As noted in the introductory chapter of this edited collection, welfare conditionality – which links recipients’ eligibility to collectively provided social security benefits and wider welfare services to compulsory, specified individual responsibilities and behavioural requirements, under threat of sanction for non-compliance – has become a core element of welfare reform in many nations since the mid-1990s. Within a diversity of national and regional settings across the globe, politicians of all hues from across the mainstream political spectrum have been happy to embrace and endorse the mantra of ‘no rights without responsibilities’ (Giddens, 1998).

Recalibrating welfare states around a principle of behavioural conditionality, which emphasises a particular individualised notion of reciprocity that relegates and denies more collectivised claims to welfare rights variously based on need, universalistic entitlement and/or human rights serves twin purposes. This approach offers populist appeal for those characterised as responsible, hard-pressed ‘workers’, whose efforts are seen as worthy of reward (see, for example, May, 2016; Morrison, 2017). Simultaneously, it also offers a powerful, farreaching and apparently common-sense justification for the reduction or removal of the basic social rights of those deemed as irresponsibly inactive or idle – and thus undeserving of collective support.

The language used varies according to geography – for example ‘shirkers’ or ‘scroungers’ in the UK; chômedu (‘dole queue rider’) in France; ‘dole bludgers’ in Australia; and ‘welfare queens’ in the US (respectively Byrne, 2011; Osborne, 2012; Hérail and Lovatt, 1987; McCauley, 2017; Gilman, 2014). However, all such people are seen as irresponsibly failing to contribute, and thus personally reneging on their side of the individualised welfare contract between citizen and state that welfare conditionality overtly propagates.

Although rights to social security and welfare remain embedded within international human rights law and treaties, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UN General Assembly, 1966), post-2008 many national governments have responded to the global economic crisis, by enacting welfare reforms that prioritise individual responsibility and economic efficiency above and beyond collectivised social rights (Taylor-Gooby, 2009). The combination of significant ongoing economic change and sustained welfare reform agendas has seen the emergence of a new politics of welfare which, in turn, seeks to legitimise a new, and much more highly constrained, conditional type of welfare state in the future (Bonoli and Natali, 2012).