Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Foreword -- Acknowledgements -- The social legitimacy of targeted welfare and welfare deservingness / Wim van Oorschot and Femke Roosma -- A universal rank order of deservingness? Geographical, temporal and social-structural comparisons / Tijs Laenen and Bart Meuleman -- The relative importance of welfare deservingness criteria / Tim Reeskens and Tom van der Meer -- False beliefs and the perceived deservingness of social security benefit claimants / Ben Baumberg Geiger -- Negative attitudes towards welfare claimants : the importance of unconscious bias / Robert de Vries -- Are visual depictions of poverty in the US gendered and racialized? / Bas van Doorn and Angela Bos -- The varying faces of poverty and deservingness in Dutch print media / Dorota Lepianka -- How welfare reforms influence public opinion regarding welfare deservingness : evidence from Dutch time-series Data, 1975-2006 / Wilfred Uunk and Wim van Oorschot -- Making deservingness of the unemployed conditional: changes in public support for the conditionality of unemployment benefits / Christopher Buss, Bernhard Ebbinghaus and Elias Naumann -- The deservingness logic applied to public opinions concerning work obligations for Benefit claimants / Femke Roosma and Marjolein Jeene -- Social assistance deservingness and policy measures : attitudes of Finnish politicians, administrators and citizens / Helena Blomberg, Johanna Kallio, Olli Kangas, Christian Kroll and Mikko Niemelä -- Deservingness in social assistance administrative practice: a factorial survey approach / Marjolijn De Wilde -- Healthcare deservingness opinions of the general public and policymakers compared: a discrete choice experiment / Maartje van der Aa, Mickaël Hiligsmann, Aggie Paulus and Silvia Evers -- Us versus them : examining the perceived deservingness of minority groups in the British welfare state using a survey experiment / Anouk Kootstra -- Leap of faith or judgment of deservingness? Generalized trust, trust in immigrants and support for the welfare state / Staffan Kumlin, Dag Wollebæk, Audun Fladmoe and Kari Steen-Johnsen -- They're not worthy : the perceived deservingness of the rich and its connection to policy preferences / Meredith Sadin -- Do the rich deserve a tax cut? Public images, deservingness criteria and Americans' tax policy preferences / Jordan Ragusa -- Evaluating the fruitfulness of deservingness theory / Bart Meuleman, Femke Roosma and Wim van Oorschot.

Presenting a stimulating contribution to the quickly advancing field of welfare attitudes research, this important book develops the understanding of welfare legitimacy. It does so by assessing the nature of popular judgments about welfare deservingness, as well as the roots and consequences of these attitudes, offering a state-of-the-art picture of the latest theoretical, conceptual and methodological developments. The Social Legitimacy of Targeted Welfare provides a multidisciplinary view on deservingness attitudes, with contributions from sociology, political science, media studies and social psychology. It advocates a multi-actor perspective, looking not only at citizens' attitudes, but also at attitudes of social administrators and policy-makers. The chapters also present new research methods in the field, including discrete choice experiments, factorial surveys, focus groups, and media content analysis. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in sociology, political science, and the fields of social psychology, philosophy, economics and history. It will help practitioners and policymakers in social policy, social work and healthcare understand popular perceptions and beliefs regarding just distributions of welfare. --

Presenting a stimulating contribution to the quickly advancing field of welfare attitudes research, this important book develops the understanding of welfare legitimacy. It does so by assessing the nature of popular judgments about welfare deservingness, as well as the roots and consequences of these attitudes, offering a state-of-the-art picture of the latest theoretical, conceptual and methodological developments.