The main mission of the the project project is to identify shifts and patterns in people‘s deservingness perceptions towards different welfare beneficiaries in Europe in the context of climate change and the transition to carbon neutral societies. The overall ambition is to better understand how social risks related to climate change and transition policies are perceived and what makes specific welfare policies supporting people in the context of global warming and its mitigation publicly and politically more acceptable, and hence more effective.
Pushing the boundaries of established approaches on social risks and deservingness perceptions to make them fit for the age of climate change and net-zero-target (NZT), the project aims at an innovative revision of the deservingness theory by scrutinising the relevance and suitability of social risk categories, the existing CARIN criteria, and benefit characteristics via the analysis of macro-level media framings, meso-level group reasonings, and individual-level attitudes in different national contexts.
Altogether, the project addresses three knowledge gaps:
- The relationship between public framing of social risks related to climate change or NZT, and their discussion and perception by individuals and different social groups,
- The relevance and suitability of benefit deservingness theory in the context of climate change and NZT,
- The effect of national context on the framing as well as the perception of third-generation social risks and on deservingness attitudes.
For that, it investigates how social risks re-lated to climate change and NZT are discussed and framed in media (macro level), and whether and how this framing is perceived and reasoned upon by different social groups (meso level) and individuals (micro level) (RQ1). Second – across the three levels – the project wants to create a better understanding of what makes people perceiving beneficiaries of third-generation social risk support as more or less deserving, and how such deservingness perceptions are justified (RQ2). Third, we embed our findings in national contexts to see how they influence perceptions and attitudes (RQ3).
To answer these questions, people‘s social risks and deservingness perceptions towards different welfare beneficiaries will be studied in three European countries: Belgium, Germany, and Slovenia. The three countries’ welfare systems share the fundamental redistribution principle of equity. This principle emphasises the role of reciprocity and provides a rationale for unequal distribution and targeted welfare especially towards those who contribut(ed).
WP1: Media analysis
Lead: Slovenia (Maša Filipovič Hrast, Tatjana Rakar)
Addressing the first two knowledge gaps, this WP aims to: (1) create knowledge about how third-generation social risks are depicted in the media and to which social groups or benefits they relate. And (2) reveal what deservingness aspects/criteria are prevailing in the media frames. Two dominant daily newspapers and two monthly magazines will be identified per country (in Belgium for the Dutch and the French-speaking community), each preferably belonging to a different side of the political spectrum (centre-left vs. centre-right). The WP leaders will provide a common framework for selecting the articles that will be agreed within the group. Relevant articles will be identified through mutually agreed key word search and then manually reviewed and selected by relevance (primarily opinion articles such as glossaries and editorials, as well as longer topical articles). The selected articles will be used to create a dataset that will be analysed with qualitative content analysis methods. Each country will use a common framework but will do the analysis individually due to language specificity. In the analysis, salient issues as well as affirmative and delegitimising lines of argumentation on the relationship between climate change, the transition to carbon neutrality and social risk-related policies will be identified. After individual country analyses, a first cross-country comparative report will be prepared. This report on the framings of social risks, risk groups and deservingness in the three different countries will help design comparable and country-specific trigger statements for the focus groups (WP2), and feed into the development of survey items (WP 3). The cross-country comparative report also feeds into three synthesis reports mentioned in the description of WP 5.
WP 2: Focus groups
LEAD: Germany (Vincent Gengnagel, Katharina Zimmermann)
WP 2 aims to study perceptions of social risks and risk groups related to climate change and NZT as well as deservingness reasonings and justifications in different socio-economic groups in Belgium, Slovenia and Germany. In total, six focus groups per country will be organised with 6-8 participants per group (middle class and working class, older and younger generations, rural and urban citizens, country-specific heterogeneity [East/West Germany, Wallonia and Flanders], milieu-heterogenous groups). The participants will be professionally recruited by a commissioned research agency along-side socio-economic criteria defined by the WP leader in consultation with the consortium. Before participating in the groups, all participants will fill in a questionnaire with questions that will also be included in the survey (see WP3). The groups will be organised and moderated by the commissioned research agency, while the moderation guideline will be developed in close interaction with the WP leader, drawing on extensive pre-studies with 12 focus groups in Italy and Germany. Core deservingness narratives from the media analysis across the three countries will be condensed in short trigger statements and presented to the focus group participants. Project partners will participate in the focus groups in their respective country. The commissioned research agency will deliver audio and video files of the groups in original language, as well as English transcripts. All country teams will prepare a national report. The WP leaders will develop a common coding framework and conduct a cross-country comparative analysis of group-level deservingness justifications and reasonings. The cross-country comparative report informs the development of survey items. It also feeds into the three synthesis reports mentioned in the description of WP 5.
WP 3: Survey study
LEAD: Belgium (Wim van Lancker, Adeline Otto)
Collecting vignette experiment survey data among a larger population, we will conduct research on individual-level perceptions of social risks, risk groups and vulnerability in the context of climate change and NZT, and how this relates to deservingness perceptions towards beneficiaries receiving support. Additionally, we will investigate how this relationship varies across different social groups in the three national populations in terms of socio-demographic and socio-political factors, norms, values and social capital. Factorial vignette studies combine traditional survey methodologies with an experimental research design and allow researchers to examine subjects’ reactions to hypothetical scenarios (vignettes) while controlling for variables within the sce-narios. More specifically, next to usual survey questions, respondents will be shown little vignettes –stories with randomly varying design features of a scenario (e.g. risk, benefit recipient, type of benefit received) – before stating to what extent they would support such a benefit. The specific scenarios will be designed based on WP1 and WP2 (see WP5). Once survey questions and vignettes have been drafted, about 5 cognitive interviews per country will be carried out to assure that the scenarios and questions are clear. Only after this, the final survey will be developed, professionally translated from English into the national languages, back-translated for quality assurance reasons, and scripted in the survey software ‘Qualtrics’. The survey will be conducted online on a quota sample of the three national populations (N=2000; age, gender, income and educational quotas). To conduct the survey, the consortium will purchase the services of an established survey agency. After cleaning the data, a technical report and a codebook will be produced. Together with the final dataset, both documents will be made publicly available via the KU Leuven Research Data Repository. The survey will be analysed with various statistical methods including multivariate regression and structural equation modelling.
WP 4: Methodological integration
LEAD: Katharina Zimmermann
CO-LEAD: Wim van Lancker
The project brings together three different established social scientific methods: media discourse analysis, qualitative focus groups, and quantitative survey data analysis. Integrating the different methodological approaches means not only integrating different levels of analysis (macro, meso, micro), but also aligning different epistemologies that reach from interpretative approaches to statistical observations. WP 4 is targeted at developing a joint epistemological approach for the entire project and aligning the different methodologies of the empirical work. This contributes to integrating the measurement, conceptualization, and epistemology of public discourse on and individual perceptions of social risks (knowledge gap 1), of deservingness theory (knowledge gap 2), and of cross-country comparative approaches on attitudes and discourse (know-ledge gap 3). At the practical level, WP 4 ensures a smooth integration of the methodological intersections of WP 1–3. This includes a) condensing core deservingness narratives from the media analysis into short trigger statements for the focus groups, b) developing items on risk perceptions for the survey based on the results from the media analysis, and c) developing items on deservingness criteria and deservingness target groups for the survey based on results from the analysis of the focus groups (method report. WP 4 leaders will accompany these three critical stages by organising method workshops targeted on the three steps. They will raise sensitivity for methodological challenges, provide training for multi- and mixed-method approaches, and foster methodological exchange through short research stays for young researchers. A joint methodological integration paper on mixed method innovation will be prepared.
WP 5: Empirical synthesis
LEAD: Adeline Otto
CO-LEAD: Maša Filipovič Hrast
WP 5 brings together the data from all empirical work packages to answer RQ 1–3. It will produce three synthesis reports. The first will inform about the link between framing and social group-specific perceptions and public attitudes related to third-generation social risks. The second will create knowledge about deservingness in the context of climate change and NZT (groups, criteria, policies and policy features). The third aims to contextualise our findings by clarifying how the relationship between media framing and deservingness perceptions as well as attitudes varies across the three countries under study.
WP 6: Public sociology
LEAD: Vincent Gengnagel
CO-LEAD: Tatjana Rakar
As our contemporary societies still struggle to come to terms with the immediacy of climate change, the project serves two main communicative purposes: a) inform policymakers of attitudes prevalent in the countries’ populations, and b) foster the public realisation of the social-ecological nexus as a matter of collective responsibilities. At the crossroads of policy and public sociology, the project reflexively engages with welfare and ecology experts, lay persons and broader designated publics:
(1) Streamlining the project’s policy output, preliminary findings from media analysis, focus groups and item development for the survey are presented and discussed in stakeholder focus groups in Berlin, Brussels and Ljubljana. Based on this feedback, a final outreach material (brochures and posters) is published for multiplication among our stakeholders’ contacts.
(2) Linking the policy and public dimension of green deservingness is a crucial democratic challenge.
Observing attitudes on macro-, meso- and micro-level, the project is perfectly equipped to help develop a more nuanced view on journalistic and every-day understandings of green deservingness. Focus group participants receive targeted outreach material and are invited to react via online interviews and to contribute comments or testimonials for a final book.
(3) Valorisation in scientific communities is ensured by supporting the professional social-scientific dissemination of conceptual, methodological and empirical findings in leading peer-reviewed journals and at national and international conferences.
(4) Reaching out to the broader public and scientific communities alike, we aim for interaction via regular and social media to promote and discuss published findings, publications, policy briefs, and events. Visually engaging commentaries and summaries of results will be created with the marketing and communications offices of the four universities and shared via Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, a project website, and platforms such as voxeu.org.