Welfare Claimants Research Articles

The static welfare claimant vs. the dynamic migrant

Abstract The study analyses YouTube comments attached to an episode of Benefits Street (a British factual welfare television programme) which enregister two figures of personhood: “The static, unmotivated British benefits claimant” and “the dynamic, driven migrant”. Using Park’s (2021) critical heuristic of time, space and affect, the study finds that the welfare claimant figure is constructed as a social failure, and the migrant as both a yardstick (to measure the failure) and a rattan stick (to punish it). The key factor is mobility: The migrant experiences social mobility via mental mobility (i.e., motivation) and spatial mobility (i.e., travelling for opportunities). The welfare claimant’s lack of mental and spatial mobility prevents their social mobility. Ultimately, the paper argues that contrasting the figures represents an attack on rootedness and a celebration of neoliberal mobility based in ideals of meritocracy and the erasure of social class as a relevant construct.

Re-evaluating the welfare preferences of radical-right voters: evidence from a vignette experiment

Research on the welfare stances of populist radical-right parties (PRRPs) cate­gorises them as ‘welfare chauvinists’ and ‘producerists’, supporting generous benefits exclusively for ‘hard-working’ nationals. However, it remains unclear whether their voters’ welfare preferences align with these positions. The argument advanced in this paper is that a comprehensive understanding of PRRP voters’ welfare preferences requires the examination of how solidarity and perceptions of welfare claimant deservingness interact. Thus, this article employs a factorial vignette survey experiment to evaluate the interplay between solidarity and deservingness perceptions among PRRP voters. Contrary to previous research, results show that PRRP voters do not exhibit stronger producerist attitudes; instead, they mostly stand out as particularly nativists. While PRRP voters exhibit significantly less solidarity towards welfare claimants deemed ‘least’ and ‘average-deserving’ than other partisans, they are not more solidaristic towards the ‘most deserving’ claimant. These findings challenge existing understanding of deservingness perceptions of PRRP voters, providing a new perspective on the study of their welfare attitudes.

Responsibility for impairment shapes the perceived deservingness of welfare claimants with disabilities

AbstractWhen do people support government assistance for people with disabilities? Disability welfare programs account for large shares of national welfare budgets, but little is known about public attitudes toward disabled welfare claimants. Drawing on psychological research in stereotype content, we argue that attitudes toward welfare for people with disabilities are likely to be more conditional than previously acknowledged. In two nationally representative, preregistered survey experiments in Wales (N = 3393) and Scotland (1707), we ask respondents to evaluate the deservingness of a fictitious disabled claimant to government assistance. We manipulate the claimant's outgroup status and the manner in which they acquired their impairment. We find that disabled claimants perceived as even somewhat responsible for their impairments are considered substantially less deserving of government assistance than those perceived not responsible, even when their needs for assistance are identical. Contrary to expectations, we find relatively modest and inconsistent outgroup penalties in perceived deservingness. Finally, we find large heterogeneous treatment effects among respondents holding to more authoritarian social values. These results challenge conventional wisdom regarding the universality of support for disability welfare and help explain why voters may not be inclined to punish politicians who propose cuts to programs for even stereotypically high‐deserving groups.

Racism and the uneven geography of welfare sanctioning in England

AbstractThis paper presents the first spatial analysis of racial disparities in the UK welfare sanction regime. As part of their austerity programme, the UK government tightened the conditionality of welfare programmes and intensified the use of financial penalties against welfare claimants who failed to demonstrate compliance with these conditions. Analysing Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) data from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Office for National Statistics between 2012 and 2019 we draw attention to the spatially uneven and highly racialised geography of welfare sanctions in England. Claimants from racially minoritised backgrounds are consistently more likely to be referred for a sanction by Jobcentre caseworkers and receive an adverse decision at the hands of institutional decision‐makers. Within this, however, there are important scalar and spatial differences that warrant critical attention. In rural England, the risk of being sanctioned is substantially higher for all groups, but especially for Mixed heritage and Black/Black British claimants who in some areas are over twice as likely to be sanctioned as their White counterparts. Since ethnicity data have not been published for Universal Credit sanction decisions, the presented evidence offers critical insight into the potential persistence of racial injustice in applying welfare sanctions. We identify ‘hotspots’ of racism in the sanction regime, most of which are in rural areas, before offering three interpretative frameworks through which spatial and racial disparities might be explained. Any suggestion that such disparities simply derive from the behaviour of DWP staff fails to adequately account for deeply entrenched histories of welfare racism, rural racism and the role of welfare sanctioning in dynamics of racial capitalism: that is, disciplining and impoverishing racialised populations in ways that generate conditions for capital accumulation. By contributing new empirical and theoretical insights to the often neglected study of rural austerity and welfare, the paper calls for scholarship to investigate the variegations of welfare, austerity and racial capitalism in diverse rural contexts.

“That's where the hunt for the correction begins”: Experiences of administrative errors as sites of administrative burden

AbstractTo err is human, and as such, administrative errors are an inevitable component of current and future welfare state bureaucracy. Hitherto, while studies on administrative burden have shown us that routine interactions with welfare bureaucracy are often burdensome, very little is known about the nature of these interactions when something goes wrong. Most social policy and public administration scholarship focus on ex‐ante analysis of administrative errors, with only scant research devoted to ex‐post analysis of how claimants experience such errors once they occur, and the types of costs they may incur. This article contributes to the growing field of administrative burden research by examining welfare claimants' experiences of administrative errors. Analysis of 19 interviews with Israeli benefit recipients uncovered two themes. The first related to the process of correcting errors, including identifying and communicating them to the system. The second theme addressed the consequences of errors: on the one hand, economic and emotional costs including loss of trust in the system, and on the other, acquiring bureaucratic skills. These findings highlight bureaucratic errors as a critical and unique site of learning burden, as well as the need for a human contact to allow claimants to better deal with their consequences.

Prioritizing exceptional social needs. Experimental evidence on the role of discrimination and client deservingness in public employees’ and citizens’ discretionary behavior

This study examines how public employees and citizens exercise administrative discretion in a dilemma. To identify and compare the moral reasoning underlying discretionary choices, we conducted a conjoint experiment among public employees, future civil servants, and lay citizens in Germany. In the conjoint, respondents were forced to prioritize between two equally eligible welfare claimants. Claimants’ profiles vary concerning attributes reflecting earned-deservingness (e.g., non-self-inflicted welfare dependency), need-deservingness (e.g., dependent children), and attributes that can be used for unlawful discrimination (e.g., nationality). While some signs of discrimination exist, need-deservingness is the most important factor shaping respondents’ prioritization choices. More importantly, we find no substantial differences in prioritization choices among public employees and citizens, indicating congruence in moral reasoning. From these findings, we conclude that efforts to reflect on national prejudices in the education of civil servants should be intensified, and a renewed emphasis on administrative ethics is required to equip public employees with the ability to make impartial yet balanced judgments in administrative dilemmas.

A thematic analysis of homelessness practitioners’ perception of the impacts of welfare reforms in the UK: “Hard to maintain my own mental equilibrium”

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the lived experiences of key stakeholders working with homeless people during the implementation of universal credit during the austerity years.Design/methodology/approachThe literature on austerity reveals welfare reforms’ impact on support services staff. Service providers’ perceptions of the impact of austerity-led policies and welfare reform via nine interviews with people working in homelessness organisations in Brighton and Hove in the UK. Service providers see the situation for their service users has gotten worse and that the policies make it more difficult to extricate themselves from their current situation. Three central themes relating to the impact of austerity-led welfare reforms were, namely, Universal Credit: the imposition of a precarious livelihood on welfare claimants; a double-edged sword: “If people are sanctioned: people can’t pay”; and “Hard to maintain my own mental equilibrium”.FindingsMore precisely, this paper captures service providers’ perceptions and experiences of the impact of austerity-led policies on their services and how they believe this, in turn, impacts their clients and their own lives.Research limitations/implicationsThe dimension cuts across service provision to vulnerable people and is intertwined with health and well-being outcomes. Austerity is detrimental to the health of service users and their clients. It is known that when it comes to the health and well-being of the most vulnerable, who have suffered most from the impacts of austerity policies. However, in times of open austerity, it falls also on those trying to ease their suffering.Originality/valueThe data suggest that policies were developed and accentuated by austerity, which led to the stripping of welfare support from vulnerable people. This process has impacted the people who rely on welfare and service providers.

Treating claimants like criminals: universal credit sanctions as punishments

ABSTRACT The UK’s social security system has attracted much criticism for the severity, ineffectiveness and invasiveness of its sanctioning regime. Political theorists, news outlets, and welfare claimants repeatedly describe sanctions as punitive, yet most use the term ‘punishment’ in a colloquial manner, rather than treating it as a theoretically-contested concept. Instead, this article subjects the empirical realities of welfare sanctions to four theoretical models of punishment: the classic Flew-Benn-Hart model, a Foucauldian model focussed on the disciplinary potential of punishment, a Durkheimian model concerning social sentiments, and Feinberg’s censure-based model. This article ultimately concludes that there is sufficient overlap in order to consider welfare sanctions a form of punishment. For this reason, proponents of welfare sanctions must be able to justify sanctions not just as a mechanism of social security law, but also as punishments.

‘I’ve always felt these spaces were ours’: disability activism and austerity capitalism

This paper reflects on City’s interview with the UK activist group, Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), examining their practices of resistance within the broader structural frame of austerity capitalism. This enables an exploration of how capitalism has constructed disability as an exclusionary category over time to support the accumulation of wealth, from urban industrialisation to austerity capitalism. The paper also engages with Gargi Bhattacharyya’s argument that austerity is deployed through a post-colonial logic of racialisation, exploring how this notion may be applied to disabled welfare claimants. It also explores her argument that austerity marks a shift towards a post-consent politics but argues that both coercion and consent are key dimensions of state governance that seek to produce public acquiescence to punitive policies that threaten disabled people’s livelihoods and lives. Indeed, the multiple struggles against austerity, including those by DPAC, clearly indicate the failure of moves towards a post-consent politics. The paper demonstrates how the city, therefore, is not only a key site for exclusion but also a central site for resistance. DPAC’s resistances disrupt and contest austerity’s processes and model an alternative prefigurative politics based on collaborative care and the use value of social reproduction. This opens up possibilities for post-capitalist futures and a right to the city based on collective rights and power. DPAC positions itself as both an identity and a class campaign, integrating reformist strategies into a longer-term anti-capitalist agenda and reaching outwards to other urban struggles that are similarly resisting the harms inflicted on bodies and minds by global capitalism. Therefore, building on the work of Mary Jean Hande, this paper argues that disabled people are not simply worthy of inclusion when theorising and constructing anti-capitalist and urban resistance, but are integral to and at the forefront of such struggles.

Do Generous Earnings Exemptions Stimulate Welfare Claimants to Find a Job? Evidence From a Field Experiment in the Netherlands

Do Generous Earnings Exemptions Stimulate Welfare Claimants to Find a Job? Evidence From a Field Experiment in the Netherlands

A hybrid job center. Composite client experiences with employment services between enforcement and care

ABSTRACT The present study introduces the concept of forms of hybridity as a tool to analyse welfare claimants’ composite experiences with public employment services. In such experiences, the job centre is depicted both as an enforcing and a caring institution. The present study demonstrates the usefulness of this conceptual tool by analysing qualitative interviews with Danish social assistance recipients. It shows how the employment system assumes several hybrid forms from the perspective of welfare claimants. The first, the actor − based hybrid form consists of numerous actors where care and enforcement stem from those who participate in the processing of cases. Second, the system/actor-based hybrid form, makes a distinction between an enforcing system and its more caring employees. In the third, a phase-based hybrid form, the participants differentiate between temporal phases of enforcement and phases of care. Our explication of hybrid forms complements the literature by providing a novel means to understand the lived experience of welfare recipients and adds nuance to discussions of social work in activation settings as either enforcing or caring.

Observing weight stigma in the editing of UK factual welfare programming

ABSTRACT Media representations of fat and weight play a central role in the circulation of weight stigma. However, the production practices involved have received little attention. This paper focuses on the editing techniques deployed in a UK reality television documentary series, On Benefits. Our analysis of cutaway shots suggests a quantitative and qualitative difference between an episode featuring “obese” people claiming welfare, compared to the rest in our sample. We examine the cutaways to show how weight stigma intersects with welfare stigma on the grounds of self-control. We conclude that images of bodies, food, and medical aides mobilize weight stigma to overdetermine welfare claimants as underserving while casting suspicion about the purpose of state welfare in the UK.

The Politics of Anger: Putin and the psychology of rage

The Politics of AngerPutin and the psychology of rage Josh Cohen (bio) it's just gone 7 a.m. in my consulting room. I'm staring into the thin powder blue of the early March sky as the day's first patient readies himself on the couch. I look over, notice the taut knotting of his brow, the tight squeeze of his lowered eyelids, and feel the air between us thicken. Gerard* is beset by physical and emotional afflictions that stick to each other like a codependent couple. Crippling headaches and [End Page 57] insomnia merge into his fear of being consigned to permanent, irremediable loneliness. He then frequently discharges this double malaise in breathless monologues, fraught with panic and rage. Gerard begins by telling me it's just not working with Amanda, the woman he's been seeing for the last couple of months. He's tried to tell her what it's like, carrying these pounding headaches through the working day, practically hallucinating after another sleepless night, but she doesn't really get it. Barely two months and she's already fed up, and who can blame her? He goes on to rail against the dating apps he's forced to use, and their steady drip-feed of misinformation—out-of-date pictures, misleading self-descriptions, sometimes outright lies. Whom does any of it benefit beyond the platforms themselves, venal parasites on human vulnerability? I can feel his breath quicken, his blood heating as he inveighs against people's preference to present themselves as generic fictions online rather than as fleshly human beings in the real world. And then he moves on to me, sitting there smugly, no doubt possessed of a lovely wife and adorable children, feeling sorry for him. Well, he doesn't need my pity, he won't be patronized. Speaking of which, did I see Boris Johnson's puffed-up speech in Parliament yesterday? How do the people of this country tolerate that hideous tone of entitled condescension? He wants to grab a big tuft of BoJo's mussy blond hair and bang his fucking forehead on the desk till his skull cracks. A nice textbook interpretation of Gerard's behavior ought to be brewing at the back of my mind, perhaps built on the observation that he pivots to Johnson as a way of redirecting the violence he'd like to inflict on me. But his rage sends me instead to images of Vladimir Putin, tank battalions advancing, and frightened mothers pushing strollers across the rubble of their flattened homes. It's as if Gerard's rant concentrates something of the inexorable momentum of rage that suffuses politics today—the rage to make war on neighboring countries, on migrants, social-media adversaries, health advisors, welfare claimants—the diffuse and boundless [End Page 58] rage that feeds, and feeds off, itself. It is there in the targets of Gerard's ire: women's autonomy, the reign of misinformation, the nerve-shredding speed of a 24/7 culture, the soul-crushing impersonality and rootlessness of the virtual world, the casual corruptions of the political class—all motifs Russia has enlisted in the effort to open and infect the wounds of Western civil society and corrode its already worn democratic norms. I reproach myself silently. "What has this got to do with anything? Don't wander off. Stay with him." But the images of global conflict defiantly refuse to disperse, as though insisting on their own relevance. And Gerard's anger makes me want to scream, to scream at him or with him, to discharge some tiny portion of the massive agitation he sends through my clogged mind and enervated body, saturated as they are with the violence in the room and in the world beyond. And if this scream could speak, it might say, What the hell is going on? ________ to answer that question, it might be useful to think of Gerard's unexceptional middle-aged discontents and the unbound aggression of Putin and the Russian military as two instances, albeit of radically different orders of magnitude, of the operation of what psychoanalysis calls the drive. There is some resistance in contemporary psychoanalysis...

Social class bias in welfare sanctioning judgements: Experimental evidence from a nationally representative sample

AbstractIn this study, we examine whether welfare deservingness judgements in the United Kingdom are affected by a bias against claimants from stigmatised social class backgrounds. In the United Kingdom, as in other countries, stereotypes of a perceived social ‘underclass’ are widespread. Political and media discourse frequently portrays members of this ‘underclass’ as lazy, feckless and not genuinely in need of support. Yet despite strong academic interest in perceived welfare deservingness, existing research has largely neglected the role of social class bias in deservingness judgements. To address this gap, we use a novel vignette experiment administered to a representative sample of British respondents to provide the first direct evidence of discrimination against welfare claimants with ‘underclass’ signifiers. We find that the British public are more likely to endorse a sanction against a claimant from an ‘underclass’ background than against an otherwise identical claimant from a less stigmatised class background. We also asked respondents to justify their decisions and, applying computational methods to analyse these free‐text responses, we find that ‘underclass’ claimants are more likely to be blamed for violating the conditions of their benefit, while claimants from other class backgrounds are more often given the ‘benefit of the doubt.’ Our findings have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between social class background and public deservingness perceptions, and potentially for the differential treatment of claimants by the benefits system.

Passing Stigma: Negotiations of Welfare Categories as Street Level Governmentality

Stigma is not the automatic outcome of power differentials, but a distinctive moral inscription generated through cultural evaluations and governmental processes. Research on welfare recipients records how the unemployed displace stigma onto other welfare recipients, positioning other(ed) claimants as the ‘real unemployed’ or ‘scroungers’. Theoretically we adapt Butler’s analysis of the psychic processes whereby subjects are formed by disavowal of discourses which abjectify them. Arguably, this is functional for the governmentalising processes of generating jobseeking, with a latent function of reinforcing activation policies. Drawing on qualitative interviews, we trace how Irish individuals negotiate the stigma attributed to or foisted upon Welfare claimants, in welfare offices and informal social interactions and in job interviews – how they attempt to ‘pass’ as good JobSeekers and pass stigma on to others. Curiously, many welfare claimants suggest governmental interventions for distinguishing and discriminating between the deserving and undeserving adopting the stigmatising perspective.

When do municipalities smooth access for new social assistance claimants? Local determinants of municipal welfare agency’s implementation practices in Belgium

AbstractIn many Western countries local welfare agencies retain large responsibilities in the practical organisation of means-tested support. While this may lead to substantial differences in the application trajectories of prospective claimants, what has garnered little empirical research is how local agencies use their discretion to implement practices that may encourage or discourage take-up. In addition, we know little on the extent to which variation in local implementation is attributable to differences in local conditions. Focusing on Belgium as an interesting case, this article addresses this gap by mapping the variation in local implementation practices in specific aspects of social assistance that are relevant in terms of limiting non-take-up. We assess whether certain local political, socio-demographic or economic characteristics favour implementation practices, using structural equation modelling on custom-collected data on the practical organisation of social assistance application trajectories in 119 Belgian municipalities. The results show that local welfare agencies implement coherent practices regarding information provision, accessibility, trust and the locus of initiative in the claiming process. We find the political orientation of the municipality and the share of foreigners in the municipality to be related with, respectively, shifting the locus of initiative away from the welfare claimant and a focus on information provision.

‘It Isn't Charity because We've Paid into it’: Social Citizenship and the Moral Economy of Welfare Recipients in the Wake of 2012 UK Welfare Reform Act

Drawing on interviews with welfare claimants living in Essex, UK, this article examines the material and symbolic effects of the UK government’s 2012 Welfare Reform Act, and it highlights the participants’ interpretations of and responses to that. In reaction to their sense of material and symbolic exclusion, participants made moral claims for their inclusion through a notion of social citizenship based on collective reciprocity and care. They claimed to have paid-in to the national purse in various material and moral ways until circumstances outside of their control meant they could no longer do so. They thus asserted a moral-economic right to social inclusion and an ensuing right to receive adequate, non-stigmatised, and non-punitive welfare. These moral-economic claims differ from other, more public, counter-narratives to welfare reform and government austerity, and they assert a clear but subtle opposition to the market-bound logic of the reform.

The Cutaway to the Toilet: Towards a Visual Grammar of Spatial Stigma in Factual Welfare Television

Editing techniques used in Factual Welfare Television (FWT) in the UK undermine narratives of hardship and structural inequality in representations of the living places of welfare claimants. This research identifies the affects of a televisual syntax – or ‘visual grammar’ – of spatial stigma in FWT. Using original data generated in a study of Channel 5’s documentary series On Benefits (2015–2019), we conduct a visual grammar analysis to argue that cutaway editing, which inserts camera shots of toilets, canine excrement, and fly-tipping into programmes, undermines potentially sympathetic representations of poverty communicated via narrator voiceovers, and/or verbal testimonies of participants. Our findings show that cutaway editing is a significant feature in the production of On Benefits and is oppositional to the articulated narrative. The research concludes that cutaway editing in FWT generates disgust towards the living places of benefits claimants, which is productive of a powerful visual grammar of spatial stigma.

Welfare Chauvinism in the Face of Ethnic Diversity: A Vignette Experiment across Diverse and Homogenous Neighbourhoods on the Perceived Deservingness of Native and Foreign-Born Welfare Claimants

Abstract The tenuous relationship between ethnic diversity and welfare solidarity has become a central focus in sociological and political inquiry. Yet, the question whether ethnic composition of the residential environment affects welfare chauvinism (favouring an encompassing welfare state that is preserved for ingroup members) has remained fundamentally unanswered. This article integrates extensive experimental data on welfare solidarity with hypothetical, unemployed persons from domestic and foreign origin among 23,015 native participants (to isolate welfare chauvinism), and detailed registry data (on the residential neighbourhood of these participants) from the Netherlands. This combination of contextual and experimental data allows us to test rivalling theoretical arguments on the relationship between ethnic diversity and welfare chauvinism, namely conflict, contact, and constrict theory. The outcomes of this enriched vignette survey experiment show that ethnic diversity has a specific and sizeable effect on welfare chauvinism under a range of model specifications. Diverse neighbourhoods drive down natives’ support for welfare distribution with migrants but not with natives. Ethnic diversity thereby stimulates the deservingness gap between natives and migrants, i.e., welfare chauvinism. We discuss the implications of these findings for conflict, contact, and constrict theory.

Why Do Policymakers Support Administrative Burdens? The Roles of Deservingness, Political Ideology, and Personal Experience

AbstractAdministrative burdens affect peoples’ experience of public administration but there is, to date, limited evidence to as why policymakers are willing to accept and impose burdens. To address this gap, we draw from the policy design and administrative burden literatures to develop the concept of burden tolerance—the willingness of policymakers and people more generally to passively allow or actively impose state actions that result in others experiencing administrative burdens. Drawing on a survey experiment and observational data with Danish local politicians in a social welfare setting, we find that more right-wing politicians are more tolerant of burdens, but politicians are less willing to impose burdens on a welfare claimant perceived as being more deserving. Politicians with a personal experience of receiving welfare benefits themselves are less tolerant of burdens, while information about the psychological costs experienced by claimants did not reduce burden tolerance.