Archive for category: Allgemein

The literature on the social legitimacy of welfare benefits has shown that sick persons are perceived more deserving than unemployed individuals. However, these studies examine sick and unemployed persons as distinct groups, while unemployment and sickness are in fact strongly related. Policymakers across Europe have been increasingly concerned with discouraging a medicalization of unemployment and activating sick unemployed persons. Therefore, it is crucial to understand welfare attitudes toward this group. Using a factorial survey fielded with a representative sample of German-speaking adults (N=2,621), we investigate how sickness affects attitudes toward a hypothetical unemployed person on three dimensions: benefit levels, conditions, and sanctions. Respondents allocated similar benefit levels to unemployed persons regardless of whether they have an illness. Yet, they were more hesitant to apply existing conditions (e.g., active job search, job training) or sanction benefits when the unemployed person was also sick. This is except for conditions that tie benefits to obligatory health services (back training or psychological counseling) which was supported by the majority of respondents. Our research shows that the German public is not more generous and only partially more lenient toward sick unemployed persons as there is strong support for conditions targeted at overcoming ill health for this group. The findings underscore that sickness matters for how unemployed persons are perceived, but the impact varies across different dimensions of welfare attitudes.

Linden, P.; Reibling, N.(2022): Unemployed + Sick = More Deserving? A Survey Experiment on How the Medicalization of Unemployment Affects Public Opinion. In: Front. Sociol. 7

Active labour market policy (ALMP) reforms have fundamentally changed welfare states over the last decades. Their objectives are quite diverse: workfare reforms have increased conditionality and sanctioning of benefits, while enabling reforms have extended education and training opportunities for the unemployed. Little is known about the political discourse on ALMP reforms. We investigate how the individual unemployed person is portrayed in ALMP reforms via a comparative coding analysis of parliamentary debates on labour market reforms that took place in Germany in 2003 (workfare) and in 2016 (enabling). Our results indicate that compared to enabling reforms the individual unemployed is less important in the framing of workfare reforms but more often blamed. Party characteristics matter: parties on the left more often point to the deservingness of the unemployed. However, when the social democratic party in government introduced a workfare reform they used blaming of unemployed persons as a framing strategy.

Ariaans, M; Reibling, N (2022): Constructions of Unemployed Individuals in German Parliamentary Debates on Active Labour Market Policy Reforms: A Comparative Analysis of 2003 and 2016. In: Social Policy and Society, 1–18.

In their article within the latest issue of the Journal of Social Policy Research, Mareike Ariaans and Nadine Reibling investigate the role of health within the political poverty discourse in Germany. For this purpose, the authors review the poverty and wealth reports of the German government published since 2001 by emplyoing medicalization theory. Using qualitative and quantitative content analysis, they examine how health and illness are portrayed in the reports. In the evaluation it is evident that poverty is mainly described as a cause of illness. The formulated and proposed interventions nevertheless focus primarily on improving the health care system rather than on anti-poverty programs. Prevention and especially setting-based prevention have become more important measures in the last two reports. At the same time, these reports show a shift away from individual responsibility toward a stronger discussion of structural causes.

Ariaans, Mareike; Reibling, Nadine (2021): Die Rolle von Gesundheit und Krankheit im deutschen Armutsdiskurs. In: Zeitschrift für Sozialreform 67 (2), S. 123–152.

Stephan Krayter and Nadine Reibling just published a systematic review of scientific publications on poverty in the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice. In this article, the authors ask whether medical and psychological disciplines are increasingly publishing on poverty and whether they are outpacing economic and legal disciplines. The results indicate that this is indeed the case. In recent decades, medicine and psychology have been among the fastest growing scientific disciplines dealing with the issue of poverty. This points to a change in the way poverty is recognized in the scientific community.

Krayter, S., & Reibling, N. (2020). Medicalisation and psychologisation of poverty? An analysis of the scientific poverty discourse from 1956 to 2017.