Abstract
Many important societal debates revolve around questions of deservingness, especially when it comes to debates related to inequality and social protection. It is therefore unsurprising that a growing body of research spanning the social and political sciences is concerned with the determinants of deservingness perceptions. In this contribution, we engage with the currently central theoretical framework used in deservingness research and point out an important weakness: Partly ambiguous definitions of the framework’s central concepts, the criteria for perceived deservingness. We also highlight the negative consequences this has for empirical research, including notably varying and overlapping operationalizations and thereby a lacking comparability of results across studies. Our main contribution is a redefinition of the criteria for perceived deservingness and a demonstration of the empirical implications of using this new set of criteria via original vignette survey experiments conducted in Germany and the United States in 2019. Our results provide a clearer image of which criteria drive deservingness perceptions.
Highlights
The last decades have seen a significant reshaping of welfare state institutions in economi‐ cally advanced democracies, and it has long been recognized that citizens’ attitudes have a strong influence on whether welfare state reforms are introduced and which shapes they take (e.g., Brooks & Manza, 2006)
We have addressed a key problem in current research on deservingness perceptions, namely ambiguously defined criteria for perceived deservingness
We have provided a clearer picture of which deservingness criteria really matter and which do not
Summary
The last decades have seen a significant reshaping of welfare state institutions in economi‐ cally advanced democracies, and it has long been recognized that citizens’ attitudes have a strong influence on whether welfare state reforms are introduced and which shapes they take (e.g., Brooks & Manza, 2006). In a highly influential article, van Oorschot (2000) developed a framework to explain the variation in the perceived deservingness of different claimant groups His framework predicts that persons or groups should be seen as more deserving the more they fulfil the following five criteria: (1) they experience hardship due to fac‐ tors outside of their control; (2) they display a grateful and docile attitude; (3) they have contributed to others in the past or are currently trying to do so; (4) they are similar in their social identity; and (5) they are really in need of help. More recent research has provided insights into the deeper psychologi‐ cal mechanisms behind deservingness perceptions, and suggests that these perceptions are driven by a cognitive “cheater-detection” mechanism that likely originated in early human hunter-gatherer societies (Aarøe & Petersen, 2014; Petersen, 2012, 2015; Petersen et al, 2012; see Bowles & Gintis, 2000; Cosmides et al, 2010)
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