Open Collections

Choi, Ariette

University of British Columbia

When designing mean-tested social programs, policymakers have two options for verifying eligibility: formal applications or self-attestations. Formal applications are far more common and often the default verification procedure. Why do policymakers generally prefer formal applications over self-attestations? Existing literature indicates that policymakers select verification procedures by paying attention to considerations related to program goals, cost effectiveness, and risk management. Another possible explanation is that this decision may also be driven by public opinion. In this thesis, I argue that benefit claimants’ characteristics shape citizens’ preferences for whether attestations or applications are used to determine eligibility for social assistance. Citizens use available informational cues about benefit claimants to make assessments of how deserving a benefit claimant is. Importantly, they may use these assessments to also evaluate claimants’ perceived trustworthiness. Results from a survey experiment suggest that exposing individuals to examples of benefit claimants with low deservingness characteristics may foster more support for formal applications, relative to examples of high deservingness characteristics. Put differently, citizens may prefer benefit claimants they deem to be less deserving, whom they may also view as less trustworthy, to submit to more rigorous verification procedure when applying for assistance. However, it is important to caveat that the significance of findings from this experiment are dependent on the chosen model specification. The findings from this experiment thus offer further insight to why verification procedures for social programs are often complex. Assessments of high deservingness and associated inferences of trustworthiness amongst benefit claimants are vital for maintaining the integrity of attestation-based verification procedure in the public’s eye. In the absence of both factors, formal applications may in fact be the more practical option for policymakers.

Text

2024-08-19

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88962

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/