by Kate McFarland | Aug 9, 2018 | News
Photo: “Fight for $15” Minimum Wage Protest, CC BY-SA 2.0 The All-Nite Images
A recently released survey shows support for an income-tax-funded basic income from people of color and the working class, but opposition from college-educated white Americans.
The left-wing think tank Data for Progress included a question about universal basic income (UBI) in Polling the Left Agenda, an opinion survey recently conducted to gain insight into the political viability of potential “big-ticket” progressive proposals.
The think tank hopes to remedy a lack of data concerning voter support for such policies, policies that politicians might be inclined to dismiss as too radical to gain sufficient support from the electorate:
“Because the policies that are exciting progressive voters have not yet caught the attention of most pollsters, debates over how ready the broader electorate is for a more progressive Democratic platform have been reduced to mere speculation. We set out to change that … We chose policies that haven’t been polled often, but could be central to the 2020 Presidential election.”
Policies considered in the poll included not only UBI but also a federal job guarantee, a stakeholder grant or “baby bond”, reparations for black Americans, and a 90 percent marginal income tax on millionaires, among other proposals.
In collaboration with YouGov Blue (a division of market research organization YouGov that serves clients from the political left), Data for Progress interviewed 1515 eligible US voters between July 13 and 16, 2018. Respondents were randomly selected and represented the full US political spectrum, not only progressives (e.g. about 44 percent of respondents who voted in the 2016 Presidential election backed Republican nominee Donald Trump).
Querying Support for UBI
Although the survey did not explicitly use the term, UBI was the intended target of one of the survey’s ten policy questions:
Would you support or oppose giving every American a monthly check from the government of $1,000, which would be paid for by raising taxes on individuals earning more than $150,000 a year?
Overall, 37 percent of respondents supported the policy (23 percent strongly and 14 percent “somewhat”), while 43 percent opposed it (31 percent strongly), and the rest remained neutral or undecided. However, as discussed below, net support for the policy was observed within some demographic groups, such as Blacks, Hispanics, women, eligible voters under 45 years of age, and those without any college education.
It bears note that the questionnaire did not query respondents about UBI per se but about a specific type of UBI: one of a certain specified amount (US$1000 per month) and funding mechanism (a higher personal income tax for individuals making more than US$150,000 per year).
Because of this, we must be cautious in making comparisons between the Data for Progress poll and other recent surveys of Americans’ opinions on UBI, such as those conducted in 2017 by Ipsos, Morning Consult, or Gallup, or the poll commissioned by the Economic Security Project in 2016. None of the latter polls included reference to a specific amount or funding mechanism in initial questions about UBI (although some proposed specific sources of funds in follow-up questions). At the same time, included other extraneous qualifications (e.g. Gallup’s poll asked specifically about a UBI introduced “as a way to help Americans who lose their jobs because of advances in artificial intelligence”). Thus, although ostensibly all surveys about Americans’ attitudes UBI, these studies cannot be said all to have measured the exact same thing.
Of particular significance is the fact that the Data for Progress questionnaire asked specifically about a UBI funded by a personal income tax. Data from earlier surveys already indicate that support for UBI decreases when respondents are told that the program would be accompanied by higher taxes.
A 2017 survey of British adults, for example, found that 49 percent of respondents would support “a regular income paid in cash to every individual adult in the UK, regardless of their working status and income from other sources”, but support dropped to 30 percent if the policy would entail an increase in taxes. Similarly, as Jurgen De Wispelaere has pointed out, a government-sponsored working group in Finland “found that Finnish support for basic income decreased quite radically once questions about the amount of basic income are paired with corresponding questions about the taxes needed to fund it”. And a 2016 Canadian poll found 67 percent of respondents in favor of a guaranteed income of C$30,000 per year, but only 34 percent said they themselves would be willing to pay more in taxes to support a government-sponsored guaranteed income.
Past American surveys have shown similar results. In the aforementioned Gallup poll, 48 percent of individuals surveyed supported “a universal basic income program as a way to help Americans who lose their jobs because of advances in artificial intelligence”. However, out of those who expressed support for the program, only a minority (46 percent) replied affirmatively to a follow-up question asking whether they would be willing to pay higher taxes to fund it. Moreover, the Economic Security Project study revealed a drop in support for a “base income” from 45 to 39 percent, and an increase in opposition from 35 to 50 percent, after respondents were informed that the program “would be paid for by tax revenues”. Notably in the latter case, the survey respondents were not told specifically that they themselves would have to pay higher taxes.
It is not uncommon to hear American basic income advocates speak of a US$1000 basic income funded in part by an increase in personal income taxes. However, there are other reasons why details are not immaterial. For one important example, note that UBI proponents also frequently cite the popularity of Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), an unconditional cash payment to all state residents, to argue that the policy could garner mainstream appeal in the US. The PFD, however, is a vastly different program from the description specified in the Data for Progress poll: Alaska’s PFD is distributed annually rather than monthly, closer to US$1000 per year than per month (its amount varies but stood at US$1100 in 2017 and US$1022 in 2016), and funded not from personal income taxes — Alaska is, in fact, one of a handful of US states with no state income tax — but from investment earnings on revenue from oil and other state-owned resources.
I will make one final note on questionnaire wording before turning to examine some results of “Polling the Left Agenda” in more detail: it is also important be mindful of what details are not explicitly noted in the survey question on UBI, such as the fact that the payment is not conditional on work or other requirements. The previously cited Economic Security Project survey found that support also declined when respondents were directly told that receipt of a UBI “is not tied to work or having a job” or that the money “could be used for anything”. Although the unconditionality of the grant is implicit in the description of “giving every American a monthly check”, individuals’ reactions and responses can vary depending one what is made salient and explicit when questioned.
Additional Survey Results
Race and Education Level
The UBI proposal received the strongest support from people of color and non-college educated Americans (or “working class” as Data for Progress labels the latter group).
As Data for Progress summarized what it referred to as the “key finding” of its study, UBI “is most popular among working class people of color, followed by college educated people of color” and “net support among working class whites” while being “rejected by college-educated whites”.
Black respondents supported the proposal by a margin of 49 percent to 19 percent (with 33 percent expressing strong support), while Hispanic respondents supported it by a much narrowed margin of 36 percent to 34 percent. In contrast, 47 percent of white respondents opposed the policy (with 35 percent strongly opposing it), while 36 percent supported it.
Across education levels, the policy proposal received net support only among those with no college education (40 percent in support to 29 percent opposed). Overall, over 40 percent of college graduates strongly opposed the policy.
Cross-tabulated data tables from Data for Progress.
These demographic trends remain consistent with the results of the 2017 National Tracking Poll conducted by Morning Consult and Politico, which queried over 1400 eligible US voters on their support or opposition to “a proposal in which the government would provide all Americans a regular, unconditional sum of money, sometimes referred to as universal basic income” (see the discussion by Patrick Hoare in a Basic Income News article on the survey).
Political Alignment
The UBI proposal also received majority support from respondents who voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, with 35 percent of Clinton voters strongly supporting the policy. (We might here note that, while Clinton herself is sometimes classified as a UBI supporter due to a jettisoned proposal described in her memoir, she opposed UBI during her campaign, and her rejected proposal was for a resource dividend inspired by Alaska’s PFD, not financed by a higher personal income taxes.)
In contrast, less than 17 percent of Trump voters in the survey supported the idea of an income-tax-funded UBI. Indeed, among those who voted for the Republican candidate, 64 percent strongly opposed the policy.
Once again, this result aligns with last year’s National Tracking Poll, which found that 56 percent of Clinton voters supported a UBI, with 28 percent opposed to the proposal. In contrast, only 32 percent of respondents who voted for Trump expressed support for the idea of UBI, while 52 percent expressed opposition. Similarly, the Gallup poll found that only 28 percent of Republican respondents supported UBI as a policy to address technological unemployment, in contrast to 65 percent of Democrats.
Some UBI supporters, being keen to depict the policy as broadly trans-partisan (“not left or right but forward”), might balk at portraying the idea as specifically “progressive” or as a potential part of “the left agenda”. If these recent surveys are a valid measure, however, there is evidence that UBI is indeed an idea that strikes a much greater resonance with America’s left.
Other Demographic Categories
The poll also suggests that an income-tax-funded UBI is more popular among women, younger Americans, and lower-income individuals, and less popular among men, older Americans, and higher-income individuals.
Women displayed a slight margin of net support for the proposal (39 percent to 37 percent), although 10 percent remained unsure, while male respondents rejected the idea 50 percent to 35 percent (with 4 percent remaining unsure).
Additionally, while the policy proposal garnered net support from young voters (in both the “under 30” and “30-44” age groups), it received net opposition from those 45 and older, and nearly half of respondents over 65 strongly opposed it.
Again, these general demographic trends tend to reflect previous survey research, such as the 2017 Gallup poll, which found greater supporter for UBI among female respondents and declining support through each of its four age categories. The National Tracking Poll also revealed stronger opposition from older age groups (especially among those over 65). In the latter survey, however, men were seen to be slightly more favorable to a general UBI proposal than were women.
Finally, the Data for Progress poll showed that lower incomes tend to be associated with a higher degree of support for UBI; while supporters outnumbered opponents among respondents with family incomes under US$40,000 per year, opponents predominated in higher income categories. This finding also remains consistent with other recent studies.
Reaction from The Nation
So, then, is basic income a viable progressive proposal? Should Democrats back the idea in the 2020 election? Journalist Clio Chang is one commentator who believes that the survey results do indeed suggest an affirmative answer, as she writes in The Nation, the popular American progressive political journal:
“[S]ome sort of cash welfare should be part of the progressive agenda, not in small part because it would help blow up the racist idea that benefits should be tied to work and finally kill Reagan’s welfare-queen myth. As the polling shows, even the most radically progressive proposals are not the political death sentences that critics would have you believe.”
by Kate McFarland | Aug 7, 2018 | News
Photo: Stormy weather in Ontario, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Jeff S. PhotoArt
Ontario’s guaranteed income pilot has been ended nearly two years early, prompting researchers and advisors who contributed the project to speak out.
On Tuesday, July 31, Ontario’s recently elected Progressive Conservative (PC) government announced the cancellation of the province’s guaranteed income experiment, reneging on a statement made during the campaign that the PC would see the three-year experiment through to its end if elected to form the new government.
The abrupt and unexpected announcement stirred the ire of politicians, anti-poverty advocates, and, not least, program participants themselves. Nonetheless, Lisa MacLeod, who presented the news at a press conference in her capacity as Minister of Children, Community and Social Services, has held her ground, dismissing claims that the PC broke a campaign promise as “fake news” since the party never included a commitment to the experiment in its campaign platform. Her words, however, have left many unappeased and continuing to fight to save the project.
Those who have spoken out again this decision of the PC government’s include several individuals involved with the implementation of the experiment, such as project advisors Hugh Segal and Kwame McKenzie, and at least one researcher who spoke to the press anonymously out of concern for confidentiality.
Former Canadian Senator Hon. Hugh Segal
The Honourable Hugh Segal, former Canadian Senator of the Conservative Party, was appointed as Special Advisor on Basic Income by Ontario’s Liberal government during the project’s initial planning stages. In this role, Segal authored the comprehensive discussion paper (“Finding a Better Way: A Basic Income Pilot Project for Ontario“) that laid the groundwork for the design and implementation of the experiment.
When MacLeod announced the pilot’s early termination, Segal responded with a scathing opinion column in The Globe and Mail, in which he foregrounds the issue of fairness to participants: “These people believed the promise that they would not end up worse off for signing up for the pilot project. They have now been let down badly.”
“[W]hen a party gives its word – as then-Official Opposition leader Patrick Brown gave me in 2016 and PC Party Leader Doug Ford echoed through his spokesperson during the 2018 election campaign – that it would let the pilot project go forward before judging the results […] , this assurance influenced those signing up.”
Segal also addresses the assertion of MacLeod and PC government that the experiment was too expensive to continue: “Looking at the cost of the pilot project is fair enough – but frankly, simplistic. We know that poverty is a perfect predictor of poor health and early hospitalization, bad educational outcomes, substance abuse and problems with the police – all of which cost Ontario billions.”
Drawing a connection to Premier Ford’s key policy goal of ending so-called “hallway health care” (hospital facilities so inadequate that patients must be treated and housed in corridors), Segal additionally speculates that a guaranteed income could lower hospitalization rates as low-income individuals begin “eating better, living more balanced lives and making progress in work, education and family.” He laments that “we will now never know” whether the policy would have had such predicted positive effects on health outcomes.
Dr. Kwame McKenzie
Dr. Kwame McKenzie, psychiatrist and CEO of the Wellesley Institute, had been named Special Advisor to the Ontario Basic Income Pilot by the previous provincial government. Like Segal, McKenzie is now concerned about the effect of the experiment’s cancellation on those currently enrolled in it. The psychiatrist tweeted on August 1, the day after the experiment was cancelled, that he “woke this morning more worried about the health impacts on participants. This is a high risk situation.”
McKenzie spoke to CBC Radio about his concerns, emphasizing that participants currently face a “difficult and stressful time” which could lead to many and severe possible physiological consequences. He noted that many of those who enrolled in the pilot have made “life-changing decisions” founded on the belief that they would have a three-year guaranteed income, and argued that they now need both adequate financial support (he recommended at least a year to wind down the project) and personal support in making new decisions.
Also like Segal, McKenzie believes that a guaranteed income could have promoted key objectives of the PC government. He stressed, for example, its potential to result in better jobs for low-income people. Asked by CBC about MacLeod’s work-focused approach to welfare, McKenzie stated that he agrees that “good jobs is a great health intervention” (while cautioning that bad jobs tend to worsen health). He went on, however, to explain that a guaranteed income might have offered a effective means to achieve this goal, bemoaning “Now I guess we’ll never know.”
Speaking anonymously to CBC, another researcher on the experiment’s academic team more directly addressed MacLeod’s allegation that the pilot project is not working: “There’s no conceivable way that they were told the project wasn’t working. We just don’t have any data to know whether it was working or not.”
The researcher acknowledged that individual recipients have gone to the media with stories that are “very positive” but underlined the fact that these reports might not be representative: “[T]he whole point of our project was to just stand back from all the stories people are telling and try to look at the data in a reasonably scientific way.”
If the experiment had continued as planned, the research group was expected to evaluate outcomes in many areas — potentially including, among others, food security, stress and anxiety, healthcare usage, housing stability, education, and employment — comparing data gathered from the 4,000 guaranteed income recipients to that collected from a control group.
Results had been expected to be reported to the public in 2020.
by Jelena Vitic | Aug 2, 2018 | News, Research
Picture credit to: iStock
The start of the longest and largest Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiment in Kenya and the approaching end of the trial in Finland spark a new discussion among experts on the effects of ‘no-strings attached’ money transfers.
An article published in Nature in May 2018 discussed the importance of randomized trials in informing researchers and policy makers alike about the feasibility of an UBI scheme. The article states that critics of the currently employed conditional welfare systems believe that the limited results do not justify large administrative costs that come with such policies. Some policy-makers see UBI as a more affordable alternative that has more potential to alleviate poverty, according to the article, but the costs and benefits of UBI schemes still have not been clearly identified. With that in mind, many decision makers prefer to employ a data-driven approach by making randomized trials, the most universally accepted method of gathering information about the effects of UBI. However, even supporters of the evidence-based approach claim that designing and conducting UBI trials comes with its own set of difficulties. They point out that it requires a large amount of planning and researchers need to look for benefits in a wide variety of areas such as health, education, nutrition and job-seeking. Furthermore, lack of standardized goals and agreed upon areas of impact pose another challenge for advocates of UBI trials.
Damon Jones, an economist at the University of Chicago believes that even clearly demonstrated benefits will not necessarily indicate that UBI would work in practice. He arguments that most resources for the trials come from private funds and only include a small portion of the population. Hence, he thinks trials do not say much about the affordability of big government programs and the willingness of people to fund them through tax increases. On the other hand, he adds that despite these inherent limitations research still should be done.
Others propose that trials have an ongoing impact on UBI discussions. Rob Reich, a political scientist at California’s Stanford University thinks trials will help researchers identify flaws in the process, refine goals and impact areas as well as provide policy makers with some answers they are looking for. Furthermore, supporters argue that over time the studies will provide more insight on the costs and benefits of guaranteed income schemes. Proponents of UBI trials recognize that despite being important, updating research is expensive.
On the other hand, Quartz interviewed experts that expressed doubt whether randomized trials are the best option for analyzing the effects of UBI in the first place. According to Karl Widerquist, many effects will play out over the years and will not be revealed during the experiment, regardless of its size and cost. Nonetheless, he notes there is very little downside to trying it out. Others believe that the benefits have already been proven by initiatives such as Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend and there is no need for more research. Matthew Zwolinski adds that UBI has to be “robust enough to survive the political process”, meaning that he sees gradual changes having a higher likelihood of being implemented, compared to radical policies.
Although opinions differ, supporters hope that big trials like the one in Kenya will open the door for future research and help the discussion move forward.
More information at:
Carrie Arnold, “Nature: Money for nothing: the truth about universal basic income”, Nature, News Feature, May 30th 2018
Kate McFarland, “Overview of current basic income related experiments (October 2017)”, Basic Income News, October 19th 2017
Kate McFarland, “US/KENYA: GiveDirectly Officially Launches UBI experiment”, Basic Income News, November 17th 2017
Olivia Goldhill, “We’re giving up on universal basic income before the evidence is in”, Quartz, May 29th 2018
by Karl Widerquist | Aug 1, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This essay was originally published on Basic Income News in August 2014.
The right-libertarian journal, Cato Unbound, has published a 4-party debate on Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) this month. Matt Zwolinski started it off with a second-best or pragmatic argument for BIG. He doesn’t say outright that BIG is better than many right-libertarians most favored policy of eliminating of all redistribution of property, but he argues that BIG is far superior to the complex and inefficient system that characterizes the current welfare system.
Manzi’s response stems from standard for the property-rights-with-no-exceptions version of libertarianism. In a nutshell, BIG would probably reduce how much propertyless people work for people with property; therefore, necessarily, it is bad. He dismisses Zwolinki’s argument that work disincentives can be a good thing by labeling it “subjective” and “value-laden,” without noting that a subjective and value-laden argument can only be countered by another subjective and value-laden argument, which he does not offer. He just assumes any and all work disincentives are bad. So, he doesn’t actually lay a glove on Zwolinski’s argument.
The closest he comes to explain the values that led him to the belief that all work disincentives are bad is to say that BIG has always been unpopular in the United States. Yet, to say something is unpopular is not say whether it is a good or bad thing. It doesn’t say whether we should try to change people’s minds about it. At any time in American history up until five or maybe ten years ago, he could have made the same argument against same-sex marriage. Now it’s popular; thanks to people worked hard to change other people’s minds. Is BIG or anything else worthy of a similar effort? Manzi implies that nothing that is currently unpopular is ever worth the effort to change people’s minds.
Manzi mentions my article, “A Failure to Communicate: What (If Anything) Can we Learn From the Negative Income Tax Experiments,” but doesn’t actually engage with its arguments about work disincentives. One argument is that any decline in work effort would—by standard theory—cause an increase in wages partly counteracting the decline in work effort and further increasing the incomes of the working poor—presumably the people a BIG is supposed to help.
Another argument in that article is that the “decline” in work effort was only relative—the experimental group vs. control group. But the experiments also found whether people were in the experimental or control group was not the primary causal factor determining whether they worked or not. The macroeconomic health of the economy was more important in determining how much a person worked than whether or not they received a BIG. Therefore, the experiments indicated that if you have a strong macroeconomy, you can have both BIG andhigh employment. People who received a negative income tax took more time to find the right job, but in all the experiments, if good jobs were available, people took them. If you want propertyless people to work for the owners of property whether or not jobs pay decent wages or provide good working conditions, then the absence of BIG or anything like it is what you should favor. If you want all jobs to be good jobs, BIG is the policy to favor.
Cato Unbound
Another of the main arguments in my article was that, without foundation, many people responded to the evidence of a relative decline in work effort by making a subjective and value-laden assumption that all reductions in work effort are necessarily a bad thing. Manzi makes that very assumption and does not explain—much less defend—the subjecctive foundations underlying his assumption.
It’s what he leaves out, what he doesn’t call attention to, that is the real problem in Manzi’s article. Typical of some brands of right-libertarianism, it’s from a tradition of newspeak. He’s for slavery and he calls it freedom. It’s perhaps unfair to hang all of the rest of what I have to say on Manzi, but it is a common position running throughout a great deal of right-libertarian literature from Nozick and Rothbard and many, many others. Manzi’s essay, by the absence of its foundations, is a good example of how successfully this argument has become taken for granted—not just among right-libertarians but in mainstream political dialogue.
In the rights-based libertarian tradition, a situation in which one group of people has no other option but to work for another group of people is called “freedom” as long as that other group of people are called “property owners” and the working class is propertyless. I call it slavery, but to right-libertarians the opposite is slavery. Any redistribution to relieve people from forced work is supposedly reduces freedom; it’s even “on par with forced labor,” in Nozick’s words. If property owners give jobs or charity to the propertyless, that’s “voluntary” and consistent with freedom, but if the government taxes and redistributes property that’s “force,” “coercion,” and “interference” which supposedly violates negative freedom.
How did these propertyless people get into the position in which they have to work for the propertied? Over a long history, property owners use the force of the legal system to force, coerce, or interfere with other people, establishing “property rights” without the consent of or compensation for the people they thereby force into a state of propertyless. Before property rights, all were free from interference to use the resources of the Earth as they wished; under the type of property rights we have today and under the ideals envisioned by right-libertarians, “property owners” are free to interfere with any use the propertyless might make of the Earth’s resources. When everything is owned by someone else, the propertyless lose so much liberty that they’re unfree to work for themselves. They’re effectively born in debt, owning their labor to the to at least one member of the group that owns property. They face interference with anything in the world they might do for themselves unless and until they accept a subordinate position to a property owner? Doesn’t that make them unfree in the most negative sense of the term?
Right-libertarians usually get around this question by definitional fiat. The interference the rich do to the poor, when they say “We own the Earth and you don’t,” simply doesn’t count. It’s not interference because it doesn’t violate your rights. You have no right to the land; therefore, you have no right to be free from laboring for the people who do, and so we don’t even call it a loss freedom when use the force of the legal system to maintain that situation. The poor are always born in debt, every generation owing their labor to the propertied group, but that doesn’t make them “unfree” because they have no right to be free from being born into debt. I hope this makes my allegation of right-libertarian “newspeak” clear.
Of course, right-libertarians tell us that they defend property rights because they believe in freedom. Now we see that they’re simply defining freedom as the defense of the property rights system they want to see. This is why I think it is fair to use to term tautological libertarianism to describe versions of it that simply define freedom as the freedom do what you have the right to do. They argue we must have libertarian property rights so we can be free, but libertarian freedom turns out to be defined as nothing but the exercise of property rights so defined. Or they argue that we must define property rights this way so that people can be free. And around and around the logical circle we go. Not all libertarians (or even all right-libertarians) take the tautological shortcut, but far too many of them do. A circular argument can appear very powerful if you don’t reveal the whole circle at once. One paper argues this: we must have the definition of property rights because freedom is important. Another paper argues this: we must have this definition of freedom because property rights are important. If you show only one argument at a time, it appears powerful. You put both arguments together, and you have no argument at all. The less of the logic you see, the more powerful the argument appears to be.
You would need a powerful argument to explain why interfering with the propertyless in such a way as to put them effectively in debt to the upper class simply doesn’t count as a violation of freedom. And such an argument could only be subjective and value laden. But if the treatment of property ownership as synonymous with freedom is pervasive enough, you never have to make that argument. You can take it for granted.
Manzi expects his readers to take that kind of argument—or some other subjective and value laden argument—for granted when he assumes that any reduction in the number of hours the propertyless are forced to work for the propertied group is necessarily a bad thing. That’s slavery caused by the application of force, interfering with negative freedom of individuals to do things for themselves. He can call it freedom if he wants, but it’s still slavery.
-Karl Widerquist, Virginia Beach, VA (revised Roanoke, VA), August, 2014
by Hannah Trippier | Jul 31, 2018 | News, Research
The Welfare Conditionality (WelCond) project recently released a report on how people receiving benefits in the UK experience welfare conditionality within a social security system. Welfare conditionality is where a person’s eligibility for benefits is dependent on meeting certain requirements, for example attending regular interviews, which will be taken away if a person does not meet the latter.
The study used longitudinal qualitative methodology to investigate the experience of people receiving welfare in the UK and the changes in their behaviour over time. Over five years, from 2013-2018, the study conducted 1082 qualitative longitudinal interviews with 481 people receiving welfare (including jobseekers, single parents, migrants, homeless people, and offenders who have left the judicial system), 52 semi-structured interviews with policy stakeholders and 27 focus groups with frontline welfare practitioners.
Longitudinal qualitative methodology enables researchers to gain an insight into people’s experience of and perspectives on welfare conditionality over a period of time. However, qualitative research does not enable the assessment of the effectiveness of welfare conditionality intervention on relevant outcomes (such as the motivation to work). Accordingly, the results of the study cannot be taken to show the effectiveness of welfare conditionality as an intervention but can be used to gain a greater understanding of the potential benefits and harms of this practice.
The results of the study indicated that benefit sanctions do little to enhance people’s motivation to prepare for, seek, or enter paid work. On the contrary, in some cases the imposition of benefits sanctions led to feelings of reduced motivation and disengagement with the social security system. Welfare conditionality was viewed to be largely ineffective in facilitating people’s entry into paid labour market or in sustaining employment. Participants often reported a lack of change or sustained change in employment status, where they shifted between short-term, insecure, and low paid jobs, and periods of receiving benefits.
Additionally, welfare conditionality and benefit sanctions were reported to be connected to adverse outcomes such as poverty, increased reliance on charitable providers and informal support networks, increased debt and loss of tenancy, etc. People dealing with high debts may have to go for a rental property after losing their home and take the assistance of a letting agents to find a property at a reasonable rate. Welfare conditionality can also be associated with negative health outcomes, including fear, anxiety, psychological distress, and exacerbating existing health conditions, particularly in people with mental health issues.
The study also indicated that the current support provided often did not help people looking for work and that the provision of personalised, holistic support could be more effective in helping people to gain and retain employment. This was noted as a potential facilitator to increase motivation to prepare for, seek and enter work, and to enable people to overcome personal and structural barriers to work.
The authors of the study concluded that the perceived benefits of welfare conditionality to increase motivation to work did not outweigh the potential drawbacks and recommended a trial of conditionality-free benefits for those looking for work and the removal of benefit sanctions for people receiving incapacity benefit for existing health conditions. As an alternative to welfare conditionality, the authors recommended that personalised, holistic employment support should be given to help people enter the job market.
More information at:
Welfare Conditionality, “Final findings report – Welfare Conditionality Report 2013-2018“, Welfare Conditionality, June 2018
