The Politics of Sanctioning the Unemployed

Unemployment benefit claimants who become unemployed voluntarily, refuse offers of employment, or fail to fulfill their job-search obligations risk being sanctioned, meaning they may lose parts or all of their benefit. Over the last three decades, many advanced democracies have reformed these sanctioning rules. Generally, they were made stricter, but occasionally, they also were relaxed. My paper examines the dynamic change in the strictness of these rules. My argument is that these rules are changed in response to changing unemployment rates. Enduring increases in unemployment are associated with the introduction of tighter sanctions. Stricter sanctions, I argue, are a way to justify increased spending on support for the unemployed during times in which the revenue base for these expenditures shrinks. They are a signal to voters that, while the `honest, deserving' unemployed will receive support, no resources are spent on those who are found to be `undeserving'. I use a mixed-methods design to show empirical support for my argument. The quantitative part draws both on cross-national survey data and a novel comparative time-series dataset on the strictness of unemployment benefit sanctions in 21 OECD countries between 1980 and 2012. The qualitative part consists of an in-depth case study of the politics of sanction reforms in Australia between 1974 and 2012.