‘Unconditionality is a very, very difficult question’ – views on benefit conditionality among Finnish basic income experiment participants

A central principle of basic income (BI) is unconditionality, contrasting with the prevailing trend in developed welfare systems that emphasises conditionality based on ‘activation’. While literature exists on attitudes about benefit conditionality and various BI solutions, there is limited understanding of the reasoning by individuals who have experienced a shift from conditionality to unconditionality within a BI framework. This gap highlights the need for more research on individual experiences related to these changing benefit principles. Utilising eighty-one in-depth participant interviews from the Finnish BI experiment targeting the long-term unemployed, we asked: how do experiment participants view benefit (un)conditionality after having received an unconditional basic income? Our results on the views of benefit conditionality among BI recipients proved to be quite varied. Some of the interviewees strongly supported principles of unconditionality, some basing their views on personal experience, while others opposed unconditionality, referring to their political beliefs, associating universal BI with leftist ideas, despite the Finnish experiment having been initiated by a conservative government. Interviews indicate that institutionalised norms and personal ideologies – key factors in welfare state research – significantly influence reasoning on (un)conditionality among participants in BI experiments, reflecting the work ethos of both traditional and current Nordic welfare state models.