IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/injsow/v28y2019i4p442-453.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Deservingness in the eye of the beholder: A vignette study on the moderating role of cultural profiles in supporting activation policies

Author

Listed:
  • Erwin Gielens
  • Femke Roosma
  • Peter Achterberg

Abstract

People support welfare policy if its beneficiaries are perceived as deserving of support. This study found that individuals’ cultural worldviews play a role in assessing the deservingness of welfare recipients. We investigated whether four different cultural profiles find some beneficiaries to be more deserving than others and how this relates to support for social rights (welfare benefit, retraining, job coach) and obligations (mandatory volunteering). A Dutch vignette experiment showed that reasons for supporting social rights differ between people with different cultural profiles: equality advocates grant support if beneficiaries are needy, while the centre and trusting groups do so when beneficiaries reciprocate. We found that irrespective of deservingness, people with equality‐advocating and trusting profiles tend to be more supportive of social rights, whereas socially discontented citizens tend to emphasise the importance of obligations. In general, obliging beneficiaries to do volunteer work was deemed appropriate by almost all respondents in the study, whereas their cultural values determined the ways in which they considered social rights to have been earned.

Suggested Citation

  • Erwin Gielens & Femke Roosma & Peter Achterberg, 2019. "Deservingness in the eye of the beholder: A vignette study on the moderating role of cultural profiles in supporting activation policies," International Journal of Social Welfare, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 28(4), pages 442-453, October.
  • Handle: RePEc:wly:injsow:v:28:y:2019:i:4:p:442-453
    DOI: 10.1111/ijsw.12392
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/ijsw.12392
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/ijsw.12392?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Collewet, Marion & Fairley, Kim & Kessels, Roselinde & Knoef, Marike & van Vliet, Olaf, 2024. "The design of welfare: unraveling taxpayers' preferences," OSF Preprints 4am7e, Center for Open Science.
    2. Piotr Michoń, 2021. "Deservingness for "Family 500 +" Benefit in Poland: Qualitative Study of Internet Debates," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 157(1), pages 203-223, August.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:injsow:v:28:y:2019:i:4:p:442-453. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1111/(ISSN)1468-2397 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.