Working Hard or Hardly Working? Examining the Politics of In-Work Conditionality in the UK

Joan Abbas

doi:10.1017/S1474746421000294

Working Hard or Hardly Working? Examining the Politics of In-Work Conditionality in the UK

Joan Abbas

Institute for Policy Research (IPR)

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

3 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

The intensification of behavioural requirements and punitive measures in unemployment benefits by UK governments has been popular and instrumental to the politics of welfare reform. Yet there is scant research into the politics of extending this approach to working households, known as ‘in-work conditionality’ (IWC), which was introduced in the UK under Universal Credit in 2012. Addressing this gap, we examine the preferences of political parties and voters towards IWC, using data from an online survey of 1,111 adults in 2017, party manifestos and parliamentary debates. While we find evidence of a partisan split between voters and politicians on the left (oppose IWC) and right (support IWC), intra-party divides and the relative infancy of IWC suggests the politics of IWC is not set in stone. This helps to explain the blame avoidance strategies of current and previous Conservative governments responsible for IWC.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	31-52
Journal	Social Policy and Society
Volume	22
Issue number	1
Early online date	4 Oct 2021
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746421000294
Publication status	Published - 31 Jan 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This article uses data from an online survey funded by the Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath, where part of the research was conducted. The research is also partially funded by the Research Council of Norway (Grant Number: 275382). The authors would like to thank attendees of the Welfare Conditionality Conference in York in 2018 and members of the Money, Security and Social Policy Network for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article. We are grateful also for the helpful feedback we received from J Millar, N Pearce, W van Oorschot and M Dickson on earlier drafts of the article and G Picot for feedback on the later version. We are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions and feedback. The title of this article is a modified version of a blog post presenting an initial analysis of the attitudinal data examined Abbas ().

Keywords

Public attitudes
Universal Credit
deservingness
in-work conditionality
political parties

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Sociology and Political Science
Political Science and International Relations

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1017/S1474746421000294Licence: CC BY

Cite this

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Working Hard or Hardly Working? Examining the Politics of In-Work Conditionality in the UK

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

UN SDGs

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