States seek to expand their infrastructural power over society through surveillance. Citizens have an interest in protecting their privacy, but they also they also desire security. States therefore draw on narratives of threats from violent crime, terrorism, migration or disease to rationalize surveillance programmes. In this talk, I examine how the Chinese state communicates about the Social Credit System (SCS)—a vast information collection and behaviour steering scheme covering all individuals and organizations—on the social media platform Sina Weibo.

I identify a dominant social anomie narrative that is most actively promoted by state-affiliated accounts and is most prone to generate user attention. It portrays the SCS as an effective solution for allegedly pervasive problems of social disorder. By punishing minor legal and norm transgressions, the SCS is depicted as a civilizing force that helps protect society from itself. Drilling into the most attention-generating posts, I discern how state-affiliated accounts piggy-bag on high-profile incidents to associate the SCS with norm-breaking phenomena that have high popular salience. Potential counter-discourses of state control and privacy are scarce, censored when they generate traction, and often out of sync with the empirical reality of the SCS.

This indicates that the Chinese state enjoyed notable success in mobilizing problems of social anomie, which are rooted in problems of governance, for deepening its penetration into society. The Social Credit System is part of a wider “civilizing” endeavour with which the Chinese Communist Party is trying to strengthen its moral legitimacy, by addressing long standing popular concerns over anti-social behaviour.

About H. Christoph Steinhardt

H. Christoph Steinhardt is associate professor at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna. His research focuses on state-society relations in China, covering popular protest, information, social trust, civil society and public opinion. He is principal investigator of a project on the Social Credit System funded by the European Research Council, in which he studies the popular perception of social credit and privacy, state justification strategies as well as the wider population of Chinese social engineering programmes.

Do wartime experiences other than violence leave long-lasting political legacies? How are these legacies kept and sustained across generations and beyond those who directly experienced war? We explore these questions in Italy, a country whose democratic institutions were forged in the aftermath of a civil war fought between 1943 and 1945 by an armed resistance movement against Nazi and Fascist forces. We argue that the local presence and activity of resistance bands left anti-Nazi/Fascist legacies that shape political attitudes and behaviors today. Furthermore, we propose that these legacies are kept alive via a process of inter-generational, community-based transmission sustained on core mechanisms: (1) memorialization recomposes the resistance experience into a coherent narrative that legitimizes winners and condemns losers, (2) local anchors strengthen the narrative’s local resonance and self-identification, and (3) local associational networks maintain and reinforce this narrative and build on it to mobilize community members. We empirically explore this argument by exploiting novel data from a recent nationwide, grassroots mobilization campaign – the “Anti- Fascist Law” – aimed at banning neo-fascist propaganda. We use an integrative multi-method research design that combines statistical analysis of all Italian municipalities to make sense of the campaign’s spatial patterns, with a within-case analysis of a purposively selected locality to trace the process by which legacies are kept and transmitted across generations. Our study emphasizes armed resistance as a critical source of war’s long-term political legacies and improves our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the collective transmission of political memories.

About

Juan Masullo J. is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University and a Research Associate at the Changing Character of War Centre at the University of Oxford.

His research focuses on the intersection of comparative politics and international relations and explores complex social dynamics in settings of political and criminal violence. In particular, he is interested in civilian agency and collective action in the face of violence (from the establishment of peace communities to the formation of vigilante groups); and in peoples’ attitudes and preferences towards different policy approaches to deal with crime and violence (from peace negotiations to militarized crackdowns). He is also interested in field research methods and research design for qualitative and mixed-methods research.

Previously, Juan Masullo J. has been a lecturer at University of Oxford and a postdoctoral researcher at BIGSSS and Yale University. He received his PhD from the EUI for which he won the 2018 Linz-Rokkan Prize. During his time at BIGSSS Juan Masullo J. offered a variety of methods courses for our doctoral fellows and participated as an expert in the BIGSSS Computational Social Science Summer School on Conflicts.

In this lecture, the findings and alleged policy implications are presented of two recently performed effect studies: 1. a systematic review of 48 experimental and simulation studies on Participation and Basic Income reforms and 2. the implementation and effect study of six Dutch local randomized controlled trial (RCT) experiments in 2017-2020 among nearly 4,000 beneficiaries of social assistance.

The review study covers not only the employment effects, but also the broader (un)intended effects on income, (mental) health, subjective wellbeing and related social outcomes: trust, social participation, substance abuse and crime. Results show that not a full or partial Universal Basic Income, but a Negative Income Tax and Participation Income or conditional Basic Income policy reforms create the best balance between efficiency (employment) and equity (income inequality, poverty) with respect to the various social outcomes studied.

The six official Dutch RCT experiments were held in Groningen, Utrecht, Tilburg, Wageningen, Deventer and Nijmegen. The main question was whether three alternative treatments or support regimes of welfare recipients may further their employment and improve their well-being, health and trust? The interventions were (1) exemption of job search obligations and rendering more trust and autonomy to the recipient for self-reliance, (2) tailored support and extra counselling for improving the reintegration into (part-time) work and (3) extra income through a work bonus (reduced benefit claw-back rate) to reward beneficiaries for finding work (they can keep 50% of their earnings up to 200 euro per month).

We found no evidence that the alternative interventions have reduced employment effects compared to current ‘workfare’ practices. In some municipalities we even find small positive significant effects for the extra support group and the work bonus group on part-time work in one city (Utrecht) and positive but mostly insignificant effects on wellbeing and trust.

The use of field experiments for testing the outcomes of alternative support regimes provides new avenues for welfare state and notably reintegration policies for people on welfare and notably of people with inadequate skills or bad (mental) health and lack of opportunities. Concerns about the increasing inequalities in employment and income prospects stem notably from the alleged impact of automation and technological progress on the labour market requiring the rethinking of the basic premisses on which the current welfare state is built.

^{Somers, M. A., Muffels, R. J. A., & Kuenn-Neelen, A. (2021). Micro- and macro-economic effects of Unconditional Basic Income and Participation Income: a systematic review. Technequality Paper Series, p. 1-65, Tables p. 1-36.}

^{Muffels, Ruud, Arjen Edzes, Peter Gramberg, Richard Rijnks & Viktor Venhorst (2021), Which Regime Works Best in Social Welfare? Comparing Outcomes of eight Dutch RCT Experiments, Technequality Paper Series, European Commission, p. 1-71.}

Prof. Dr. Becker is a Mercator Fellow in project B01, Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy in Munich, and honorary professor at the LMU. His research deals with national and European social law, including the development of social rights in the European Union, the modernization of the German social benefits systems, health law and the impact of migration for the welfare state.