The Achilles’ heel of welfare state legitimacy: perceptions of overuse and underuse of social benefits in Europe

ABSTRACT

When analysing the legitimacy of the welfare state, perceptions of the overuse and underuse of welfare are of great importance. Previous literature suggests that many people perceive overuse (misuse or fraud), and there is evidence that people also perceive underuse (non-take-up) of welfare benefits. Perceptions of overuse have therefore been called ‘the Achilles’ heel of welfare state legitimacy'. We analyse data from the European Social Survey for 25 countries and investigate the occurrence and the individual and contextual determinants of overuse and underuse perceptions. We find that both overuse and underuse perceptions are prevalent in all European countries. However, whereas overuse perceptions are more related to ideology, collective images of welfare recipients and selective welfare regimes, underuse perceptions are more shaped by self-interest and the levels of unemployment and social spending in a country. Instead of one Achilles' heel, welfare state legitimacy seems to have two weak spots.

KEY WORDS:

• Benefit abuse
• European Social Survey
• non-take-up
• welfare attitudes
• welfare states

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to thank the JEPP referees for their constructive comments.

FUNDING

This research was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) [grant number 400-09-083].

Notes

1 See http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/.

2 The term ‘insufficient benefits’ can be interpreted as ‘inadequate benefits’ or as ‘benefits that are lacking'. In the latter case, it can be discussed whether this item measures support for more benefit schemes in general instead of mis-targeting. The correlation of this item with support for the role of government, however, is substantially smaller than the correlation with the other underuse item. We argue that this item is therefore suitable for measuring underuse perceptions.

3 The results of these measurement equivalence analyses are available from the first author.

4 See http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Femke Roosma

Biographical notes

Femke Roosma is PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology at Tilburg University in The Netherlands.

Wim van Oorschot

Prof. dr. ing. Wim van Oorschot is professor of social policy at the Centre for Sociological Research (CeSO) at Leuven University in Belgium.

John Gelissen

Dr John Gelissen is assistant professor at the Department of Methodology and Statistics at Tilburg University in The Netherlands.