The multidimensionality of public support for basic income: a vignette experiment in Belgium

ABSTRACT

Despite the much-increased political salience of basic income in recent years, we still know relatively little about its public support. The current article contributes to existing knowledge by studying public support for basic income from a multidimensional perspective, using a vignette experiment that charts popular support for a broad range of differently designed types of basic income. The results demonstrate that support for basic income is indeed inherently multidimensional, for three main reasons. First, some types of basic income are more popular than others, especially those that are conditional and equity-based. Second, people make significant trade-offs between various policy design dimensions and the deservingness criteria associated with them. Third, there are important differences in the types of basic income preferred by specific ideological groups: while left-wing people differentiate little between various proposals, their right-wing counterparts clearly prefer more-restrictive proposals. By situating these findings in a comparative perspective, the article proposes a novel conceptual framework, which postulates that the multidimensionality of support for basic income is context dependent. From a policy point-of-view, this is relevant in light of the crucial role played by public opinion in determining the political feasibility of implementing some form of basic income in a real-world setting.

KEYWORDS:

• Basic income
• multidimensionality
• political feasibility
• public opinion
• vignette experiment

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Wim van Oorschot and Yannick Vanderborght for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of the paper. Credit is also due to the Belgian National Lottery, for their financial support in collecting the survey data used in this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 This is the definition of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), a leading community of academics and activists interested in the idea of BI: www.basicincome.org. Please note that the term ‘ideal type’ does not entail a normative judgement on the merits of this particular BI. Instead, the term refers to the sociological notion of the Weberian ideal type, as it was also used by Esping-Andersen (1990) in his classification of real-world welfare states into ideal-typical welfare regimes.

2 As a robustness check, in the Supplementary Material we compare the AMCEs for the vignette dimensions in models with and without several respondent characteristics as controls. The results indicate that the coefficients barely vary between the two models.

3 Because it could be argued that some of the resulting vignettes are more similar to existing conditional benefit schemes, such as social assistance, we performed additional analyses to test whether our results hold when removing from the sample the vignettes combining dimensions that are very far from the ideal-typical BI. As shown in the Supplementary Materials, this does not lead to different conclusions.

4 The descriptive findings also confirm H5, by showing that need-based schemes are slightly more popular than equality-based schemes.

5 In the Supplementary Material, we investigate the role of political ideology in greater detail, by exploring differences between party supporters within each ideological group, as well as differences according to the economic and cultural dimensions of political ideology.

6 AMCEs are not used to compare subgroups (ideological groups, in our case), because they depend too heavily on the choice of the reference category and can lead to strongly misleading conclusions (Leeper et al., 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101023631. The research is also supported by the Research Foundation Flanders [grant number 11H2619N].

Notes on contributors

Tijs Laenen

Tijs Laenen is Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences of Tilburg University (the Netherlands) and the Centre for Sociological Research of KU Leuven (Belgium).

Arno Van Hootegem

Arno Van Hootegem is Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Sociological Research of KU Leuven (Belgium).

Federica Rossetti

Federica Rossetti is Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Sociological Research of KU Leuven (Belgium) and Researcher at Sciensano, Service of Lifestyle and Chronic Diseases (Belgium).