28. A Right to Welfare Benefits? Varieties of Deservingness in Comparative Perspective

Gianluca Busilacchi (University of Macerata and European University Institute)

Femke Roosma (Tilburg University and University of Amsterdam) 

Over the past decade, the concept of welfare deservingness – who deserves what and why - has gained significant prominence in both political discourse and academic research. In a context defined by permanent austerity and rapid social transformations - where public finance constraints on one hand and the emergence of new risks on the other strain social spending choices - the push for greater conditionality and targeting in welfare policies reflects a growing emphasis on the deservingness of beneficiaries. While institutional frameworks and public opinion vary across contexts, these factors collectively shape the welfare deservingness of target groups of social benefits (Van Oorschot, Roosma, 2017). Despite these variations, common patterns are increasingly evident across Europe. 

One such pattern is behavioral conditionality, which has tightened eligibility conditions for welfare provisions over recent decades, based on so-called ‘virtuous’ activities, such as being employed, socially included, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, avoiding harmful substances (Clasen & Clegg, 2007; Watts & Fitzpatrick, 2018). This marks a shift from traditional risk protection mechanisms to a welfare model that acts more and more as a tool for modifying behavior (Rodger, 2008). For example, the increasing demand for work activation seeks to denounce inactivity and target only the “deserving welfare recipients”. Similarly, in healthcare, individuals engaging in harmful behaviors - such as drug use, alcohol consumption, or smoking - are stigmatized, and fully subsidized healthcare is more and more restricted to “deserving patients”. 

Another related phenomenon is welfare chauvinism, which prioritizes welfare benefits for native populations while excluding out-groups from the welfare state, a trend increasingly fueled by the rise of far-right populism. Public opinion often assumes that immigrants extract more from the welfare system than they contribute (De Koster et al., 2013). Related to this, immigrants are perceived as the least deserving of welfare benefits (van Oorschot, 2000). This perception has fostered widespread opposition to granting welfare access to immigrants (Reeskens, van Oorschot, 2012; Reeskens, van der Meer, 2019). 

The stronger reliance on deservingness thinking, exemplified in - among other things - behavioral conditionality and welfare chauvinism in social policies and politics, restricts access to social benefits and therefore threatens to undermine universal social rights for all European citizens. 

In this session, we welcome a variety of contributions from different disciplines (sociology, political science, economics, law, etc.) and employing diverse methodologies to examine welfare deservingness in relation to behavioral conditionality, welfare chauvinism, and other deservingness-related social policy developments, addressing these issues at both theoretical and empirical levels.