How Welfare Policies Can Change Trust – A Social Experiment Assessing the Impact of Social Assistance Policy on Political and Social Trust

IF 1.6 Q3 ECONOMICS Basic Income Studies Pub Date : 2022-08-04 DOI:10.1515/bis-2021-0029

J. Betkó, N. Spierings, Maurice Gesthuizen, P. Scheepers

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引用次数: 2

Abstract

Abstract While there is a substantive literature on the link between welfare states and individuals’ trust, little is known about the micro-linkage of the conditionality of welfare as a driver of trust. This study presents a unique randomized social experiment investigating this link. Recipients of the regular Dutch social assistance policy are compared to recipients of two alternative schemes inspired by the basic income and based on a more trusting and unconditional approach, testing the main reciprocity argument in the literature: a trusting government will harvest trust from welfare recipients in return. Particularly trust in local government – the level at which the experiment was implemented – increases among recipients of the alternative treatments. Subsequently, we innovatively theorize and test rigorously which mediating mechanisms might explain this increase. Policy evaluation, social integration, and psychological well-being are studied in this respect. Of these, the only underlying mechanism proven to mediate the treatment effect in local political trust, is citizens’ satisfaction with policy.

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福利政策如何改变信任——评估社会救助政策对政治和社会信任影响的社会实验

虽然有大量文献研究福利国家与个人信任之间的联系，但对福利条件作为信任驱动因素的微观联系知之甚少。这项研究提出了一个独特的随机社会实验来调查这种联系。荷兰常规社会援助政策的接受者与受基本收入启发、基于更信任和无条件方法的两种替代方案的接受者进行了比较，检验了文献中主要的互惠论点:信任的政府将从福利接受者那里获得信任作为回报。特别是在接受替代疗法的人群中，对地方政府的信任——即实验实施的层面——增加了。随后，我们创新地理论化和严格地测试中介机制可能解释这种增加。政策评估，社会整合和心理健康在这方面进行了研究。其中，唯一被证明能调节地方政治信任治疗效果的潜在机制是公民对政策的满意度。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Basic Income Studies ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

2.40

自引率

18.20%

发文量

期刊介绍： Basic income is a universal income grant available to every citizen without means test or work requirement. Academic discussion of basic income and related policies has been growing in the fields of economics, philosophy, political science, sociology, and public policy over the last few decades — with dozens of journal articles published each year, and basic income constituting the subject of more than 30 books in the last 10 years. In addition, the political discussion of basic income has been expanding through social organizations, NGOs and other advocacy groups. Internationally, recent years have witnessed the endorsement of basic income by grassroots movements as well as government officials in developing countries such as Brazil or South-Africa. As the community of people working on this issue has been expanding all over the world, incorporating grassroots activists, high profile academics — including several Nobel Prize winners in economics — and policymakers, the amount of high quality research on this topic has increased considerably. In the light of such extensive scholarship on this topic, the need to coordinate research efforts through a journal specifically devoted to basic income and cognate policies became pressing. Basic Income Studies (BIS) is the first academic journal to focus specifically on basic income and cognate policies.