This article provides a map of the UBI debate, structured into the main themes that guide and group the arguments on both sides. It finds that UBI’s supporters and opponents both draw on core principles of justice and freedom, focusing on need and poverty, discrimination and inequality, growth, social opportunity, individuality, and self-development. From an economic perspective, they both appeal to business concerns about efficiency, risk, flexibility, and consumption, as well as labour interests on work fulfilment, working conditions, remuneration, and bargaining. Likewise, they focus on political questions around welfare state reforms, redistribution, taxation and funding sources, democratic citizenship, and the prospects for cross-party policy coalitions. By providing an overview of the thematic pillars of the UBI debate, this article helps researchers and activists locate and orient themselves within the wider spectrum of opinion on UBI.

In this article, we conduct a case study of EU-level debates on universal basic income (UBI) trials, as part of which we examine core contributions in the Conference on the Future of Europe, the election manifestos produced by European party groups, as well as European Parliament debates since 2009. The results indicate that parties and politicians are far more hesitant than citizens to demand UBI, while also relying proportionally more on proposing trials rather than policies. Interpreting the results, we develop a conceptual framework designed to better understand how political decisionmakers at the EU level can deal with the uncertainties involved in European social policymaking. We argue that these actors face legal, political, and suitability risks when proposing policies that would integrate the EU’s social dimension. Unlike in national settings, the potential to pursue various strategies of risk reduction is limited at the EU level. However, we argue that empirical trials of social policies are particularly well-suited to insuring politicians at the EU level against risks. This insurance function is based not only on the scope of empirical trials to reduce uncertainties about policy outcomes, but also on the fact that they are inherently non-binding. By simply proposing empirical trials, actors can influence agendas, benefit from public demands, or reduce public pressure without having to take on the risks associated with implementing a fully-fledged policy proposal. We conclude that empirical trials can be understood as buffers against risks that might be used strategically by politicians, and which have the potential to break stalemates in the future development of a “Social Europe”.