Converging ethnicity and class: a strategy for fostering interethnic solidarity and mitigating income inequality

Abstract

A dominant political narrative of welfare chauvinism posits that migration and ethnic minorities threaten the interests of non-migrant citizens, particularly those in lower socio-economic positions. This framing fuels intergroup tensions, fostering an ‘us vs. them’ attitude, undermining cohesion. Building upon literature on social identity and boundary-making processes, this study investigates whether an alternative political narrative that merges class and ethnicity–invoking a diverse working class–promotes solidarity for the improvement of income positions for citizens with and without a migration background. And whether it does so more than a general-social-class narrative and a ‘welfare-chauvinism’ narrative. Our study uses an original survey-experiment, incorporated in the 2023 Dutch Parliamentary Election Study (N = 4824). We investigate whether the impact of the narratives varies by type of solidarity and participants’ social class and migration background. Contrary to expectations, the merge-class-and-ethnicity narrative did not increase interethnic-class solidarity. However, it decreased levels of chauvinist-class solidarity. Put differently, the merge-class-and-ethnicity narrative did not contribute directly to higher levels of interethnic-class solidarity, but only indirectly by the stronger rejection of exclusionist-ingroup solidarity. These findings differ from earlier studies conducted in the US. We call for a better understanding of the conditionality of responses to political narrative(s) that promote solidarity.