The rise of "welfare chauvinism"

In fact, a new threat to center-left parties has emerged. Populist parties on the right are moving beyond their adamant opposition to immigration, the European Union and the welfare state to become proponents of a more lavish, but also more restrictive, domestic social spending regime under a policy European scholars describe as “welfare chauvinism.”

Under this approach, parties of the right support health care, housing programs and other benefits with the explicit proviso that only legal residents qualify and that public spending on behalf of illegal immigrants be eliminated…

In practice, deep ideological and partisan disagreements in the United States about the existence of the “legitimately needy” and the “deserving poor,” as well as quarrels about the necessity of protection from free trade for unionized workers, prevent support for a European-type right populist agenda by the conservative wing of the Republican Party or the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

If the goal of democratic politics is to give voice to competing constituencies, then multiple parties provide one means of achieving this end.