A PI acts as a trojan horse to enable the political success of redistributive policy because it is viewed as only giving benefits to the “deserving” poor.

The crucial difference between PI and UBI is conditionality. In other words, PI is allegedly based on a principle of reciprocity while BI is not. (The validity of this statement is conditional upon the definition of reciprocity (Goodin 2002), many UBI advocates argue, as will be later illustrated, UBI is fully compatible with reciprocity.) While defining conditionality on grounds of political expedience, Anthony Atkinson’s (1996) seminal article underlined that individuals could contribute to society through more than just paid work. This view is shared with UBI advocates but it stands up against workfare and activation proponents. Here is what Atkinson (1996, 68) said about participation in his original introduction:

in my proposal, the Basic Income would be paid conditional on participation. I should stress at once that this is not limited to labour market participation. While the qualifying conditions would include people working as an employee or self-employed, absent from work on grounds of sickness or injury, unable to work on grounds of disability and unemployed but available for work, it would also include people engaging in approved forms of education or training, caring for young, elderly or disabled dependants or undertaking approved forms of voluntary work, and so on. The condition involves neither payment nor work; it is a wider definition of social contribution.

Atkinson (1996, 67) viewed retention of behavioural condition as a pragmatic acquiescence to win public support for universal social assistance without means-testing. The social policy literature has mainly construed PI as a political tactic to smooth the way for an easier adoption of UBI, sometimes referred to as “implementation by stealth” (Groot et al. 2019, 280). However, from a political philosophy perspective, the participation condition is important also on normative grounds. Unlike UBI, PI adhered to the widely accepted principle of reciprocity in social cooperation (McGann and Murphy 2021). PI’s idea aligns normatively also with John Rawls’s idea of fairness in social cooperation: individuals have an obligation to share in its burdens as well as its benefits. By pointing to fierce philosophical debates in the late 1990s and early 2000s McGann and Murphy (2021, 8) reiterate that unconditional welfare fails to respect people’s moral autonomy: “Enjoying cooperative benefits without contributing in return is to treat fellow citizens as mere instruments to our own wellbeing, undermining the social conditions of our mutual interdependence and equality to each other.”

The long history of social protection is dominated by the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor (van Oorschot 2006). The deserving poor are those who were poor through no fault of their own, either because of illness, accident or age, while the undeserving poor are those who were poor because of laziness or personl problems. Deserving poor include children in poor families, the elderly and disabled, while the long-term unemployed, substance abusers and the over-indebted are considered undeserving poor. The norms governing perceptions of deserving and undeserving poor can be seen as oppression by those better placed in a society. They can also be interpreted as a call for all the hands on the deck, in other words, pleas for solidarity and reciprocity. Political philosopher Stuart White (2003a, 49, 2003b, 138) maintains that “a principle of reciprocity” calls those who willingly enjoy a share of the social product to have a corresponding obligation to make a productive contribution to the community in return. As Lane Kenworthy (2020) and Bo Rothstein (2017) illustrated above, the principle of reciprocity is essential for government-run social insurance and social assistance schemes, which have a public good character. Without broad public support the schemes will sooner or later collapse.