Axel West Pedersen

The limits of social solidarity : Basic income, immigration and the legitimacy of the Universal Welfare State

Does mass immigration and increasing ethnic diversity challenge the legitimacy of the universal welfare state? Assuming that basic income can be seen as a radical extension of the universal welfare state, we pursue this question by investigating whether popular reactions towards a basic income proposal are susceptible to persuasion that invokes attitudes towards immigration. The study is based on survey data covering a representative sample of the Norwegian electorate. We find that a comfortable majority express sympathy with the idea of a basic income, and that the structure of initial support for the basic income proposal is well in line with established findings concerning attitudes towards welfare state institutions and redistributive policies more generally. However, by applying a persuasion experiment, we show that negative attitudes towards immigration can be mobilized to significantly reduce the scope of support for a basic income proposal among the Norwegian electorate.

Inequality as Relative Deprivation A Sociological Approach to Inequality Measurement

Although concerns for inequality are at the heart of the sociological tradition, few sociologists have taken a serious interest in the normative and methodological issues involved in the choice between different measures of inequality. It is argued in this article that the widely used but also widely criticized Gini index can be seen to incorporate a particularly sociological conception of inequality. The Gini index has features that are alien to mainstream welfare economics, but perfectly sensible if inequality is understood more sociologically as arising from a state of relative deprivation. However, the commitment to a relativistic conception of inequality leads to serious theoretical and practical complications. The implicit rationale of the Gini index assumes that it is applied to a ‘reference population’ – where everybody compares themselves with everybody else. It is not obvious that the residents of a nation-state always constitute a reference population in this sense, and arguments can be found both for widening and narrowing the scope of the relevant population. Both aggregation and disaggregation from whatever is considered to be the ‘appropriate’ scope of the reference population is problematic and requires different methodological solutions.

The Privatization of Retirement Income? Variation and Trends in the Income Packages of Old Age Pensioners

The aim of this article is to investigate the changing balance between public and private components in the income packages of old age pensioners in a selection of nine OECD countries. Four waves of data from the Luxembourg Income Study databank are used to analyse variation across countries and across time in the public/private mix of retirement income. The article seeks to address two main questions: (a) Is there a general trend towards a stronger reliance on private income provision and, perhaps, a trend towards convergence in the balance between public and private income components? (b) Is there evidence of a tendency for substitution/crowding out between public and private income components, and hence a tendency for crossnational convergence in the relative income position enjoyed by old age pensioners – despite variation in the generosity of national pension systems?

Welfare Dualism in Two Scandinavian Welfare States: Public Opinion and Party Politics

Recent research on the legitimacy of the welfare state has pointed to a potential negative impact of immigration. While much of this research has been concerned with a possible weakening of the general support for economic redistribution, this article analyses popular support for the introduction of a two-tier (dualist) welfare system, and focuses on the interplay between public opinion and party competition. It uses survey data from Denmark and Norway: two similar welfare states where elite politics on migration and welfare dualism has been markedly different over the last decade. It finds that the level and structure of popular support for welfare dualism are fairly similar in the two countries, but that attitudes toward dualism have a stronger impact on left–right voting in Denmark where the politics of welfare dualism has been actively advocated by the populist right party and pursued by a right-wing coalition government.

When the Going Gets Tough: The Differential Impact of National Unemployment on the Perceived Threats of Immigration

Economic competition theory predicts that anti-immigration sentiments will increase in periods with high unem-ployment, in particular among low-skilled workers. Using five rounds of cross-sectional data from the European Social Survey and utilising the rise in unemployment in many European countries due to the financial crisis, this article provides a more effective empirical test of interest-based theories than previous studies. It employs hierarchical, two-stage regression techniques to estimate the relationship between aggregate unemployment rates and immigration opinion, and explores whether the relationship differs according to respondent’s level of education. It is found that high unemployment rates are associated with a high level of economic concern over immigration – particularly if the size of the foreign-born population is large. The relationship is stronger among the low skilled, implying a tendency for polarisation of opinions about immigration in economic recessions. Finally, it is discovered that the general level of cultural concern over immigration is unrelated to variation in unemployment.

Closing the gender gap in pensions: A microsimulation analysis of the Norwegian NDC pension system

In this article, we use an advanced microsimulation model to study the distributional effects of the reformed Norwegian pension system with a particular focus on gender equality. The reformed Norwegian system is based on the notional defined contribution (NDC)-formula with fixed contribution/accrual rates over the active life-phase and with accumulated pension wealth being transformed into an annuity upon retirement. A number of redistributive components are built into the system: a unisex annuity divisor, a ceiling on annual earnings, generous child credits, a possibility for widows/widowers to inherit pension rights from a deceased spouse, a targeted guarantee pensions with higher benefit rates to single pensioners compared to married/cohabitating pensioners, and finally a tax system that is particularly progressive in its treatment of pensioners and pension income. Taking complete actuarial fairness as the point of departure, we conduct a stepwise analysis to investigate how these different components of the National Insurance pension system impact on the gender gap in pensions and on general (Gini) inequality in the distribution of pension income within a cohort of pensioners. Our analysis concentrates on one birth cohort – individuals born in 1963 – and we study three different outcomes: the distribution of annual pensions early in retirement (at age 70), the distribution of the total sum of pension benefits received over retirement, and the distribution of the average annual pension benefits received over the retirement phase. In addition, we look at three alternative income concepts. These are personal income, equivalised household income, and finally an original income concept developed for this study: personal income adjusted for the economies of scale enjoyed by couple households.

Comfort in numbers? Social integration and political participation among disability benefit recipients in Norway

There are growing concerns both in academic and political debates that the provision of cash transfers to people in economically active age groups does not support and might even undermine active social citizenship. In this article we study the social integration and political participation of disability benefit recipients in Norway. We anticipate that disability benefit recipients are less likely than others to participate in social and political arenas, but postulate that the degree of their social and political marginalisation depends on contextual factors. In particular we expect that the presence of a large proportion of disability benefit recipients in the local area where the individual disability benefit recipient lives will make it less likely that they will be marginalised in terms of social networks; we anticipate that this positive network effect will also spill over into participation in voluntary organisations and the propensity to vote in national elections. Analysing Norwegian survey-data, we find that disability benefit recipients are somewhat marginalised both socially and in terms of participation in voluntary organisations. In municipalities with a high proportion of disability benefit recipients, individuals belonging to this group are more likely to have close friends, but this beneficial contextual effect is not found to spill over into increased organisational and political participation.