The Politics of Unconditional Basic Income: Bringing Bureaucracy Back In
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Author | Lindsay Stirton,Jurgen De Wispelaere |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.01004.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
The Politics of Unconditional Basic Income:
Bringing Bureaucracy Back In
Jurgen De Wispelaere
McGill University
Lindsay Stirton
University of Sheffield
We challenge the view, typically assumed by advocates of unconditional basic income (UBI), that its administration is
uncontroversial.We identify three essential tasks which, from the point of view of the administrative cybernetics
literature, any income maintenance policy must accomplish: defining criteria of eligibility, determining who meets
such criteria and disbursing payments to those found to be eligible. Building on the work of Christopher Hood, we
contrast two alternative ways in which the design of a UBI might apply the principle of‘using bureaucracy sparingly’
to the performance of each of these three tasks. Relating these alternative designs to the politics of basic income,we
show a correspondence between contrasting senses of using bureaucracy sparingly and‘redistributive’ and‘aggregative’
UBI models.
Keywords: basic income; bureaucratic efficiency; cadasterability; unconditional welfare;
welfare administration
In Agrarian Justice (1797), Thomas Paine advanced two radical proposals to mitigate the
extreme poverty of his time:
To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person,when arr ived at the
age of twenty-one years,the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the
loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property: And
also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life,to every person now living, of the age of
fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age ...It is proposed that the payments,
as already stated, be made to every person, rich or poor (Paine, 1997 [1797],pp. 326–7).
Since Paine,many political thinkers have endorsed the idea of an unconditional basic income
(UBI), as the proposal in its moder n form has become known (Cunliffe and Erreygers,
2004). UBI,‘an income unconditionally paid to all on an individualbasis, without means test
or work requirement’ (Van Parijs, 1992, p. 3), is a unique type of income maintenance
programme in modern welfare societies:it is universal rather than targeted or categor ical,paid
to the individual as opposed to households, and above all unconditional in contrast to the vast
majority of welfare programmes that require means and work testing as conditions for
eligibility.In recent years,basic income has gained considerable traction among scholars who
claim positive effects on income security, unemployment, social exclusion, ‘discretionary
time’ and flexibility across the life cycle, and even gender equality among the scheme’s many
virtues (Birnbaum, 2012; Groot, 2004; Haagh, 2011; McKay, 2001; Offe, 2008; Standing,
1999; 2002;Van Parijs, 1992; 1995; 2004;Wr ight, 2004; 2006).
While the scholarly fascination with UBI has yet to translate into widespread policy
development, advocates can point to the Alaska Permanent Fund, which has paid each
resident an unconditional annual grant of around $1,200 since 1982 (Widerquist and
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doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.01004.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013 VOL 61, 915–932
© 2012The Authors. Political Studies © 2012 Political StudiesAssociation
Howard, 2012). Additionally, in January 2004 Brazilian President Lula da Silva signed Bill
n. 10.835 into law, putting legislation in place to transform conditional cash grants schemes
such as the Bolsa Família into an unconditional Citizens Basic Income (Suplicy, 2005).
Similar proposals have been considered by governments in Ireland, the Netherlands,South
Africa and the US, while UBI policies are today on the policy agenda in countries as diverse
as Germany, Mongolia and Iran (Caputo, 2012). While there has been little explicit
acceptance of the basic income principle in the UK, Bill Jordan argues that a first step
towards the establishment of a UBI lies‘concealed within a load of cuts, conditionality and
means-testing’ of the current coalition government’s proposals for administrative simplifi-
cation of the tax–benefit system (Jordan, 2012, p. 1).1
In this article we focus on what Bernard Schaffer (1973) calls ‘the administrative factor’,
typically (and regrettably) ignored in most discussion of basic income. Elsewhere we have
addressed a number of ways in which administrative analysis sheds light on debates over
UBI, including the administrative efficiency of basic income compared with selective
welfare policies (De Wispelaere and Stirton, 2011) and the specific implementation chal-
lenges of UBI (De Wispelaere and Stirton, 2012). In this article, we instead focus on the
close link between administrative analysis and the political feasibility of UBI.The politics of
UBI is a complex matter that requires in-depth analysis of agenda setting, coalition
building, legitimacy and popular support, and institutional design (De Wispelaere and
Noguera, 2012). It is our view that administrative analysis is essential to all these and that
the administrability of UBI itself constitutes a first-order political problem.To neglect admin-
istration is to ignore a core dimension of politics.
Basic Income Administration as Politics
While some justifications for UBI are of a more ‘principled’ nature and others distinctively
‘pragmatic’ (Barry, 1996b),all presuppose that certain substantive effects will materialise. For
instance, universalism implies not merely that no-one is formally excluded from a pro-
gramme, but demands that mechanisms are put in place to ensure that eligible recipients
effectively receive their entitlement (De Wispelaere and Stirton,2011). In this regard, Brian
Barry’s (2001, p. 63) feline simile is spot on. When basic income advocates think of
differences between varieties of UBI, they typically do so in terms of broad design features:
for instance, whether the scheme is fully unconditional or instead resembles a participation
income (Atkinson, 1996; De Wispelaere and Stirton, 2007). While this is a central design
choice, it can easily obscure two important features. On the one hand, the canonical
definition of UBI as universal, individual and unconditional abstracts from a number of
dimensions – such as uniformity, adequacy, frequency or modality of payment (De Wis-
pelaere and Stirton, 2004) – which must be developed in some detail to understand fully
the design and real-world effects of particular proposals. On the other hand, the general
definition of UBI tells us little about the broader policy context in which it is meant to
operate, including the administrative context of implementation.Since the insights that can
be gained from considering only the broad contours of a radical idea are quickly exhausted,
we should focus instead on the detailed design choices that present themselves in imple-
mentation. According to Brian Barry, it is these that determine whether a UBI in practice
turns out to be a ‘tabby’ or a ‘tiger’:
916 JURGEN DE WISPELAERE AND LINDSAY STIRTON
© 2012The Authors. Political Studies © 2012 Political StudiesAssociation
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013, 61(4)
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