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.

Citation

De Vries, R., Baumberg Geiger, B., Scullion, L., Summers, K., Edmiston, D., Ingold, J., …Young, D. (2023). Welfare attitudes in a crisis: How COVID exceptionalism undermined greater solidarity. Journal of Social Policy, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279423000466

• 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
• 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