perform certain activities, personal advisors likewise sign a commitment to offer certain levels of support. Where claimants feel a greater entitlement to support, we would expect stigma to fall (Gubrium and Lødemel, 2014). The third way of reducing stigma is perhaps the closest to the traditional heart of social policy: to change the structure of the benefits system. Britain has seen several deliberate attempts to create less-stigmatising benefits; 1960s research convinced Labour to replace the stigmatised ‘National Assistance’ with ‘Supplementary Benefits’ (according to Page, 1984:44), while tax credits in the 1990s were explicitly designed to – and appear to have succeeded in – lowering stigma (see also Breese, 2011). In general, we would expect less universal, less contributions-based, less generous, and more conditional benefits to be more stigmatised (Albrekt Larsen, 2006), with global studies of shame providing some support for this (Gubrium and Lødemel, 2014). As Richard Titmuss put it in Commitment to Welfare (1968:135), the ‘fundamental challenge’ of social policy is therefore to create a universal infrastructure around which selective provision can target services ‘with the minimum risk of stigma in favour of those who needs are greatest’. However, this paper’s main contribution is descriptive rather than prescriptive: to show that of benefits stigma can be conceptualised and measured; that stigma is reported by a considerable minority of claimants and non-claimants alike; and that there is evidence against the idea that this overspills into a ‘dependency culture’. In this, it hopefully sheds new light on an old problem, and provides a further academic grounding for policy debates that seem likely to recur for as long as we have a benefits system in the present form. Notes , The American (blog of the American Enterprise Institute), Nov 30 2009. 2 , accessed 4/8/2014. 3 Claimants will often be subject to other associated stigmas such as unemployment and poverty; but while these are a crucial part of lived experience, they are not part of our focus here. 4 Authors’ analysis of weighted data from British Social Attitudes survey 2000 (UK Data Archive SN4486). 5 For links to a number of headlines (and a critique of the statistics within them), see
perform certain activities, personal advisors likewise sign a commitment to offer certain levels of support. Where claimants feel a greater entitlement to support, we would expect stigma to fall (Gubrium and Lødemel, 2014). The third way of reducing stigma is perhaps the closest to the traditional heart of social policy: to change the structure of the benefits system. Britain has seen several deliberate attempts to create less-stigmatising benefits; 1960s research convinced Labour to replace the stigmatised ‘National Assistance’ with ‘Supplementary Benefits’ (according to Page, 1984:44), while tax credits in the 1990s were explicitly designed to – and appear to have succeeded in – lowering stigma (see also Breese, 2011). In general, we would expect less universal, less contributions-based, less generous, and more conditional benefits to be more stigmatised (Albrekt Larsen, 2006), with global studies of shame providing some support for this (Gubrium and Lødemel, 2014). As Richard Titmuss put it in Commitment to Welfare (1968:135), the ‘fundamental challenge’ of social policy is therefore to create a universal infrastructure around which selective provision can target services ‘with the minimum risk of stigma in favour of those who needs are greatest’. However, this paper’s main contribution is descriptive rather than prescriptive: to show that of benefits stigma can be conceptualised and measured; that stigma is reported by a considerable minority of claimants and non-claimants alike; and that there is evidence against the idea that this overspills into a ‘dependency culture’. In this, it hopefully sheds new light on an old problem, and provides a further academic grounding for policy debates that seem likely to recur for as long as we have a benefits system in the present form. Notes , The American (blog of the American Enterprise Institute), Nov 30 2009. 2 , accessed 4/8/2014. 3 Claimants will often be subject to other associated stigmas such as unemployment and poverty; but while these are a crucial part of lived experience, they are not part of our focus here. 4 Authors’ analysis of weighted data from British Social Attitudes survey 2000 (UK Data Archive SN4486). 5 For links to a number of headlines (and a critique of the statistics within them), see
2016%20JSP%20post-print.docx