Abstract Illiberal regimes increasingly rely on “soft repression” that weaponizes economic precarity while preserving a veneer of legality. This article develops a theoretical framework demonstrating how Universal Basic Income (UBI) alters the strategic interaction between citizens and the state. By guaranteeing survival independent of political compliance, UBI lowers the personal cost of moderate dissent, functions as a universal “strike fund” facilitating collective action, and solves coordination problems by reducing the fear of exemplary punishment in moderate dissent. More importantly, UBI raises the threshold for repression. By neutralizing cheap and deniable economic coercion, it forces illiberal regimes either to tolerate higher levels of dissent or to escalate to more visible and costlier forms of “hard” repression. The article concludes that UBI should be understood as more than a social policy. It is a political institution that fortifies the material conditions necessary for exercising civil liberties under stress.
A central question in the development of national socio-political systems concerns how to ensure fair distributional outcomes. At the level of practical policy-making, this often translates into determining an appropriate balance between universalism and targeting - for instance, between densely and sparsely populated areas, between affluent and disadvantaged municipalities, or in contexts where household characteristics vary markedly. A universalist approach to these challenges is to disregard the specific attributes of residential areas and other background factors, as exemplified by the design of a universal basic income (UBI). In this article, we address the question of distributional fairness by utilising data from the Finnish UBI experiment (2017-2018). We ask what kind of differences in wellbeing there were within and between the treatment and control groups according to place of residence. We ask if UBI produced similar effects on wellbeing across different places (accumulation), or did it even out (compensation) or enlarge (multiplication) differences in wellbeing of residents living in urban and rural areas. We concentrate on two crucial aspects of wellbeing, i.e., health and ability to cope economically. Our results demonstrate pronounced regional gradients: problems are biggest in rural municipalities. This pattern is evident in both the treatment group (TG), which received the basic income, and the control group (CG). Although receiving a basic income significantly alleviated such difficulties across all regional categories, the relative gap between rural and urban municipalities remained unchanged in both the TG and CG. This indicates that UBI was not a sufficient instrument for reducing regional disparities; its effects were more accumulative than compensatory. Consequently, while there is a clear case for strengthening universal economic security, there is simultaneously a compelling need for more targeted compensatory policy measures.
Numerous state and community actors have initiated basic income (BI) pilots to demonstrate the efficacy of cash transfers. Notwithstanding the substantial evidence on BI-like programs, pilots continue to be introduced at the community level but have consistently failed to be scaled-up to the national level. In this conceptual paper, we explore the multiple streams approach to policymaking and a critical policy studies orientation that offers valuable nuance on why the implementation of BI has been stymied in Canada, and what role pilots potentially play in this country. Concerns surround pilot framing, problematic interpretations of evidence, and troubling ethical considerations. We highlight potential ways that pilots can be helpful in mobilizing citizens and the political will to install BI permanently into Canada's social protection infrastructure. These include providing instructive information on BI implementation, rallying strong support constituencies, and educating policymakers on the flawed adoption of the deservingness paradigm to orient social welfare programming.
There has historically been a paradox in public health policymaking. In international development, there has been a working assumption that improving the quantity, security and predictability of people's material resources leads to overall improvements in health, education, employment and other outcomes. However, in domestic policy within high-income societies, opinion has been divided on causality. This has appeared contradictory: if poverty harms health and if development mechanisms in low-to-middle income countries include transfers of resources, why would the same considerations not apply in high-income societies and why would improving people's resources via policies such as Basic Income not improve their health? In this article, we explore this apparent distinction through semi-structured interviews with 14 UK-based public health policymakers. We find that the distinction is not clear, with UK-focused policymakers viewing the UK as a 'poor country with rich people in it', subject to similar considerations as low-to-middle income countries.
