The Inequality and Distributive Politics Research Team participates in the third funding phase of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1342 “Global Dynamics of Social Policy” , led by the Bremen University. Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since 2018 (current funding period until 2029), the CRC brings together universities across Germany to analyse how social policies develop globally and how international linkages shape national welfare trajectories.
Within this framework, we are co-Pis in Project B14: “Socially Motivated Reasoning in Social Policy Evaluation: Studying the Causal Effects of Social Policies on Citizens’ Political Attitudes and Behavior.”, together with Sarah Berens and Markus Tepe from Bremen University. The project examines under which conditions social policies strengthen political integration and democratic stability, and when they instead contribute to political conflict or declining system support. It addresses contrasting expectations in the literature by investigating how the design of social policy programmes—particularly their inclusiveness and scope of benefits—affects citizens’ attitudes toward both policies and political institutions.
Our project develops a micro-level perspective on policy feedback processes by combining insights from political economy and social psychology. It studies how self-interest, distributive justice preferences, and socially motivated reasoning—shaped by group identities such as insider–outsider status or partisan affiliation—influence how citizens interpret policy performance and translate these evaluations into broader political support.
We investigate this from multiple angles. A cross-national analysis links global data on welfare state characteristics with comparative public opinion surveys, while survey and behavioural experiments conducted in Germany, Mexico, and South Africa identify the causal mechanisms through which social policy design affects political attitudes and behaviour. This comparative approach across diverse institutional contexts allows the project to generate insights into the political consequences of social policy.