The Social Legitimacy of Targeted Welfare presents a state-of-the-art review of research on ‘deservingness’. The editors claim that the institutional design of the welfare state and the public image (stereotypical images) of targeted groups are important components of the social legitimacy of targeted welfare benefits, but they believe that the perceived deservingness of the target group is the most influential factor of it. Perceived deservingness plays a role in the formation of social policies, and as the rank order of standard social risk groups’ deservingness seem to be universal across advanced societies. On the strength of these arguments, the book builds upon the importance of deservingness perceptions and how these work as indicators of social legitimacy in welfare policy.

The emphasis is clearly on the deservingness perceptions, but there are some chapters which present the link between public image, institutional design and perceptions. For instance, van Doorn & Bos, Lepianka and Ragusa (Chapter 6, 7, 17) apply a public image approach and prove that media images and frames as well as stereotypes reflect on the deservingness perceptions of target groups. The study of Reeskens and van der Meer (Chapter 3) provide evidence regarding the link between institutional design and deservingness perceptions, as their results show that the public give more weight to those deservingness criteria which are reflected in legislation as well.

One of the greatest achievements of the volume is the unified adaptation of the CARIN criteria, which serves as a tool to operationalize perceptions, originally developed by van Oorschot (Reference van Oorschot2000). The first CARIN component is ‘control’, which refers to the responsibility of the group for their needy situation. ‘A’ stands for ‘attitude’, more precisely, it defines the attitude of claimants towards their received support. The next component is ‘reciprocity’, as a group deservingness perception also relies on the level of the groups’ contribution to the society. ‘Identity’, as the fourth component, emphasizes the gap between the target group and the public and assume that people find those groups more deserving, who are similar to them based on particular aspects. Finally, ‘need’ is the most evident criterion, as it defines the perceived level of need.

The book extends the application of the CARIN criteria to different target groups, and their results revealed that the weights of the components differ regarding social groups. For instance, Reeskens and van der Meer (Chapter 3) report that reciprocity – measured as previous tax contribution and job search activity – and control – measured as the external cause of the unemployment – are the most important dimensions regarding the deservingness of unemployed people. By contrast, de Wilde’s chapter (Chapter 12) revealed that Flemish social workers considered primarily the need criterion (the financial need of the recipients) when they had to judge the deservingness of social assistance recipients. Furthermore, Kootsra (Chapter 14) investigated the deservingness criteria in case of white and BME Britons, and immigrants. The results showed that identity was the sole factor predicting each groups’ deservingness, and the effect was the strongest in case of the immigrants.

The challenges associated with operationalizing CARIN are particularly demonstrated in the book. Reeskens and van der Meer, as well as Buß et al. (Chapter 3, 9) investigate general policy preferences (e.g. whether respondents prefer to reduce or increase social spending), while others (e.g. Chapter 4) concern concrete benefits (e.g. agree/disagree with the statement ‘many of the social assistance beneficiaries don’t deserve help’). In addition to measuring general or scheme specific deservingness opinion, Baumberg Geiger and Kumlin et al. (Chapter 4, 15) also implement the perception of misuse of welfare benefits (e.g. measuring the level of agreement with the following statements: ‘welfare system has created a culture of dependency’, ‘unemployed could find a job’, ‘whether many people manage to get benefit to which they are not entitled’). These examples illustrate how heterogeneous the concept of deservingness is, and how difficult it is to investigate the topic, thus general inferences from the findings should be cautiously drawn.

Laenen and Meuleman (Chapter 2) try to create a rank order for not the dimensions of the criteria but for the groups themselves. They investigated the universal rank order on the individual level instead of the commonly used aggregate country-level analysis. They highlight that the aggregate data has masked the existence of a considerable group, the welfare-egalitarians, who do not differentiate between older people, sick or disabled people, and unemployed people. The authors also revealed that the majority of those people who have an order, put both elderly and sick or disabled people to the top. Their findings also support that on the micro level individual characteristics have more effect on the rank order than structural parameters. They argue that cross-national and cross-temporal differences are less important, while people rank social groups differently because of their social position.

Other chapters (9, 10) examine further the role of individual and contextual characteristics in the formation of deservingness perceptions and opinion toward welfare recipients. Based on these investigations we can also add the question of ‘according to who?’ to van Oorschot’s (Reference van Oorschot2000) original questions, which incorporates the concept of deservingness: ‘Who should get what, and why?’. Individuals’ socioeconomic and ideological position has an influence on their deservingness opinion, in some cases it could be even more important than other explanations such as self-interest (Chapter 10). Regarding contextual characteristics, Buß et al. in Chapter 9 have found that institutional changes such as activation reforms do not correlate with the belief that eligibility conditions should be tightened. They also consider that differences in deservingness opinion can be explained by cultural reasons.

The book also extends deservingness theory to rarely investigated social groups, such as immigrants and rich people. While the research of immigrants easily fits the deservingness theory, as CARIN criteria are as applicable in their case as regarding older people, people with a disability or unemployed people, the deservingness of the rich may seem strange for the first reading. Although Sadin’s and Ragusa’s chapters (16, 17) clearly identify the significance of the research topic and the applicability of the deservingness theory for wealthy people. In the case of the more wealthy, the question is whether they deserve their assets or not. Therefore, the ‘need’ criterion is negligible in this context. Nevertheless, control, attitude and reciprocity are important components of wealthy people’s perceived deservingness. In the case of the rich, control refers to the person’s own effort in accumulating capital, attitude is about work ethic, while reciprocity measures the usefulness of wealthy people for the society.

The book also considers methodological issues in this field. For instance, Reeskens and van der Meer as well as De Wilde (Chapter 3, 12) use vignette-based surveys to investigate which group is most likely to attract public support and what are the associated aspects that can determine deservingness opinion. In discrete choice experiments (e.g. Chapter 13), respondents have to decide between two randomly paired situations considering which is the more deserving of publically funded welfare and support. Using this method the authors have found no difference between the preferences of the public and the policy makers regarding ranking the CARIN criteria.

A unique approach is measuring not only explicit but implicit attitudes as well. In Chapter 5 de Vries applied survey questions for explicit and the Go / No-go Association Test for implicit attitudes. During the test participants had to pair or unpair stimulis (e.g. pictures or characteristics) with benefit claimants within a limited time. The investigation proved that there is a correlation between explicit and implicit attitudes, although a great part of respondents who do not acknowledge explicit attitudes do hold implicit ones.

In summary, the book is an important contribution to the social welfare literature, as it serves many examples on how to apply deservingness theory to assess the deservingness of any given social group, and so the social legitimacy of targeted welfare. Most of the chapters apply the CARIN criteria, which help to operationalize deservingness. However, the diverse results of the chapters shed a light on the main deficiency of the CARIN criteria, which is its operationalization, as many methodological aspects are not clearly defined, and future work might focus on the comparative aspects of CARIN (criteria) across measurements.