The Multidimensionality of Public Support for Basic Income: A Vignette Experiment in Belgium

Despite the rapidly increasing political relevance of universal basic income (UBI), relatively little is known about its popularity among the general public. A notable exception in this regard is the latest wave of European Social Survey (ESS), which suggests that there is a moderate to high level of support for the implementation of a fully-fledged UBI in most European countries. However, a major issue is that the ESS measures a fundamentally multidimensional concept –public support for UBI– in a one-dimensional way. It is increasingly being recognized that in policy reality there exists a multitude of UBI varieties that differ on a number of institutional design characteristics, such as their coverage, level and mode of financing. To capture the multidimensional nature of public support for UBI, this paper reports the results of a unique vignette experiment embedded in a face-to-face interview among a representative sample of the Belgian population. In the experiment, respondents were presented different hypothetical (but realistic) basic income scenarios that randomly vary on five crucial policy dimensions: (a) benefit access, (b) benefit level, (c) position within the broader social security system, (d) accumulation with other earnings, and (e) work conditionality. After reading the vignettes, respondents were instructed to indicate to what extent they would support or oppose the implementation of the given UBI scenario in Belgium. In this way, the paper is able to examine to what extent the level of public support for UBI is causally affected by (different combinations of) experimental manipulations of its design features.