Into the unknown: Empirical UBI trials as social Europe’s risk insurance
| Author | Dominic Afscharian,Viktoriia Muliavka,Marius S. Ostrowski,Lukáš Siegel |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13882627221118103 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Into the unknown: Empirical
UBI trials as social Europe’s risk
insurance
Dominic Afscharian
Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
Viktoriia Muliavka
Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa, Poland
Marius S. Ostrowski
European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy
LukášSiegel
University of SS. Cyril and Methodius, Trnava, Slovakia
Abstract
In this article, we conduct a case study of EU-level debates on universal basic income (UBI) trials,
as part of which we examine core contributions in the Conference on the Future of Europe, the
election manifestos produced by European party groups, as well as European Parliament debates
since 2009. The results indicate that parties and politicians are far more hesitant than citizens to
demand UBI, while also relying proportionally more on proposing trials rather than policies.
Interpreting the results, we develop a conceptual framework designed to better understand
how political decisionmakers at the EU level can deal with the uncertainties involved in
European social policymaking. We argue that these actors face legal, political, and suitability
risks when proposing policies that would integrate the EU’s social dimension. Unlike in national
settings, the potential to pursue various strategies of risk reduction is limited at the EU level.
However, we argue that empirical trials of social policies are particularly well-suited to insuring
politicians at the EU level against risks. This insurance function is based not only on the scope
of empirical trials to reduce uncertainties about policy outcomes, but also on the fact that they
are inherently non-binding. By simply proposing empirical trials, actors can influence agendas,
benefit from public demands, or reduce public pressure without having to take on the risks asso-
ciated with implementing a fully-fledged policy proposal. We conclude that empirical trials can be
Corresponding author:
Marius S. Ostrowski European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy.
Email: marius.ostrowski@eui.eu
Article
European Journal of Social Security
2022, Vol. 24(3) 257–275
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/13882627221118103
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejs
understood as buffers against risks that might be used strategically by politicians, and which have
the potential to break stalemates in the future development of a “Social Europe”.
Keywords
universal basic income, social Europe, risk insurance, policy trials, European Union
Introduction
The European Union is under tremendous pressure. In the wake of the financial crisis, Brexit, and
against a backdrop of surging Euroscepticism, more and more voices are demanding that Europe be
given a more “human”face in the form of a stronger social dimension (Graziano and Hartlapp,
2018: 1488). However, any proposal for a genuine “Social Europe”with EU-level social policy
competencies is accompanied by many legal, political, and suitability risks around preserving
national welfare states, winning national elections, and adhering to the Treaties. Such uncertainties
shape a field of tension in which criticism of Europe’s social deficits is as omnipresent as the lack of
concrete political commitments to social integration.
One proposal with theoretical potential to address the stalemate regarding the implementation of
a Social Europe that has recently gained attention is the idea of a universal basic income (UBI). The
policy enjoys high levels of salience and—in its abstract form—popularity according to recent
public opinion data (Roosma and Van Oorschot, 2020: 203; Bartha et al., 2020: 67–9; Ash and
Zimmermann, 2020; Baute and Meuleman, 2020); meanwhile, during the Covid-19 pandemic in
particular, researchers found ‘positive discussion’of UBI increased significantly (Nettle et al.,
2021).
A prominent example of this trend was that the idea of a European UBI was among the most
salient social policy proposals on the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) (Kantar
Public, 2021a). The CoFoE was a project of deliberative democracy in the EU designed to
enable citizens to propose, discuss, and promote (policy) ideas for the future of Europe through
an online platform and citizen panels. Of course, the extent to which any such process can
produce results that are perfectly representative of the whole European population is debatable,
due to the limited numbers of participants, potential biases involved in which citizens choose to
participate, and potential distortions of proposed ideas as a result of procedural hurdles.
Nonetheless, the randomised selection of participants along with the accessibility through physical
and digital channels already works to counter some of these concerns. However, regardless of how
representative the CoFoE might be, politicians have urged that its results be taken seriously (French
Presidency of the Council of the European Union, 2022), and when the results were presented, pol-
icymakers instrumentalised them to justify or oppose key policy changes in the EU, including
Treaty changes (Basso and Noyan, 2022). Thus, the CoFoE can be assumed to have considerable
impact on politicians’perceptions of the salience of the issues in question. Furthermore, far-
reaching activities around UBI on social media (Hemsley, Garcia-Murillo and MacInnes, 2018)
along with extensive general media attention (Prabhakar, 2021) imply that the typical sources of
such perceived salience are likely to prompt politicians to acknowledge that UBI is a salient idea.
However, policymakers typically appear to be positioned on a spectrum between scepticism and
aversion towards UBI—often driven by points of contradiction between the idea of UBI and the
258 European Journal of Social Security 24(3)
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