While in recent years basic income has evolved from a marginal policy idea to a serious item on the policy agenda, there is surprisingly little engagement with questions of how to integrate universal and unconditional basic income schemes into the existing institutional configuration of the developed welfare state. In this project I adopt a political economy approach to analyse what I term the “varieties of basic income”: distinctive basic income models that can be mapped onto the specific features of types of welfare states. The project involves both a systematic review of basic income models and welfare regimes, and several empirical projects focused on the political support of political parties and key stakeholders in Finland (where basic income is scheduled to be trialled in January 2017). The importance of this project is to refocus scholarly attention from philosophical and economic debates about the desirability and feasibility of basic income, to its political feasibility — with specific focus on examining the prospects for building a robust basic income constituency, a stable enacting coalition of political actors, and the goodness-of-fit of specific basic income proposals within the institutional configuration of mature welfare states.