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Claiming deservingness : The durability of social security claimant discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic
Summers, Kate Edmiston, Daniel Geiger, Ben Baumberg Ingold, Jo Scullion, Lisa de Vries, Robert Young, David
Summers, Kate
Edmiston, Daniel
Geiger, Ben Baumberg
Ingold, Jo
Scullion, Lisa
de Vries, Robert
Young, David
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic created extraordinary conditions for social protection systems globally, with both material and discursive implications. In the UK, these unprecedented circumstances led to an influx of (first-time) social security claims, expectations of increased social solidarity and more positive public discussion around benefits. One might expect this to affect attitudes towards claiming. This article focuses on the accounts of claimants themselves, and how they conceived of their own claims during the pandemic. We analyse in-depth interviews conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic with a large, diverse sample of social security benefit claimants, and draw on concepts of deservingness to show how social security claimants negated stigma through appealing to specific deservingness frames. We show how frames relating to the normative criteria of need, control, contribution and identity were deployed by those who began claiming during the pandemic, as well as those whose claim began pre-pandemic. Despite important points of variation, especially in relation to the categories of control and identity, we find that these deservingness frames did not appear to be disrupted in a major way by the pandemic context, suggesting their notable durability in extraordinary circumstances, with implications for the conditions that can (and cannot) precipitate discursive change or rupture.
Keywords
COVID-19, deservingness, social security, United Kingdom, welfare benefits
Date
2025
Type
Journal article
Journal
The Sociological Review
Book
Volume
Issue
Page Range
1-21
Article Number
ACU Department
Peter Faber Business School
Faculty of Law and Business
Faculty of Law and Business
Collections
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
CC BY-NC 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© The Author(s) 2025.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).