Social Policy Bureaucrats’ Deservingness Perceptions : Factors Influencing Brazilian INSS Officials

Abstract

Welfare States’ settings and social policies’ design are linked to people’s welfare attitudes: their ideas on distributive justice, often translated in survey studies across different dimensions of deservingness perceptions. Scores across deservingness perceptions’ dimensions are expected to tell how respondents believe social policies should be implemented: which social groups should be targeted, and on what grounds. Research across European countries has traced relevant connections between different individual and institutional factors and people’s deservingness perceptions, and hint at how these are linked to support for different social policy designs. These suggested significant impacts in both forthcoming social policy reforms and present social policy outcomes – for their implementation is often operated by street-level bureaucrats, who can channel their own perceptions through the policy's instruments, effectively shaping its delivery. Street-level bureaucrats’ deservingness perceptions were still not quantitatively studied in the South American countries, whose welfare States carry very distinct characteristics. Drawing on the existing European research's survey designs and latest qualitative findings on the topic, we apply an adapted and updated survey to a sample of Brazilian social security street-level officials and relate it to available administrative data. Ordered regression analysis gauge how social work academic background, direct contact with the public and socioeconomic status are linked to shifts in the officials’ perceptions about social assistance beneficiaries under seven different deservingness criteria. We found that social work academic background strongly contributes to the odds of higher overall deservingness perceptions, while frequent contact with the public can reduce them under the control deservingness criterion. Middle-class socioeconomic status, both objectively our subjectively measured, can be connected to increased odds that beneficiaries are seen as undeserving under the criteria of control and reciprocity. The research takes a new step on the deservingness perceptions survey studies’ trail and opens up avenues for the formulation of new analytical frameworks. For practitioners, it raises the awareness of the importance of understanding the factors driving bureaucracy decision-making, being it in the street, screen, or system-level.