European unemployment systems have undergone a fundamental transformation. Income protection has been progressively subordinated to activation logics that combine conditionality, behavioral compliance, and employability requirements. Yet who evaluates these policies matters. A growing experimental literature documents public preferences over welfare state design, but most evidence relies on general population samples — groups with little or no direct exposure to unemployment institutions. This paper focuses instead on the policy constituency itself: individuals who have experienced job loss firsthand and interact repeatedly with the welfare system.

We address this through a conjoint experiment among women registered as job seekers with the Catalan Public Employment Service (SOC), estimating preferences over three dimensions: compensation, conditionality, and relational support. We argue that training-oriented obligations are more acceptable than coercive ones; that resistance to strict activation intensifies without personalized support; and that relational support functions as a mechanism of recognition — signaling that the state treats beneficiaries as subjects with agency rather than administrative cases. Its presence or absence may thus shape not only policy satisfaction, but broader orientations toward welfare institutions and political legitimacy. Data collection and analysis are currently underway; full results will be presented at the conference.