Immigration and Attitudes Towards Day Care

We examine the relationship between preferences for the public funding of school children day care and the share of foreign pupils in German jurisdictions. To this end, we employ multilevel models to analyze individual-level data from the 1997 and 2002 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel and data on different jurisdiction-levels from official sources. In contrast to a number of recent studies that investigate the link between redistributive preferences and immigration, we find no evidence for a negative association between the two variables. The specifications either indicate no relationship or a weak positive relationship. Our analysis supports two main conclusions: First, the direction of the relationship between redistributive preferences and immigration depends on the specific domain of the welfare state. Second, we demonstrate that the magnitude of the relationship differs across the different levels of jurisdictions. This second result suggests that the patterns found in the previous literature may not be robust to a disaggregation of the data to lower level of jurisdictions. Further research is necessary once more data is available.