in middle-income South American countries with high rates of immigration—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. Barriers to access are measured through qualitative coding of social assistance, social pensions, and public healthcare that build on legal documents, information requests, and secondary literature from 1990 to 2023, and public officials’ views are measured through in-depth interviews. In analyzing barriers to accessing social policy, this study contributes to the literatures on comparative welfare states and immigration, as well as comparative social policy in middle income countries. 

Sara Niedzwiecki is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She studies social policy, subnational politics, and immigration in Latin America. Sara is the author of Uneven Social Policies: The Politics of Subnational Variation in Latin America (2018, Cambridge University Press), which was awarded LASA's Donna Lee Van Cott Book Award from The Political Institutions Section and the International Public Policy Association's IPPA Book Award. She also co-authored Measuring Regional Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance (Oxford University Press, 2016). Sara has authored and co-authored articles in Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, Latin American Politics and Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, Regional and Federal Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, International Political Science Review, among other peer-reviewed journals. During 2020-2021 academic year, Sara was a fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies where she worked on a new project on social policy and immigration in South America. Website: saraniedzwiecki.com

If you cannot attend in person, it is possible to follow the lecture via Zoom:
https://uni-bremen.zoom-x.de/j/63621789671?pwd=dbHcT1eGhCg7ONxCB3pEQR5EQKRkSt.1…
Meeting-ID: 636 2178 9671 Passcode: 452328

Accurately measuring public perceptions of economic phenomena is complicated, but doing so is important for responsive policy-making. Survey measurement difficulties are particularly pronounced when it comes to economic inequality, which is an abstract and mathematically demanding concept, but perceptions of which have the potential to directly affect the desirability of redistributive policies. In this paper, we compare different ways to ask questions about perceived inequality, characterizing the costs and benefits of different approaches. In particular, we ask whether relatively complicated survey items result in high rates of “satisficing” and/or high rates of non-response, with consequences for survey quality. In a survey fielded to representative samples in Switzerland, Germany, and France, we ask respondents about income inequality in two different ways. First, respondents estimate household incomes at specified percentiles of the income distribution. Later in the survey, they estimate the incomes that qualify a household as rich or poor, respectively. We anticipate that because the percentile questions are relatively abstract, respondents may rely on their prototypes of the rich and the poor when answering, leading to similar answers to the two sets of questions. We also anticipate that because the percentile questions are more mathematically involved, we may see systematic non-response patterns. The results show that in all three countries, the 90th percentile, the 99th percentile, and the rich are seen as significantly different from each other in terms of household income. At the same time, we find significant rates of non-response and uninformative responses in the percentile questions (but not the questions about the rich/poor). We conclude that even apparently low levels of mathematical complexity in question wording can lead to non-response patterns that affect the representativeness of survey samples.

Kris-Stella Trump is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University. A scholar of public opinion and political psychology, she primarily studies perceptions of deservingness, attitudes toward income inequality, and the politics of distribution. Her regional focus lies in the United States and Western Europe. Kris-Stella joined Johns Hopkins from the University of Memphis, and prior to that, she served as program director at the Social Science Research Council. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. She is Estonian by origin, and also lived in Sweden and the United Kingdom before moving to the United States. You can find out more at: https://www.kstrump.com