Lars Inge Terum

Discrimination Against Ethnic Minorities in Activation Programme? Evidence from a Vignette Experiment

We conducted a vignette experiment involving 470 Norwegian front-line workers to investigate whether their decisions to sanction non-compliance of activation requirements varied with the ethnicity of the welfare claimant. This is the first vignette experiment on ethnic discrimination in the administration of activation programmes in Europe. The study shows that front-line workers did not sanction claimants with a North African name more often than claimants with a native Norwegian name. However, among front-line workers who had experience with the relevant activation programme, a male claimant with a North African name was sanctioned less often than a male claimant with a native Norwegian name. Thus, we find some degree of reverse discrimination on the part of experienced front-line workers. This finding is contrary to a similar US vignette experiment that detected discrimination (not reverse discrimination) with regard to claimants with an ethnic minority name. The most likely explanation for the difference concerns the different institutionalcultural contexts within which Norwegian and US social policy programmes operate. Introduction Discretion, which is an inescapable feature of most administrative decisions, may be performed in ways that discriminate against specific categories of claimants. Two social policy trends make the risk of ethnic discrimination particularly salient. The first trend, known as activation turn, imposes activation requirements on welfare recipients and sanctions on those who fail to comply (Watts et al., 2014). Activation increases the discretionary power of front-line workers (Brodkin, 2013). The second trend is increased net migration into 1 This study was made possible by grants from the Research Council of Norway’s Welfare, Working Life and Migration (VAM) programme. We gratefully acknowledge the following individuals for their insightful feedback on an earlier version of this article: Jonathan Bradshaw, University of York; Mike Adler, University of Edinburgh; Flemming Larsen, Aalborg University; and Silje B. Fekjær and Anders Molander, Oslo and Akershus University College. We also thank the anonymous referees at the Journal of Social Policy for their helpful comments.