Would a Universal Basic Income Advance Republican Liberty? Understanding the Impact and Implications of a UBI on the Exit Costs Associated with Unemployment

Abstract Would a UBI advance republican liberty? The potential threat to non-domination posed by administrative bureaucracies has led some republican theorists to argue in favour of a UBI. While the strength of the republican case for UBI has been the subject of a robust debate in the literature, insufficient attention has been paid to how the exit costs associated with unemployment are affected by how people perceive and evaluate risk. This paper shows that once we properly account for the fact that people are loss averse and assess exit costs in a context of uncertainty and limited information, we get a better grasp of the non-domination related trade-offs at stake in a decision between an income-maintenance model of welfare provision and a baseline provision model built around a UBI. It identifies and outlines three of these trade-offs and sketches an approach for how to think about these from a non-domination perspective.