PhD: ‘How Welfare States Create and Reinforce Social Deficits of Migrants’

This PhD project takes a different perspective. It starts from the idea that social networks can be supportive and, at the same time, generate social deficits: pressures, stigma, and misinformation (Offer 2021) that may undermine migrants’ economic prospects. Welfare states can play an important role by providing formal protection (Koning 2021), thus decreasing migrants’ dependency on social networks that produce social deficits (Bilecen & Barglowski 2015). Yet, little is known about the relationship between welfare states and social deficits. This project therefore asks: under what welfare-state conditions do migrants’ social networks become sources of support or deficit, and under what conditions do they reinforce economic vulnerability?

The PhD project combines comparative secondary analysis with original cross-national data collection. First, you will link data from the European Social Survey with MIPEX indicators to examine whether cross-national variation in migrant welfare rights is associated with migrants’ exposure to deficit-related economic outcomes.

Second, you will contribute to the development of a new two-wave survey in several countries. This survey will directly measure social network deficits across multiple migrant groups and enable systematic migrant-group comparisons.

Supervision Team
The project will be supervised by Verena Seibel and Tobias Stark at Utrecht University. The project is embedded in the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science and is part of the ERC Starting Grant project “The shadow of migrants’ social networks: Towards a new theory of how social networks can increase migrants’ economic vulnerability.”

Your tasks

• Together with your supervisory team, you will design and conduct novel empirical studies;
• You will integrate new insights across disciplines, including sociology, political science, and economics;
• You will contribute to the theoretical development of the concept of social network deficits;
• With our support, you will be in charge of all aspects of data collection (from recruiting participants to the design and implementation of a new two-wave cross-national survey);
• You will use advanced statistical methods to process and analyze data;
• You will write international peer-reviewed scientific papers;
• You will work in a collaborative environment that seeks to improve one another’s research;
• You will present your work at international conferences for academics, policy makers, and educators.