The Ideology Of Entitlement: Public Opinion, Social Division And Social Security

This book analyses the origin of the distinction between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor in British public opinion and analyses the influence of this distinction upon social welfare provision. It outlines the survey evidence which demonstrates the 'hierarchy of favouritism' which characterises British attitudes towards different types of welfare recipient, and explains these popular judgements of relative desert by applying a revised form of the Entitlement approach to the study of poverty developed by Amartya Sen.