Claim and Blame: How Welfare Law institutionalises Deservingness

This chapter argues that deservingness conceptualisations play a key part in rationalising welfare law, as they justify who can reasonably claim benefits and who is not eligible, and to blame for their own plight. Crucially, these deservingness conceptualisations are not just inventions of recent welfare conditionality programs that distinguish between activated, self-responsible and hesitant, punishable claimants, but have been part and parcel of all forms of welfare provisions. The chapter argues that acknowledging this and analysing how these conceptualisations have been institutionalised in welfare systems improve implementation studies. Thus, rather than comparing new and conditional social law in clash with existing ‘organisational culture’, we should compare the different deservingness conceptualisations of laws old and new and examine their different institutionalisation potentials.