ABSTRACT
There are undoubtedly many causes of cross-national difIerences in welf1lre provisions. Is this a basis for rejecting ethnicity as one causal factor among others? Affirmative answers tend to rely on particular cases and seek one exdusive cause for each case. For example: ' ... IRleduction of welfare state expenditures is a public policy related to the fiscal discipline imposed by the EU with the introduction of the euro (as in Germany) or associated with "liberatarian" ideology (as in the USA). ,:-19 Gilens HI argues from survey data and content analysis of American television over the last few decades that the reluctance of white taxpayers to fund welfare for hlacks is due to media bias. Gilens finds that blacks have been over-represented in depictions of poor people in US television reports, and makes the plausible case that without this bias the issue of welfare would not have become so racialized. Hence, white discriminatory hehaviour is imposed from the outside and is not at all intrinsic to human nature. He does not deny that blacks are indeed overrepresented among welfare categories such as unemployed and single mothers, and entertains no other factors as underlying welfare attitudes.
