Over the past decade, the proposal for a Universal and Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) has become a serious alternative in policy-making circles. UBI promises replace the complex welfare bureaucracy with a single benefit – abandoning targets (such as the unemployed) and activation instruments (such as job-search requirements). This disarmingly simple idea has inspired policy experiments in many countries, the Netherlands among them. I show how UBI became a credible policy alternative in the Netherlands, with the capacity to fundamentally alter the course of the welfare state, but also at the risk of losing the underlying revolutionary ideals.
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This dissertation has been funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) through a research talent grant. The awarded project was titled “Unravelling the Basic Income Debate” with project number 406.18.531. The data collection required for this project was subjected to ethical review by the Ethics Review Board at Tilburg University and approved under references RP583 and TSB_RP54.
The data used in this project are archived and publicly available (partly upon request) in the Tilburg School of Social and Behavioural Sciences Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.34894/0VEH4V).
