Informal carers are people who care for family members or friends due to illness, disability, or old age. Most long-term care systems depend on the unpaid care work that informal carers provide, as formal care services only cover a minor part of existing care needs. In Austria, for example, where we conducted our empirical work, it is assumed that about 75 % of care work is provided by informal carers and that about 13 % of the adult population is engaged in caring for others in connection with illness, disability, or old age; most of them being women (Nagl-Cupal et al., 2018). Because informal caregiving can constitute a massive burden for carers, various countries, across Europe and beyond, have implemented benefits for informal carers such as care allowances and care leaves (Rocard & Llena-Nozal, 2022).
In this article, we analyse informal carers’ experiences with trying to access these benefits. We understand informal carers’ attempts to access benefits and their related interactions with authorities as ‘public encounters’ (Hupe, 2022). Furthermore, we assume that these encounters, in which citizens and the state interact, constitute and reflect hierarchies of citizens and citizenship (Carswell et al., 2019; Carswell & De Neve, 2020). In terms of methods and empirical material, we conducted qualitative interviews with 20 informal carers from Austria, which we analysed with a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach (Charmaz, 2014).
In Austria, there exist various kinds of benefits, however, we show that accessing these is connected with multiple obstacles for informal carers. First, we show that informal carers experience it as difficult and frustrating to gather reliable information on benefits. Second, claiming these benefits usually constitutes a heavy ‘administrative burden’ (Halling & Baekgaard, 2023) for informal carers due to the complicated bureaucratic procedures involved. Third, informal carers reported that their applications for benefits were regularly denied on unsubstantiated grounds and that they spent substantial amounts of time objecting to administrative decisions before they were able to access benefits. Where informal carers were successful in gathering information, submitting applications, and receiving benefits, they often accredited their success to favourable personal circumstances (e.g., a professional background in law), goodwill from individual public officials, or help from friends.
Informal carers’ experiences with the state are characterized by the paradox of, on the one hand, being indispensable for the provision of care, but, on the other hand, constantly being ‘fended off’ by authorities when trying to access public benefits, which have been implemented to support them. In fact, for many informal carers, trying to access public benefits constitutes an additional burden, in terms of time as well as emotional. Our findings also indicated that ‘social citizenship’ is not only constituted through formal eligibility for accessing public services and benefits but also the everyday encounters between citizens and public authorities in trying to access formal entitlements.
