COVID-19 had the potential to dramatically increase public support for welfare. It was a time of apparent increased solidarity, of apparently deserving claimants, and of increasingly widespread exposure to the benefits system. However, there are also reasons to expect the opposite effect: an increase in financial strain fostering austerity and self-interest, and thermostatic responses to increasing welfare generosity. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the pandemic on attitudes towards working-age unemployment benefits in the UK using a unique combination of data sources: (i) temporally fine-grained data on attitudinal change over the course of the pandemic; and (ii) a novel nationally representative survey contrasting attitudes towards pandemic-era and pre-pandemic claimants (including analysis of free-text responses). Our results show that the pandemic prompted little change in UK welfare attitudes. However, we also find that COVID-era unemployment claimants were perceived as substantially more deserving than those claiming prior to the pandemic. This contrast suggests a strong degree of ‘COVID exceptionalism’ – with COVID claimants seen as categorically different from conventional claimants, muting the effect of the pandemic on welfare attitudes overall.

中文翻译：

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危机中的福利态度：新冠例外论如何破坏更大的团结

COVID-19 有可能大幅增加公众对福利的支持。这是一个团结明显增强、理应获得救济的人以及越来越广泛地享受福利制度的时代。然而，也有理由预期会出现相反的效果：金融压力的增加会促进紧缩和自身利益，以及对日益慷慨的福利的恒温反应。在本文中，我们使用独特的数据源组合来调查大流行对英国工作年龄失业救济金态度的影响：（i）大流行期间态度变化的时间细粒度数据；(ii) 一项新颖的全国代表性调查，对比对大流行时代和大流行前索赔人的态度（包括对自由文本回复的分析）。我们的结果表明，大流行对英国的福利态度几乎没有造成什么改变。然而，我们还发现，新冠疫情期间的失业申请人被认为比大流行前的失业申请人更值得领取失业救济金。这种对比表明了强烈的“新冠例外论”——新冠病毒索赔者被视为与传统索赔者截然不同，从而削弱了大流行对整体福利态度的影响。