This article was originally posted on the LSE Politics & Policy blog - it’s a co-written post by me, Kate Bell and Declan Gaffney, based on our new report on the stigma of claiming benefits that came out last week.
If you don’t pay much attention to these issues – hell, even if you do – you probably think that the public has entirely lost its support for benefits claimants. That the perception is that most claimants are scroungers or even fraudulent. That we are embarrassed by the benefits system, and think that all benefits should be cut. And that people think claiming benefits is something you should be ashamed of.
But if you thought this, then you would be wrong. Most people do not think that that most claimants are fraudulent, false or scroungers – indeed, even most Conservative voters don’t think this. Last time anyone checked (in 2003), a majority of people said they were proud of Britain’s social security system. Even in 2011, a majority are in favour of more spending on benefits disabled people, carers, low earners and retired people, as one of us shows here. And really very few people agree that claiming benefits is something you should be ashamed of: only 10-12% people agree (for each one of five benefits), while 78-80% disagree.
The reality of stigma
Yet this doesn’t mean that attitudes haven’t hardened nor that benefits stigma in Britain doesn’t exist – instead it shows that it takes a different form to what we might think. We detail all of this and more in our new report for Turn2us, Benefits Stigma in Britain, based on a new IpsosMORI survey, a re-analysis of existing data, some focus groups, and an analysis of all newspaper articles on benefits since 1995. (The various findings below are taken from the report unless otherwise specified).
From these analyses, we find that benefits stigma is less about the shame you yourself attach to claiming; instead it’s primarily about what we think others might think, and the way we’d be treated if we actually went to claim. And while part of this is about feelings of entitlement (which we return to below), at heart this is about whether people see us as ‘deserving’ or not – whether you would be seen as truly needy, as morally acceptable, and whether your claim seems your own fault or out of your hands.
And it’s here that the problems lie. While most people don’t think the majority of out-of-work claimants are outright fraudulent, our survey found that the average view was that one-in-four claimants were cheating the system – an order of magnitude higher than the officially, painstakingly checked figure. And it’s this feeling that claimants are deserving that seems to have been falling in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The roots of stigma
So where is this perception of undeservingness coming from? One answer could be that it’s driven by personal experience – but actually, it’s very difficult for us to know how deserving the people we meet are. We included (what we think is) a novel question to test this out among those claiming disability-related benefits. Only one in five of them said that their disability is usually ‘obvious to anyone when they see me in the street’, while nearly twice as many said that people usually ‘only know if I tell them’. Disability is more often hidden than easily visible.
Yet the Sun’s ‘Beat the Cheat’ campaign earlier this year asked for whisteblowers to contact them if they see their neighbour “who claim[s] to be too sick for work but enjoy sports and nights out down the pub”. No wonder the overwhelming majority of calls to the benefit fraud hotline are wrong, instead accusing people who are fully entitled to their benefit.
So is it the media’s fault? We’ve written elsewhere on coverage of benefits has changed since 1995, and how the media disproportionately focus on fraud (something that research shows just doesn’t happen in Sweden and Denmark). Alongside our Turn2us report, we also produced a ‘mythbuster’ that tries to correct some of the most common claims about benefits that are simply untrue.
We also found that negative coverage and personal experience can form a toxic combination – the highest perceptions of fraud were among those who live in a neighbourhood with many benefits claimants AND read a paper that represents claimants negatively. Given that deservingness is so difficult to literally ‘see’ in front of us, our view is that the newspapers we read influence how we see the deservingness of the people we meet.
Yet it’s too easy just to blame newspapers for this. In fact, the biggest driver of newspaper coverage was the policy process – ministerial speeches, the passage of legislation, think-tank reports and the like. Tony Blair sought to ‘make the welfare state popular again’ through talking tough on benefits, but this seemed entirely counterproductive, making us more likely to think that the people around us were not genuine claimants (see this). A better alternative might be to talk about the positive achievements of the welfare state, and the enduring popularity of the contributory principle (as two of us discuss here).
For any party that did break from the mould – and if they did this in a way that chimes with the support for the benefits system that remains, as we started with – then they may even find a groundswell of support for it too.
Fascinating stuff, Ben. I’ve only just downloaded the report, so my comments here are offered without a careful reading (which will be undertaken shortly!).
I’m surprised at the finding that benefits stigma is “less about the shame you yourself attach to claiming; instead it’s primarily about what we think others might think,” given the ample evidence suggesting that the socialization of stigma typically results in significant self-stigmatization among the out-group. I believe Graham Scambler refers to this as the distinction between enacted and felt stigma. I am not contesting the result — obviously! — but just noting my surprise given how powerful the assignation of deviance is, especially inasmuch as it is attached to existing social and political gradients.
The other point that leaps to mind is your question about where such stigma comes from. Two possibilities: the first is the evolutionary theory of stigma, and the second is the history of pension and benefits stigma. I’m wary of evolutionary explanations, but only insofar as they tend to encourage a kind of unreflective reductionism (i.e., that evolutionary considerations explain everything about human behavior, a kind of GUT). But I do think the basic question is critical: given how prosocial human animals generally are, why is the profoundly alienating and painful experience of stigma so unbelievably common in human societies?
The idea, then, is that stigma as a social mechanism adopted in part as a method of handling the perceived harms and risks of social life. Anyway, it’s interesting, although it’s IMO not the whole story.
The history of benefits stigma is more in my wheelhouse, so to speak, since it is one of the things I study (particularly in context of pain), and I think it’s important to understand that while concerns about deception and feigning illness are at least a thousand years old, they take on a new and more urgent character in the modern era, and especially in the nineteenth century. Not coincidentally, this c. sees the beginning of the organized, modern pension schemes all over the West, and when combined with the profound Victorian anxieties about truth, superficiality, authenticity, and identity, I think one can start to see some reasons for the rise in concerns about benefits/pension malingering.
Much more to say here — maybe I’ll say it sometime!
Thanks for the comment Daniel, and sorry for the slow reply. Going through your (really thought-provoking) points in turn:
- Benefits stigma is unusual in some ways in that it turns on this issue of deservingness, and this has interesting internal/external dimensions to it. So from the inside, I generally think that I personally am a deserving claimant, but the stigma often comes from other people thinking I am NOT a deserving claimant. So the personal stigma around benefits is lower than I’d guess it would be for other issues, even if the stigma as a whole is equally real.
- Evolutionary explanations are vaguely useful here. I think Kate and Declan vetoed the following quote from Bang Peterson et al 2012, but I liked it: “To risk oversimplification, just as we have evolved specializations that cause us to fear snakes and spiders, we evolved specializations that make us angry at the lazy but compassionate toward the needy.” On the other hand, I’m not sure this takes us very far – how do we differentiate between the lazy and the needy? How does this change in different historical periods? What are the respective roles of personal experience, the media and politicians in this? And this is what we start to explore in the report, although I’d like to spend another couple of decades studying it to be honest…
- And as we’ve discussed before – I’m really looking forward to reading more about your own work on this!