This study investigates the impact of Indonesia’s flagship conditional cash transfer (CCT) program—PKH—on violent crime. Exploiting data from a randomized controlled trial and administrative data from the staggered nationwide program roll-out in combination with different causal identification strategies, we show that communities receiving access to the CCT experienced an increase in violent crime.  Examining possible mechanisms, our analysis reveals that the program resulted in an increase in idleness among non-targeted male youth within beneficiary households, which we believe contributed to the rise in violent crime. In contrast, we show that the surge in violent crime is neither related to PKH increasing the (monetary and non-monetary) rewards for committing crime nor to alternative reductions in the (material, psychic, punishment-related) costs of engaging in crimes.

Krisztina Kis-Katos is Professor for International Economic Policy at the University of Göttingen. She studied Economics in Szeged and Konstanz, attended the Swiss Doctoral Program at the Study Center Gerzensee, and received her doctoral degree in Economics in 2010 at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Her research interests lie in the fields of applied development economics and political economy. Her recent research projects focus on the effects of (de-)globalization and more generally of macro-economic processes or related public policies on a range of social and economic outcomes, including labor market and firm outcomes, land use change and deforestation, or conflict.

PEW offers a platform to discuss early/unpublished papers that investigate the political economy, broadly construed, of social policy and inequality, with the ambition to bring together researchers at the SOCIUM and beyond, across methodological divides and with varying levels of experience.

The workshop format is as follows: Authors briefly introduce the background of the paper (1-2 minutes), a discussant shortly summarizes the paper and provides feedback (10-15 minutes), and subsequently we open to the audience. Papers are circulated one week in advance.

And most importantly, everyone is warmly welcome to attend!

You can sign up here for our mailing list.

PEW offers a platform to discuss early/unpublished papers that investigate the political economy, broadly construed, of social policy and inequality, with the ambition to bring together researchers at the SOCIUM and beyond, across methodological divides and with varying levels of experience.

The workshop format is as follows: Authors briefly introduce the background of the paper (1-2 minutes), a discussant shortly summarizes the paper and provides feedback (10-15 minutes), and subsequently we open to the audience. Papers are circulated one week in advance.

And most importantly, everyone is warmly welcome to attend!

You can sign up here for our mailing list.

PEW offers a platform to discuss early/unpublished papers that investigate the political economy, broadly construed, of social policy and inequality, with the ambition to bring together researchers at the SOCIUM and beyond, across methodological divides and with varying levels of experience.

The workshop format is as follows: Authors briefly introduce the background of the paper (1-2 minutes), a discussant shortly summarizes the paper and provides feedback (10-15 minutes), and subsequently we open to the audience. Papers are circulated one week in advance.

And most importantly, everyone is warmly welcome to attend!

You can sign up here for our mailing list.

- CANCELLED -

PEW offers a platform to discuss early/unpublished papers that investigate the political economy, broadly construed, of social policy and inequality, with the ambition to bring together researchers at the SOCIUM and beyond, across methodological divides and with varying levels of experience.

The workshop format is as follows: Authors briefly introduce the background of the paper (1-2 minutes), a discussant shortly summarizes the paper and provides feedback (10-15 minutes), and subsequently we open to the audience. Papers are circulated one week in advance.

And most importantly, everyone is warmly welcome to attend!

You can sign up here for our mailing list.

PEW offers a platform to discuss early/unpublished papers that investigate the political economy, broadly construed, of social policy and inequality, with the ambition to bring together researchers at the SOCIUM and beyond, across methodological divides and with varying levels of experience.

The workshop format is as follows: Authors briefly introduce the background of the paper (1-2 minutes), a discussant shortly summarizes the paper and provides feedback (10-15 minutes), and subsequently we open to the audience. Papers are circulated one week in advance.

And most importantly, everyone is warmly welcome to attend!

You can sign up here for our mailing list.

PEW offers a platform to discuss early/unpublished papers that investigate the political economy, broadly construed, of social policy and inequality, with the ambition to bring together researchers at the SOCIUM and beyond, across methodological divides and with varying levels of experience.

The workshop format is as follows: Authors briefly introduce the background of the paper (1-2 minutes), a discussant shortly summarizes the paper and provides feedback (10-15 minutes), and subsequently we open to the audience. Papers are circulated one week in advance.

And most importantly, everyone is warmly welcome to attend!

You can sign up here for our mailing list.

PEW offers a platform to discuss early/unpublished papers that investigate the political economy, broadly construed, of social policy and inequality, with the ambition to bring together researchers at the SOCIUM and beyond, across methodological divides and with varying levels of experience.

The workshop format is as follows: Authors briefly introduce the background of the paper (1-2 minutes), a discussant shortly summarizes the paper and provides feedback (10-15 minutes), and subsequently we open to the audience. Papers are circulated one week in advance.

And most importantly, everyone is warmly welcome to attend!

You can sign up here for our mailing list.

Accurately measuring public perceptions of economic phenomena is complicated, but doing so is important for responsive policy-making. Survey measurement difficulties are particularly pronounced when it comes to economic inequality, which is an abstract and mathematically demanding concept, but perceptions of which have the potential to directly affect the desirability of redistributive policies. In this paper, we compare different ways to ask questions about perceived inequality, characterizing the costs and benefits of different approaches. In particular, we ask whether relatively complicated survey items result in high rates of “satisficing” and/or high rates of non-response, with consequences for survey quality. In a survey fielded to representative samples in Switzerland, Germany, and France, we ask respondents about income inequality in two different ways. First, respondents estimate household incomes at specified percentiles of the income distribution. Later in the survey, they estimate the incomes that qualify a household as rich or poor, respectively. We anticipate that because the percentile questions are relatively abstract, respondents may rely on their prototypes of the rich and the poor when answering, leading to similar answers to the two sets of questions. We also anticipate that because the percentile questions are more mathematically involved, we may see systematic non-response patterns. The results show that in all three countries, the 90th percentile, the 99th percentile, and the rich are seen as significantly different from each other in terms of household income. At the same time, we find significant rates of non-response and uninformative responses in the percentile questions (but not the questions about the rich/poor). We conclude that even apparently low levels of mathematical complexity in question wording can lead to non-response patterns that affect the representativeness of survey samples.

Kris-Stella Trump is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University. A scholar of public opinion and political psychology, she primarily studies perceptions of deservingness, attitudes toward income inequality, and the politics of distribution. Her regional focus lies in the United States and Western Europe. Kris-Stella joined Johns Hopkins from the University of Memphis, and prior to that, she served as program director at the Social Science Research Council. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. She is Estonian by origin, and also lived in Sweden and the United Kingdom before moving to the United States. You can find out more at: https://www.kstrump.com

Since its colonization, inequality has been one of Latin America’s (LA) defining characteristics. The social psychology of economic inequality is an emerging field that covers how income disparities shape people's thoughts about interpersonal relations. In this talk, I will present evidence from two studies. First, we use 13 waves from 18 Latin American countries over 23 years (above 250,000 participants) to examine the association between structural inequality and fairness evaluations with political and social trust. Multilevel regression analyses for comparative longitudinal surveys suggest that within-country changes in economic inequality over time are negatively related to political and social trust. However, between-country inequality was negatively associated with social trust but not to political trust. In addition, fairness evaluations of inequality were positively associated with social and political trust. Exploratory analyses revealed that fairness evaluations mediated the negative association between economic inequality and political and social trust. Second, we tested whether justice evaluations in LA were related to countries’ objective inequality and people’s ideological differences. We showed that most people in LA evaluate income distribution as unfair, which has not changed meaningfully over the years. However, the region cannot be characterized into a single story. Regardless of people’s similarities, each country has its history, reflecting different societies and worldviews. The results confirm that evaluating the distribution of economic resources is sensitive to the context’s social characteristics. Furthermore, we showed that ideological beliefs shaped distributive unfairness evaluations beyond structural and situational variables. We discussed how subjective elements, such unfairness evaluations of economic resources, play a decisive role in evaluating social reality and mobilizing people to pursue social change.

The special issue workshop is organized by Dr. Aline Grünewald (CRC project A02), Dr. Tobias Böger (CRC project A06), Dr. Armin Müller (CRC project B05) and Prof. Dr. Paul Marx (University of Bonn). It brings together CRC members and scholars from the Global South to discuss their research papers on the historical dynamics of dualization. In so doing, the workshop builds a bridge between two research strands which, thus far, have been unconnected: the historical origins of economic dualism in developing countries and current debates on welfare dualization in advanced economies. The papers will be published as a special issue.

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.

Nate Breznau of project A02 will present his research on social policy and replication. In this (non-CRC) project, 73 research teams examined whether immigration reduces public support for government provision of social policy, using identical cross-country survey data. The results results varied greatly!

Nate's paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2203150119

You can register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/social-policy-and-the-replication-crisis-tickets-519644509717

Join the event at:
https://cardiff.zoom.us/j/85840792171?pwd=QlNBSm1aWC9OcFJkUERKTFdRS0tFQT09

In this workshop, relevant SFB 1342 projects will give short presentations on their projects and their specific plans and issues surrounding definitions and coding of coverage and generosity in their areas. Lyle Scrugss and the audience will give feedback and discuss strategies.

If you are part of the Unicom and interested in attending to learn more about coverage and generosity, please email Nate Breznau.

Zoom Room: https://uni-bremen.zoom.us/j/94461287912?pwd=L212SmhHalkwUVZaT1FCSk14c29RZz09

Zoom Room: https://uni-bremen.zoom.us/j/97829885696?pwd=UG5Ya2VucFRKbTgxWVZGanh3bHRqUT09