The political determinants of benefit work conditionality

ABSTRACT

The increasing conditionality of access to social protection on claimants’ proven willingness to seek and accept work has been one of the major dimensions of welfare state transformation of recent decades. Our understanding of the political determinants behind this trend, however, remains insufficient. This article assesses the state-of-the-art of political research on benefit work conditionality; points out a series of gaps and inconsistencies in existing research; and formulates an agenda for renewed and intensified research on the politics of work conditionality reforms, highlighting also how this research would contribute to important debates in welfare state research and political economy more generally.

KEYWORDS:

• Benefit conditionality
• comparative politics
• political economy
• welfare state reform

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Flavia Fossati as well as the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The ‘regulation approach’ has also been criticised on empirical grounds (Vis, 2007).

2 See e.g. the reviews by Starke (2006) or Myles and Quadagno (2002).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung): Grant Number 51NF40-182897 (NCCR - on the move).

Notes on contributors

Carlo Michael Knotz

Carlo Knotz is SNSF Postdoctoral Researcher at the Swiss Graduate School for Public Administration in Lausanne.