The Palgrave International Handbook of Basic Income by Malcolm Torry

Author:Malcolm Torry
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030236144
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Secondly, and relatedly, an implication of human IPE is to give a deeper explanation for narratives and debates about, and public attitudes to, Basic Income across time and space. Svallfors (2006) has shown that attitudes to welfare are heavily influenced by the class basis of the institutions that shape experience. Human IPE goes one step further and assumes that congruence of institutions with core human development needs affirms legitimacy and affiliation, as well as an informed public and a critical culture. A progressive tendency in Britain to rely on a uniform low level of means-tested assistance to support working-age adults contrasts with a range of instruments to support this group in Nordic states (Haagh 2012). This difference maps onto contrasting views of income security for working-age adults. For example, based on results of the late 2010s, the European Social survey shows that in Britain 65% of respondents—the most negative attitude by far among OECD countries—think that welfare makes people lazy, compared with 44% in Denmark (Brooks 2012: 208). Britain outflanks all other countries on this measure.

An implication of this is to add another analytical layer to the ‘frame’ literature, which looks at how discursive strategies affect public opinion . In sum, whereas in general radical discourses can be portrayed as relatively more illusory—given the limited impact of a single policy—this phenomenon is both more likely and differently accented in conditions of high inequality. As already noted, Anglo-liberal capitalist development and liberal thinking have been extremely influential in shaping the Basic Income argument and its political presence. Over time, differences in welfare state development have exerted increasing impact. When the Basic Income proposal first emerged as a serious policy proposal, in the 1970s and 1980s, a different turn in welfare state development was being consolidated and deepened, once again setting the Anglo-liberal states apart. In 1975, taxation in Denmark represented only 37% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), scarcely higher than Britain’s 34%. By 2000, Denmark’s rate had increased to 47%, whereas Britain’s had fallen to just under 33%. These ratios have since remained roughly similar, with the US rate of around 25% remaining broadly unchanged over time.

Writing on Basic Income in continental European states during the earlier period, e.g., in Germany, Belgium, and Holland, focussed more on labour market stratification, which fits a ‘dual’ industrial structure, and the lower levels of female occupational inclusion of these societies compared with the emerging Scandinavian model. Regional variation also shaped the female perspective during the period of maturing of Basic Income scholarship between the 1970s and the 2010s. In Britain, Parker’s argument of the 1980s that women should be paid both a Basic Income and a care allowance (Parker 1989: 229) fits logically within a welfare state structure that protected women’s status as mothers, exempt from expectations connected with market work that prevailed in Nordic states . The later critique of Basic Income libertarianism on grounds of gender (Haagh 2015; Robeyns 2001, 2008, 2010) was predated by many Danish feminists of the 1980s who saw Basic Income as a potential threat to women’s occupational rights (Christensen 2002).

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