Eligibility, benefit level or activation? What drives fairness perceptions and take-up intentions of minimum income benefits?

Minimum income schemes are among the most controversial social policy programmes. Besides debates about their effectiveness to alleviate poverty and the costs associated with them, social legitimacy and stigma associated with benefit receipt are important issues, which contribute to high rates of non-take-up. Despite growing political and academic interest, there is limited understanding of how specific policy design features affect social legitimacy and take-up behaviour. This article investigates the impact of key design features of minimum income schemes on perceptions of fairness and intentions to claim benefits. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from distributive justice, utility arguments, and the literature on administrative burden, we conducted a factorial survey experiment in Germany. Survey respondents of the labour force were presented with scenarios describing a minimum income scheme that varied in the following dimensions: eligibility criteria, benefit level, workfare activation and enabling activation. Our findings reveal that means testing, behavioural requirements, and subsidised training significantly increase perceived fairness, with behavioural requirements being the most critical factor. Behavioural requirements are particularly important for perceived fairness when benefits are generous. Conversely, moderate behavioural requirements, higher benefit levels, and opportunities for subsidised training enhance take-up intentions. We interpret these results as reflecting the principle of need and the social norm of reciprocity, which shape perceptions of fairness, alongside utility arguments that influence take-up intentions. Notably, we find little evidence that perceptions of administrative burden reduce take-up intentions in our scenarios, except in the case of very harsh behavioural requirements. Overall, the design features of our factorial survey have a similar influence on perceptions of fairness and take-up intentions (although to a different extent), suggesting a partly interrelated relationship between these phenomena.