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Do white voters support welfare policies targeted at ethnic minorities? Experimental evidence from Britain

ABSTRACT Academics and policymakers have begun discussing ethnically focussed policies to offset the penalties ethnic minorities suffer due to discrimination, but little is known about how such policies would be received by the public. We employ new survey experiments fielded in Britain to examine public reactions to equal opportunity policies targeted at working class, black or Muslim Britons, and redistributive policies aiming to reduce inequality between the rich and the poor or between whites and ethnic minorities. We find widespread support for class- or income-targeted policies among white British respondents, but much lower support when identical policies are ethnically targeted. We find evidence for two mechanisms which help to explain this drop in support. Firstly, political and ideological values such as egalitarianism and support for an active state strongly predict support for class- and income-targeted policy, but have a much weaker effect on support for ethnically targeted policy. Secondly, hostility to immigrants has a strong negative effect on support for ethnically targeted policy, but no effect on support for class- and income-targeted policy. The combination of intense opposition from anti-immigrant voters and indifference from traditionally pro-welfare left wingers results in very little public support for explicitly ethnically targeted policy.