EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Support for a Universal Basic Income: A Demand-Capacity Paradox?

Zachary Parolin () and Linus Siöland
Additional contact information
Linus Siöland: University of Antwerp

No fvh92, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Debate around a universal basic income (UBI) tends to focus on the economic and social implications of the policy proposal. Less clear, however, are the factors influencing support for a UBI. Using the 2016 European Social Survey, we investigate how trade union membership and left political ideology (central to power resources theory) and attitudes towards immigrants’ access to welfare benefits (central to welfare state chauvinism) affect individual support for a UBI. We also investigate how country-level differences in levels of social spending moderate individual-level UBI support. Results from multi-level models suggest that a broader coalition of UBI supporters can generally be found in countries where social spending is low. Specifically, we find that welfare state chauvinism is more likely to be associated with negative attitudes towards a UBI in countries with high levels of spending, but has only a weak association with UBI support in low-spending countries. Similarly, political ideology is more consequential in explaining UBI support in countries with higher levels of spending. These tensions form a demand–capacity paradox: the countries which are presumably least equipped to implement a UBI see the most broad-based support for the policy.

Date: 2019-11-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5c3df522e8da0e0019580f11/

Related works:
Working Paper: Support for a Universal Basic Income: A Demand-Capacity Paradox? (2019) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:fvh92

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/fvh92

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:osf:osfxxx:fvh92