The social legitimacy of the universal basic income from a social justice perspective: a comparative analysis of Germany and Slovenia

Abstract

The universal basic income (UBI) has found its way into public debates and has prominent advocates across almost all political camps. In many debates, it is presented as a solution for the consequences of a large variety of current societal challenges, such as unemployment, over-education, ecological crises, gender inequality and issues related to digitalization and automatization. While UBI has been discussed broadly from an expert position, we know very little about the population’s perceptions of UBI. Thus, to shed light on the public legitimacy of UBI as a radically different concept of social justice and citizenship, our contribution uses data from large group discussions where participants explicitly refer to the UBI as an option for a future welfare state. By comparing debates in Slovenia and Germany, we unearth that the perspective adopted by the participants towards a UBI is strongly shaped by the welfare institutions of the countries in which they live and the social justice principles embodied in those institutions.

The attitudes of young citizens in higher education towards universal basic income in the context of automation—A qualitative study

“…The negative attitudes of our respondents could also be explained by the Hungarian context, and in this regard our analysis strengthens previous results that show that the context influences the narratives regarding support for UBI (Rossetti et al, 2020; Zimmermann et al, 2020), and that the importance of work may vary in different contexts (Weiss & Hörisch, 2022). Students often expressed views that are in line with the Hungarian government's agenda of a work‐based society.…”

“…While we investigated the attitudes in a future scenario compared to previous studies focusing on the present, our results suggest that the attitudes of these Hungarian respondents are more in line with the attitudes of the Dutch (Rossetti et al, 2020) than the Slovenian or German respondents (Zimmermann et al, 2020). This, we suggest, could be explained by the similar workfare regime of the Netherlands and Hungary.…”

“…It is a question to what extent citizens would accept such a radical change, even in a future society. While previous studies have investigated attitudes towards UBI (e.g., Dermont & Weisstanner, 2020; Martinelli, 2019; Roosma & van Oorschot, 2020; Rossetti et al, 2020; Zimmermann et al, 2020), these mainly focused on the present context. Only a few quantitative studies have examined preferences in relation to UBI in a future scenario of significant technological unemployment (Nam, 2019; Pulkka, 2019).…”

“…Only a few quantitative studies have examined preferences in relation to UBI in a future scenario of significant technological unemployment (Nam, 2019; Pulkka, 2019). What is more, hardly any research has investigated attitudes towards UBI with qualitative methods (Rossetti et al, 2020; Zimmermann et al, 2020), and none of it has focused on the future context. In this study, we explore attitudes towards UBI in a hypothetical future labour market based on interviews.…”

“…Finally, our paper broadens the literature by qualitatively investigating these attitudes in a Central‐Eastern‐European country, as previous studies regarding attitudes towards UBI have mainly relied on comparisons of international survey results or case studies of Western European countries (except for the study of Zimmermann et al, 2020). Hungary serves as an interesting case study as the Hungarian welfare system has been oriented towards a workfare regime since 2010.…”