Welfare attitudes in a crisis: How COVID exceptionalism undermined greater solidarity

De Vries, Robert; Baumberg Geiger, Ben; Scullion, Lisa; Summers, Kate; Edmiston, Daniel; Ingold, Jo; Robertshaw, David; Young, David

Abstract

COVID-19 had the potential to dramatically increase public support for welfare. It was a time of apparent increased solidarity, of apparently deserving claimants, and of increasingly widespread exposure to the benefits system. However, there are also reasons to expect the opposite effect: an increase in financial strain fostering austerity and self-interest, and thermostatic responses to increasing welfare generosity. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the pandemic on attitudes towards working-age unemployment benefits in the UK using a unique combination of data sources: (i) temporally fine-grained data on attitudinal change over the course of the pandemic; and (ii) a novel nationally representative survey contrasting attitudes towards pandemic-era and pre-pandemic claimants (including analysis of free-text responses). Our results show that the pandemic prompted little change in UK welfare attitudes. However, we also find that COVID-era unemployment claimants were perceived as substantially more deserving than those claiming prior to the pandemic. This contrast suggests a strong degree of 'COVID exceptionalism'-with COVID claimants seen as categorically different from conventional claimants, muting the effect of the pandemic on welfare attitudes overall.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 24, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Oct 4, 2023
• Publication Date: Oct 4, 2023
• Deposit Date: Oct 4, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 6, 2023
• Print ISSN: 0047-2794
• Electronic ISSN: 1469-7823
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279423000466
• Keywords: welfare attitudes; COVID-19; structural topic models; free-text responses