How not to owe them anything. Narrating collective past of “us – welfare givers” and target populations’ deservingness

In public policy and social welfare research the legitimacy of targeted social programs is often explained by the public image of beneficiaries. Deservingness theory (van Oorshot, 2000; 2006; Laenen, 2020; Mueleman et al., 2020) and ‘social construction of target populations’ (Ingram et al, 2019) argue that the more needy, compliant, acting in a reciprocal fashion the members of target populations are deemed to be, the more likely they are to become the beneficiaries of social welfare programmes. Much has been recently debated about how othering practices (Jensen, 2011) and constructing some social groups as immoral or evil, in particular under populists’ rule (Karolewski & Sata, 2020), have contributed to redirecting of social transfers. This paper seeks to add to deservingness literature by shifting the attention from target population to a discursive construction of “us – welfare givers”. “Us” may be the people who e.g. debate whether to accept refugees to the country or whether welfare benefits should be paid out of tax money they contributed to. I argue that apart from portraying “others” as immoral and undeserving, there is a mechanism of narrating own collective past to claim (un)deservingness of target population. In this paper I conduct the analysis of public discourse (parliamentary debate, media, users’ comments) on granting welfare to refugees and to families with dependant children in Poland in order to answer following research questions: How is the collective past of “us-welfare givers” exactly narrated? How are these narratives linked to claims about target populations’ (un)deservingness? Applying a reflexive thematic analysis to the collected material has enabled me to reconstruct i.a. the following themes: “our needs were unmet in the past, too”, “we are unlike beneficiaries”, “it’s not us who are responsible for their need” but also: “we received help in the past, so we should reciprocate”. These findings suggest, first, the need to expand the scientific perspective in explaining target populations’ “undeservingness” and in explaining the changes in targeted welfare programmes’ legitimacy. Second, these findings show that in regard to both discourses under study there are significant similarities between a populist discourse (on refugees) and neoliberal one (on families with children), as they converge in discursive arguments of why “us-welfare givers” don’t owe anything to welfare claimants. Thus, in particular in countries where both neoliberal and populist discourses are well present, as in case of Poland, narrating “us-welfare givers” may be a part of broader political strategies aimed at changes in social stratification.