Eligibility, Benefit Level or Activation. What Drives Public Fairness Perceptions and Take-Up Intentions of Minimum Income Benefits?

Minimum income schemes are among the most controversial social policy programmes. Besides debates about their effectiveness to alleviate poverty and the costs associated with them, social legitimacy and stigma associated with benefit receipt are important issues, which contribute to high rates of non-take-up. Despite growing political and academic interest, there is limited understanding of how specific scheme features affect social legitimacy and take-up behaviour. Our paper investigates the impact of key design features of minimum income schemes on perceptions of fairness and intentions to claim benefits. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from distributive justice, utility arguments, and administrative burden literature, we conducted a factorial survey experiment in Germany. Survey respondents were presented with scenarios describing a minimum income scheme that varied in the following dimensions: eligibility criteria, benefit level, workfare activation, and enabling activation. Our findings reveal that means-testing, behavioural requirements, and subsidised training as an enabling activation element significantly increase perceived fairness, with behavioural requirements being the most critical factor. Respondents believe that higher benefit levels should be accompanied by strong behavioural requirements. Conversely, moderate behavioural requirements, higher benefit levels, and opportunities for subsidised training enhance take-up intentions. We interpret these results as reflecting the principle of need and the social norm of reciprocity, which shape perceptions of fairness, alongside utility arguments that influence take-up intentions. Notably, we found little evidence that perceptions of administrative burden reduce take-up intentions in our scenarios, except in the case of very harsh behavioural requirements. Overall, most design features of our factorial survey had a similar influence on perceptions of fairness and take-up intentions (although to a different extent), suggesting a partly interrelated relationship between these phenomena.