The Non-Take-Up of Health and Social Benefits: What Implications for Social Citizenship?

The sociology of welfare tends to focus on welfare regimes, welfare institutions or welfare beneficiaries. However, since the 1960s a specific stream of literature highlights the phenomenon of non-take-up of welfare benefits in the European context (for a literature review, see Kerr 1982; van Oorschot, 1991; Daly 2002; Warin 2006; Eurofound 2015). Indeed, many people eligible for welfare benefits, both in the field of health and social care, do not receive them. This phenomenon questions both the conditions of access to social benefits and their adequacy or even legitimacy when some people prefer not to claim their rights. Understanding the reasons accounting for non-take-up is therefore essential for the design of adequately inclusive social protection frameworks, especially given that non-take-up is becoming salient and reaching policy agendas, including in Switzerland. In the wake of both conservative and liberal criticisms, the transformation towards a less generous and more restrictive welfare state contributed to creating a gap between the citizens and the social institutions. However, both the political obsession with budget saving and the focus on fraud kept this gap in a blind spot. With the coronavirus crisis, which strongly hit in 2020, media and politics have given a new attention to the non-take-up issue. Social inequalities are growing, including in Switzerland, where people with lower income are most affected (Martinez et al. 2021). In the context of this new social emergency, the social and economic precariousness of numerous categories of the population were put in the spotlight. The relevance of social rights has thus gained legitimacy.