Abstract

The design of the welfare state affects the lives of many people - those who receive benefits as well as those who pay for it. Among other things, empirical justice research investigates the political acceptance and thus the legitimacy of institutional designs. An important aspect are the attitudes of citizens towards the distribution of scarce goods - as well as their attitudes to the sanctioning of deviant behavior. The project examines different attitudes towards labor market institutions and instruments as well as to welfare state principles. To this purpose, factorial surveys (vignette experiments) and stated-choice methods will be used. Possible questions are: Do unemployed and employed individuals accept the principle of equivalence in the unemployment insurance? Perceive different groups the amount of Basic social care to be fair and appropriate? How do individuals judge sanctions of non-compliant behavior in the unemployment insurance and in the basic social care system? What do the unemployed and employees think of labor market policies designed to help them integrate into the labor market? An overarching topic is: Are there anchor effects, if design features of the investigated institutions are explained in advance? The analysis will be based on random samples drawn from administrative data. In some cases, it is already possible to build on preliminary work by the Research departments involved. However, previous studies did not use representative random samples, thus surveys sampling from administrative data will have a high added value. I would also be possible to do extra surveys among groups that are particularly informed about the analysed institutions, as e.g. caseworkers.