Solidarity Lost in Institutions? Welfare Policies and Muted Egalitarianism

Education has become the main battleground of contemporary politics, and despite efforts to alleviate educational inequality, the trend of improving educational opportunities has stalled. Furthermore, those who have benefited the most from education seem less interested in egalitarian policies. EDUMERIT is puzzled by this apparent paradox of educational success muted solidaristic demand and aims to demonstrate the role of welfare policy mixes in shaping social mobility related fairness reasoning. Specifically, by combining survey experiments and interviews, EDUMERIT unpacks the formation of fairness perceptions in general, and meritocracy beliefs specifically, as well as their dependence on welfare policies. The interdisciplinary and nested mixed-method approach of EDUMERIT addresses the challenge of diminishing demand for equity-enhancing policy implementation by developing theoretical and empirical knowledge of the interaction between people's fairness perceptions and welfare policies, thereby improving the possibilities for shaping more solidaristic policies. More specifically, EDUMERIT addresses the challenge of policy feedback-driven muted egalitarian demand by moving beyond the state of the art as follows: First, EDUMERIT extends comparative social policy literature by examining policy feedback effects across the entire welfare mix, encompassing both compensatory and social investment policies that are increasingly crucial in the knowledge economy. Second, the project complements debates on meritocracy, social mobility, and fairness reasoning through original survey experiments, disentangling endogeneities in preference formation and related system legitimation. Third, EDUMERIT's nested design of survey experiments and interpretive qualitative approach elucidates the relational notion of social mobility and the role of sense-making narratives of fairness beliefs in different contexts.