Quantifying 'Conditionality' : A New Database on Conditions and Sanctions for Unemployment Benefit Claimants

This paper describes our new dataset on conditionality requirements for unemployment benefit claimants. Even though the past three decades have witnessed extensive efforts in quantifying social rights, conditionality remains relatively unexamined, with only a handful of excellent though incomplete studies assembling comparative data on how states delimit and enforce the job search behavior of the unemployed. We build on these studies with the goal of collecting data for 22 countries between 1980 and 2011. In this paper we explain the relevance of the dataset for the study of welfare state change, discuss measurement issues, and present data for five countries: France, Germany, South Korea, Austria, and the United Kingdom