The Political Resilience of Basic Income
Abstract
Recent research in comparative policy has drawn attention to the importance of path-dependency and stickiness in relation to the study of political efficiency of welfare policies. This paper builds on this literature by discussing the political resilience of basic income schemes, defined as the capacity to resist political change once adopted. The main argument is that in addition to contingent political mechanisms that produce path-dependency certain design properties of an unconditional basic income scheme contribute to its political resilience. The paper employs a variety of sources in cognitive psychology, political science and sociology to demonstrate how the specific design features of basic income outperform more selective welfare policies. Research in political resilience is important to understand the dynamic properties of policies, but moreover has important, if ambivalent, implications for the more general question of political efficiency.
This document is currently not available here.