What explains the popular support for basic income?

Abstract

There is growing interest in understanding the popular support for basic income in Finland and globally. On the one hand, researchers have tried to evaluate the level of support in different countries, and, on the other hand, to explain the variation of support within populations. In addition to scientific curiosity, there are practical reasons for surveying population support. These reasons are closely linked to politics and policymaking: for example, political parties aim to understand the opinions of the electorate to frame their political agenda in a way that resonates with opinions among their possible voters and maximises their political support in elections. During the last two decades, support for basic income has been stable in Finland. Surveys carried out before the Finnish basic income experiment showed that about 60 to 70 percent of Finns were in favour of universal basic income (Airio et al., 2016; Andersson and Kangas, 2005). However, recent studies on popular support have provided highly divergent results. Differences in the results of separate surveys are likely related to differences in the definitions of basic income given in the questionnaires. Previous research has shown that there tends to be a substantial framing effect on the level of support for policy issues (Rasinski, 1989). Moreover, such general questions as ‘Are you in favour of or against basic income?’ and ‘Is basic income good or bad?’ tend to produce much higher support levels than more specific questions that aim to explain the content of the basic income model (Pulkka, 2018). One obvious feature of general survey questions on basic income is that they do not give any indication to the respondent about the possible costs of implementing basic income. In some Finnish surveys, the respondents were given more detailed information about the costs and tax levels needed to finance the benefit. Such more-detailed information decreased the support levels to lower than 30 percent (Airio et al., 2016).