Abstract
Drawing on the neo-republican theory of non-domination and a qualitative case study conducted in three Dutch municipalities, this article explores the extent to which external rules are able to prevent arbitrary power in relationships between welfare officers and work supervisors, on the one hand, and welfare recipients participating in mandatory work programmes, on the other hand. It concludes that external rules were insufficiently implemented in the three municipalities in question. In addition, it found that rules cease to be capable of constraining arbitrary power where institutional contexts themselves are unpredictable and insecure. Under these conditions, welfare recipients may seek to avoid risks and act in accordance with the preferences (or their expectation of the preferences) of the welfare officer or work supervisor by playing the role of the ‘good recipient’ instead of relying on available rules of a protective nature or rules that enable them to have a say in their participation in mandatory work programmes.
Highlights
Many jurisdictions subject the right to social assistance or welfare benefits to rules that specify the behaviour desired of recipients
Welfare officers usually have some discretionary freedom to decide whether a recipient is complying with sanction-backed obligations, discretionary spaces tend to expand and cease to be effectively subjected to supervisory jurisdiction (Watts and Fitzpatrick, 2018: 28, referring to Donnison, 1977), where recipients are subjected to conduct conditionality
Based on the neo-republican theory of non-domination developed by Philip Pettit and Frank Lovett (Pettit, 1997, 2012; Lovett, 2010), this article investigates the extent to which effective external rules are able to prevent arbitrary power in the welfare to work (WTW) relationship between, on the one hand, welfare recipients who are obliged to participate
Summary
Many jurisdictions subject the right to social assistance or welfare benefits to rules that specify the behaviour desired of recipients. Based on the neo-republican theory of non-domination developed by Philip Pettit and Frank Lovett (Pettit, 1997, 2012; Lovett, 2010), this article investigates the extent to which effective external rules are able to prevent arbitrary power in the welfare to work (WTW) relationship between, on the one hand, welfare recipients who are obliged to participate. This article builds on Lovett’s analysis of how rules operate in unequal and dependent relationships such as WTW relationships His argument for implementing effective external rules is not restricted to the neo-republican theory of non-domination, given that a growing body of social policy literature is arguing in favour of implementing a system of constraining rules in the context of WTW relationships (Van Berkel, 2011; Ervik et al, 2015b; Eriksen, 2019). The final section discusses the results of the research against the neo-republican theory of non-domination
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