30 September 2026

Can receiving social assistance encourage people not only to cope with hardship, but also to participate in helping others? This question is at the heart of our recent study, “How could social assistance empower recipients? The impact of different forms of social assistance on recipients’ philanthropic behaviors,” published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications in 2026.
Headshot of Yongjiao Yang

Debates about social assistance often focus on whether welfare programmes reduce poverty, improve living conditions, or create dependency. Much less attention has been paid to whether recipients can become active contributors to their communities. Yet this matters for how we understand empowerment. Rather than seeing people receiving assistance simply as passive beneficiaries, our study asks how welfare institutions may enable or constrain their capacity to engage in philanthropic behaviour.

Drawing on institutional logics theory, we distinguish between state assistance, charitable assistance, and mixed assistance combining the two. These forms of support are underpinned by different principles: state assistance is primarily rights-based, while charitable assistance places greater emphasis on social responsibility and helping people to help themselves. We examine these differences using nationally representative longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies, matching 22,707 respondents across the 2016 and 2018 waves.

The findings show that different forms of assistance shape philanthropic behaviour in different ways. In China, state assistance strengthens the importance of recipients’ economic circumstances in determining whether they give, suggesting that material constraints remain particularly important. More strikingly, receiving both state and charitable assistance weakens the positive role of self-efficacy and perceived reciprocity in encouraging charitable giving. Charitable assistance alone does not consistently generate the empowering effects that might be expected.

These findings invite us to rethink what “empowerment” means in social assistance. Providing resources is essential, but empowerment also depends on how assistance is institutionally designed and delivered. In contexts where government and civil society work together, simply adding charitable provision to state welfare may not automatically produce greater agency. More attention is needed to how different institutional arrangements can enable recipients to move from being understood as welfare beneficiaries towards becoming active participants in social and community life.

Yongjiao Yang, Chongqing University/Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh