To Örebro University

The decision whether to index government benefits can have significant economic and political implications. It can affect whether or to what extent benefits maintain their real value over time, affect the policy levers available to fight inflation, and shape discretionary budget priorities. Most of the attention in the literature has focused on understanding the economic pros and cons of indexing and the politics and political use of indexation in the context of welfare state reform and retrenchment. Less attention has been paid to what indexation means for democratic accountability. This paper seeks to rectify this by investigating the democratic stakes of indexing government benefits. It argues that there are, other things being equal, strong democratic reasons to index government benefits in a way (or according to metric) that preserves their publicly articulated purpose. However, concerns about lack of discretion and ownership suggest indexation rules should be designed to provide governments with some discretionary power over the size and perhaps timing of automatic adjustments-though accompanied by requirements that the exercise of this discretionary power be justified publicly.

Would a UBI advance republican liberty? The potential threat to non-domination posed by administrative bureaucracies has led some republican theorists to argue in favour of a UBI. While the strength of the republican case for UBI has been the subject of a robust debate in the literature, insufficient attention has been paid to how the exit costs associated with unemployment are affected by how people perceive and evaluate risk. This paper shows that once we properly account for the fact that people are loss averse and assess exit costs in a context of uncertainty and limited information, we get a better grasp of the non-domination related trade-offs at stake in a decision between an income-maintenance model of welfare provision and a baseline provision model built around a UBI. It identifies and outlines three of these trade-offs and sketches an approach for how to think about these from a non-domination perspective.

Accounts of non-domination have tended to emphasise the role resources and other capacity and voice building mechanisms can play in giving people the power and the institutional means of living lives that are free of domination. Yet the role of exit - of institutionally protected means of withdrawing from relationships - has remained undertheorized in accounts of non-domination. Drawing on a range of public policy examples, this paper seeks to shed light on the ways in which, and under what conditions, institutionalised means of exit can contribute to realising the ideal of non-domination. It shows that while rights of exit and low exit-costs can play an essential role in protecting people from dependence on the arbitrary wills of others, it is only under certain conditions these can be said to contribute to the realisation of the ideal of non-domination in a broader sense. Understanding the relationship between exit and non-domination, it further argues, gives us a clearer (if more complicated) picture of the relationship between non-domination and sources of power such as monetary resources and voice.