To take or not to take? An overview of the factors contributing to the non-take-up of public provisions
| Author | Julie Janssens,Natascha Van Mechelen |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13882627221106800 |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
To take or not to take? An
overview of the factors
contributing to the non-take-up
of public provisions
Julie Janssens
Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy, Department of Sociology, University of
Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
Natascha Van Mechelen
Federal Public Service Social Security, Brussels, Belgium
Abstract
This article aimsto provide an overview of the main mechanisms underlyingthe non-take-up of public
provisionsby bringing together insightsfrom existing theoreticalmodels and the large body of empirical
evidencewithin Europe and the U.S. We drawon studies based on the rational choice modelas well as
on insightsfrom psychology and behaviouraleconomics. Whereas most studiesare confined to the cli-
ent level onlyto explain non-take-up, an importantfocus of attention here is the way policydesign and
administrationcan affect the uptake of public provisions,as well as the role the broader socialcontext
plays in understanding non-take-up. In this article, we bring different strands in the literaturetogether
and developa theoretical framework which listsand links the various mechanisms at play.At the same
time, we summarisemost important empiricalfindings on the drivers of non-take-up,and focus on les-
sons from the literature regardinghow policies could be redesigned to reducenon-take-up.
Keywords
Non-take-up, public provisions, social policy, multilevel framework
Introduction
It is widely acknowledged that non-take-up of public provisions is a serious problem in contempor-
ary welfare states. Available estimates indicate that in many Western European countries more than
Corresponding author:
Julie Janssens, Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy, Department of Sociology, University of Antwerp, Antwerp,
Belgium.
E-mail: julie.janssens@uantwerpen.be
Article
European Journal of Social Security
2022, Vol. 24(2) 95–116
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/13882627221106800
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half of those eligible for means-tested social assistance at active age do not receive it (Eurofound,
2015; Fuchs et al., 2020). Despite the fact that exact figures on the degree of non-take-up vary
depending on the type of benefit studied and type of data and methods used (Goedemé and
Janssens, 2020), such high non-participation rates imply that public policies risk missing their
purpose.
1
Non-take-up undermines the poverty-reducing capacity of the welfare state. Further, it
causes unjustified disparities among those eligible (Fuchs, 2007: 7; Hernanz et al., 2004: 9).
Finally, while non-take-up saves public funds in the short term, this may not hold true in the
longer term if non-take-up contributes to, for instance, delayed health care and an impoverished
environment for children (Dubois and Ludwinek, 2014: 10-11).
Not surprisingly, then, there is a vast amount of academic and empirical literature on both the
size and the determinants of non-take-up. Traditional economic literature considers the issue of
non-take-up from an economic perspective relying on the assumptions of the rational choice
model. Within this strand of the literature, individuals are assumed to be perfectly rational
2
and
utility-maximising actors who are able to optimise the trade-off between costs and benefits of a
given choice, including the choice to take up benefits or not. More recently, a second stream of lit-
erature has raised serious questions and counterarguments to the idea that the decision to apply for
benefits simply reflects a rational calculation by perfectly optimising individual agents. Instead,
behavioural economics focuses on important deviations from the traditional assumptions of ration-
ality and utility maximisation by drawing attention to cognitive and behavioural barriers to individ-
ual decision-making. Few attempts have been made to integrate both strands of literature (with
Bhargava and Manoli (2015) being a notable exception). Most studies focus on either the costs
and benefits of claiming or on associated behavioural barriers, and an integrated framework of
all potential determinants of non-take-up is lacking.
This article aims to bridge this theoretical gap by providing an integrated overview of the main
mechanisms underlying the non-take-up
3
of public provisions. We pay particular attention to the
way policy design and administration can affect the uptake of public provisions. While the traditional
1. Whereas in this article we consider non-take-up as an inefficiency of social policy, it should be added that some see the
complexity associated with the application procedure (and the associated non-take-up) as an additional targeting instru-
ment that will make policies more efficient as the costs associated with applying may screen out those with low expected
benefits and only self-select those individuals into programmes that assess the benefits to be most valuable to them
(Kleven and Kopczuk, 2011). Kleven & Kopczuk (2011) further argue that in the case of imperfect information and
limited public budgets a certain degree of non-take-up (type I error) may be defendable and even optimal in order to
also minimise the number of false awards to ineligible claimants (type II error).
2. In the academic literature on individual decision-making the word ‘rational’can be interpreted in at least two different
ways. In the narrowest, strictly micro-economic sense, individuals are said to be rational if their preferences are complete
(that is, if they reflect a relationship of superiority, inferiority, or indifference among all pairs of choices) and are transitive
(that is, they do not exhibit any cyclic inconsistencies) (Mas-Colell et al., 1995). In the broader sense, and according to the
interpretation that we adopt in this article, individuals are considered to be rational when they choose a course of action
that is most in line with their personal preferences.
3. In this article we use the term non-take-up as a synonym for non-receipt or non-provisionof benefits. Despite the fact that
the term non-take-up seems to suggest that non-receipt is the individual’s responsibility (as he has decided not to claim),
and we argue that administration, policymakers and the social context should be held responsible too, it is still the concept
that is most often used in the literature. In addition, we believe different types of non-take-up can be distinguished (e.g.
primary vs. secondary), each with their own specific explanations. For a detailed overview of the different types of
non-take-up see Goedemé & Janssens (2020) and Warin (2010). The goal of this article, however, is to provide a
broad overview of the different determinants influencing the non-take-up of public provisions in general, rather than dis-
cussing the drivers for the different subtypes of non-take-up separately.
96 European Journal of Social Security 24(2)
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