Jurgen De Wispelaere

The Public Administration Case against Participation Income

Anthony Atkinson’s proposal for a participation income (PI) has been acclaimed as a workable compromise between the aspirations of unconditional basic income proposals and the political acceptability of the workfare model. This article argues that PI functions poorly in terms of a number of essential administrative tasks that any welfare scheme must perform. This leads to a trilemma of participation income, which suggests that PI can only retain its apparent ability to satisfy the requirements of universalist and selectivist approaches to welfare at the cost of imposing a substantial burden on administrators and welfare clients alike. Consequently, the main apparent strength of PI, its capacity to garner support across different factions within welfare reform debates, is shown to be illusory.

The Administrative Efficiency of Basic Income

Basic income advocates typically praise the administrative efficiency of universal income maintenance. This article exposes several misconceptions, unwarranted generalisations or careless assumptions that permeate discussion of the administrative properties of basic income. Each of these obscures a significant constraint on the possibility of administrative savings, or else inflates the likely size of such efficiencies where they do exist. Our analysis also reveals a number of important political choices faced by policy makers and advocates intent on implementing an administratively efficient basic income policy. The absence of systematic administrative analysis in the basic income literature has obscured these hard choices.

Disability Rights in Ireland: Chronicle of a Missed Opportunity

Abstract This article critically examines the Disability Act 2005, which regulates access to public services for disabled people in Ireland. We examine the competing conceptions of disability rights advanced by the government and the disability sector during the debate on the legislation, and offer an interpretation of disability rights as the justiciable right to challenge. The Disability Act 2005 is then evaluated in light of the proposed framework. A number of ways are outlined in which the absence of a justiciable right to challenge fails to safeguard the dignity, empowerment and participation of disabled people. We contend that, despite protestations to the contrary, the Act fails to meet the requirements of a rights‐based approach, thus amounting to a missed opportunity for genuinely advancing the cause of disabled citizens in the Republic of Ireland.

When Basic Income Meets Professor Pangloss: Ignoring Public Administration and Its Perils

Basic income advocates propose a model that they believe will dramatically improve on current welfare programmes by alleviating poverty, reducing involuntary unemployment and social exclusion, redistributing care work, achieving a better work–life balance, and so on. Whether these expected social effects materialise in practice critically depends on how the model is implemented, but on this topic the basic income debate remains largely silent. Few advocates explicitly consider questions of implementation, and those that do are typically dismissive of the administrative challenges of implementing a basic income and critical (even overtly hostile) towards bureaucracy. In this contribution we briefly examine (and rebut) several reasons that have led basic income advocates to ignore administration. The main peril of such neglect, we argue, is that it misleads basic income advocates into a form of Panglossian optimism that risks causing basic income advocacy to become self-defeating.