Unravelling the Politics of Basic Income: How Responsive Are Policymakers to Public Opinion?

In light of growing debates on the idea of basic income (BI), the BI-RESPONS project investigates under which conditions policymakers respond to public opinion about BI.

I argue that BI is a scientifically challenging case because it poses a theoretical puzzle that has hitherto not been addressed empirically.

On the one hand, BI is a likely case for responsiveness to occur because its introduction would directly impact the lives of many citizens.

On the other hand, BI is an unlikely case compared to most other social policies because it is characterized by a lower salience and higher radicalness.

The project will solve this puzzle by uncovering (a) which types of policymakers are (un)responsive and to whose opinions they are (un)responsive; (b) in which spatial and temporal contexts they are (un)responsive; (c) through which mechanisms they are (un)responsive, and (d) how their (un)responsiveness to public opinion varies across different BI proposals and compares to that of the well-established social policy of child benefits.

These analyses are informed by the newly developed Multi-Level Framework of Contingent Policy Responsiveness, which argues that two of the main contingency factors identified in prior research –salience and radicalness– do not only vary between policy cases but also (a) within these cases, (b) across context and (c) between policymakers.

This new theoretical framework is scrutinized empirically within an innovative mixed-methods design that links qualitative in-depth interviews with different types of policymakers to a quantitative public opinion survey in eight European countries that differ with regard to the salience and radicalness of BI.

In doing so, the BI-RESPONS project forces a major breakthrough in the research on the politics of BI, and more broadly, expands our knowledge of (social) policy responsiveness and welfare state politics.