In this study, we examine whether welfare deservingness judgements in the United Kingdom are affected by a bias against claimants from stigmatised social class backgrounds. In the United Kingdom, as in other countries, stereotypes of a perceived social ‘underclass’ are widespread. Political and media discourse frequently portrays members of this ‘underclass’ as lazy, feckless and not genuinely in need of support. Yet despite strong academic interest in perceived welfare deservingness, existing research has largely neglected the role of social class bias in deservingness judgements. To address this gap, we use a novel vignette experiment administered to a representative sample of British respondents to provide the first direct evidence of discrimination against welfare claimants with ‘underclass’ signifiers. We find that the British public are more likely to endorse a sanction against a claimant from an ‘underclass’ background than against an otherwise identical claimant from a less stigmatised class background. We also asked respondents to justify their decisions and, applying computational methods to analyse these free-text responses, we find that ‘underclass’ claimants are more likely to be blamed for violating the conditions of their benefit, while claimants from other class backgrounds are more often given the ‘benefit of the doubt.’ Our findings have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between social class background and public deservingness perceptions, and potentially for the differential treatment of claimants by the benefits system.

中文翻译：

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福利制裁判断中的社会阶级偏见：来自全国代表性样本的实验证据

在这项研究中，我们研究了英国的福利应得性判断是否受到对来自受污名社会阶级背景的索赔人的偏见的影响。与其他国家一样，在英国，普遍存在对社会“下层阶级”的刻板印象。政治和媒体话语经常将这个“下层阶级”的成员描绘成懒惰、无能且并不真正需要支持。然而，尽管学术界对感知的福利应得性有浓厚的兴趣，但现有的研究在很大程度上忽略了社会阶级偏见在应得性判断中的作用。为了解决这一差距，我们对英国受访者的代表性样本进行了一项新颖的小插曲实验，以提供对具有“下层阶级”能指的福利要求者的歧视的第一个直接证据。我们发现，英国公众更有可能支持对来自“下层阶级”背景的索赔人进行制裁，而不是对来自不太受污名化的阶级背景的其他相同的索赔人进行制裁。我们还要求受访者证明他们的决定是正确的，并应用计算方法来分析这些自由文本的回答，我们发现“下层阶级”索赔人更有可能因违反其福利条件而受到指责，而来自其他阶级背景的索赔人则更多经常给出“怀疑的好处”。我们的研究结果对我们理解社会阶层背景与公众应得性认知之间的关系具有重要意义，并可能对福利制度对索赔人的区别对待具有重要意义。