Entries by Torsten Schneider

New Publication: Unemployed + Sick = More Deserving? A Survey Experiment on How the Medicalization of Unemployment Affects Public Opinion

6. May 2022 in , /by

The literature on the social legitimacy of welfare benefits has shown that sick persons are perceived more deserving than unemployed individuals. However, these studies examine sick and unemployed persons as distinct groups, while unemployment and sickness are in fact strongly related. Policymakers across Europe have been increasingly concerned with discouraging a medicalization of unemployment and […]

New Publication: Constructions of Unemployed Individuals in German Parliamentary Debates on Active Labour Market Policy Reforms: A Comparative Analysis of 2003 and 2016

2. March 2022 in , /by

Active labour market policy (ALMP) reforms have fundamentally changed welfare states over the last decades. Their objectives are quite diverse: workfare reforms have increased conditionality and sanctioning of benefits, while enabling reforms have extended education and training opportunities for the unemployed. Little is known about the political discourse on ALMP reforms. We investigate how the […]

New Publication: How much Money is Appropriate? A Vignette Study on the Acceptance of Sanctions in SGB II

5. January 2022 in , /by

Since the reforms of the Social Code Book II in 2004/05, sanctions in the minimum income system have been considered a central pillar of the activating welfare state. However, in terms of social policy, it is often debated whether sanctions are generally permissible, since those affected then live (temporarily) below the socio-cultural subsistence level. In […]

New Publication: The Role of Health and Illness in the German Poverty Discourse – A Content Analysis of the Poverty and Wealth Reports

2. November 2021 in , /by

In their article within the latest issue of the Journal of Social Policy Research, Mareike Ariaans and Nadine Reibling investigate the role of health within the political poverty discourse in Germany. For this purpose, the authors review the poverty and wealth reports of the German government published since 2001 by emplyoing medicalization theory. Using qualitative […]