Rethinking Basic Income: Welfare Principles, Institutional Contexts, and Job Search Behaviour

This book examines how basic income may impact on job search behaviour amongst unemployed individuals by analysing its defining principles, unconditionality, universalism, and non-withdrawal, within existing welfare regimes. The research develops a new ideal type framework to measure how closely ten European welfare regimes approximate basic income principles. Using qualitative comparative analysis and time use data, the study examines a range of welfare configurations to identify their impact on job search intensity. The findings challenge conventional assumptions about basic income's incentivising effects, revealing that its impact is neither linear nor deterministic but emerges from complex interactions between policy mechanisms and institutional contexts. This approach provides a foundation for more realistic expectations about basic income implementation and advances debates that have often relied more on theoretical assumptions than systematic evidence.