Workplace Authority, Autonomy, and the Politics of Deservingness

One of the central conflicts in both welfare state politics and in the workplace revolves around the necessity and means of enforcing work ethic norms. Do people generally need to be forced to work (or work hard) via the threat of punishment? Or do most people want to work, and work well, out of an intrinsic sense of pride or social obligation? This paper theorizes that intuitions derived from people’s relation to authority in the workplace inform their attitudes and preferences with respect to the unemployed and the governance of unemployment benefits. First, I analyze observational data from the 2016 European Social Survey (ESS) to examine this relationship. I find that having authority over others in the workplace is associated with more negative reciprocity beliefs – beliefs about the prevalence of free-riding and the need for punishment as a solution (Cavaillé 2023). I then leverage a vignette experiment embedded in the 2016 ESS to test whether workplace authority conditions preferences for benefit sanctions in the face of negative deservingness cues. I find evidence that those with workplace authority react more punitively to negative deservingness cues by increasing their support for harsh sanctions.