Moral preferences, labor markets and welfare policy

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The research project has three main themes that all relate to central parts of the research program, VAM. The first part of the research project, "The welfare state and heterogeneity in moral preferences" takes as the point of departure the increasing soc ial and moral heterogeneity in modern societies, and studies how increased heterogeneity challenges the support of welfare polices and employer-employee relationships. In particular we study the tension between an egalitarian ideology and the increased pr evalence of moral ideals justifying some economic inequalities, resulting for example from individual choice and risk. The second part of the research project, "The moral psychology of the welfare state", studies how the framing and contextualization of welfare policies may fundamentally affect their support and sustainability. Recent research in psychology and economics has shown that small changes in the way the choice situation is presented might dramatically affect individual behavior. This literatur e, however, has not studied the importance of these insights for redistributive polices, and the aim of this part of the research project is to show how these psychological mechanisms fundamentally affect people's willingness to finance welfare policies. The third part of the research project, "The moral dynamics of the welfare state", studies how welfare policies shape moral preferences in society, which in turn determines the long term support and sustainability of the welfare state. Importantly, it h as been argued that the egalitarian ideology underlying the Nordic model is a result of a long history of social welfare policies which shaped the moral preferences of a homogeneous population. This part of the project aims at studying this mechanism in m ore detail. In order to do so, the research project will study how exposure to different redistributive policies, labor market experiences and socio-economic characteristics shape people's moral preferences