With a growing number of strict obligations and harsh sanctions for welfare recipients, the Netherlands has increasingly become a punitive welfare state. This article looks at what this means for welfare clients and their commonsense understandings of the law. To analyze how welfare officials shape clients' legal consciousness, I draw on an online survey among Dutch welfare clients (N = 1305) and a correlation analysis. The findings show that there is a clear relationship between welfare clients' own legal consciousness and their assessment of welfare officials' beliefs about the law. However, not all elements of their legal consciousness are relationally influenced by the same factors. Also, clients' self-reported compliance behavior is less relationally influenced than other elements of their legal consciousness. This study adds to our understanding of the mechanisms that constitute the production of relational and second-order legal consciousness and it contributes to the development of new research methods to study people's perceptions of law.

中文翻译：

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惩罚性福利国家中的关系法律意识：荷兰福利官员如何塑造客户对法律的看法

随着对福利接受者的严格义务和严厉制裁越来越多，荷兰日益成为一个惩罚性福利国家。本文着眼于这对福利客户意味着什么以及他们对法律的常识性理解。为了分析福利官员如何塑造客户的法律意识，我利用了一项针对荷兰福利客户的在线调查（N = 1305）和相关性分析。研究结果表明，福利委托人自身的法律意识与他们对福利官员法律信念的评估之间存在明显的关系。然而，并非他们的法律意识的所有要素都受到相同因素的相关影响。此外，与法律意识的其他要素相比，客户自我报告的合规行为受到的相关影响较小。这项研究增加了我们对关系性和二阶法律意识产生机制的理解，并有助于开发新的研究方法来研究人们的法律认知。