Når kassen smækkes i - Rådet for Socialt Udsatte

English Summary
Dorte Caswell, Henrik Lindegaard Andersen, Matilde Høybye-Mortensen,
Anna May Markussen & Sille Lundfos Thuesen
Economic Sanctions Towards Cash Benefit Recipients
– Analysing the Danish Case
This paper is about economic sanctions towards cash benefit recipients in Denmark. There
has been a substantial rise in the number of economic sanctions towards cash benefit recipients.
This is also the case for cash benefit recipients who have problems besides unemployment.
This paper reports the findings of a study of rules and regulation surrounding economic
sanctions, descriptive analysis of who get sanctioned, how the municipalities perceive and
use sanction as a tool as well as how clients experience economic sanctions.
The empirical material on which the analyses are based encompasses a wide variety of
data, including register based quantitative data about all cash benefit recipients in Denmark
both those who are sanctioned and those who are not and qualitative interviews with professionals
in the municipalities as well as cash benefit recipients with substantial experience of
being sanctioned.
We analyse how municipalities administer the discretionary latitude of client availability.
Especially when it comes to demands placed on clients with complex problems besides unemployment.
Furthermore, we ask how municipalities, with a high sanction rate, manage to
link legislation and political objectives to the concrete acts of sanctioning cash benefit recipients.
We also analyse the extent to which economic sanctions are followed by clients becoming
self-supporting. We find that although sanctions may lead to clients leaving the welfare
system, it does not mean that they become wage earners. Rather they seem to find temporary
ways of managing and often return to being cash benefit recipients again after a short period
of time.
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