Research Highlights in a Nutshell. Live Podcast at the In_equality Conference

Hosts:
Marius R. Busemeyer – Professor of Comparative Political Economy at the University of Konstanz and Speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”.

Gabriele Spilker – Professor of International Politics at the University of Konstanz and Co-Speaker of the Cluster.

Guests:
Researchers from the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”, presenting key findings from projects on perceptions of inequality, workplace integration, political elites, and climate-related inequalities.

Overview

What have cluster researchers learned about the political causes and consequences of inequality in the Cluster’s first funding phase? In this special live episode, researchers present short insights from several major Cluster projects. The conversation shows how inequality is perceived, negotiated, and politicized — in surveys, workplaces, firms, parliaments, and climate-affected communities.

Across the projects, one message stands out: inequality is not only about objective distributions of income, risk, or opportunity. It is also shaped by perceptions, institutions, political contexts, and ideas of fairness.

Highlights

· The Inequality Barometer – Marius R. Busemeyer: Perceptions matter: people often misperceive their own position in the income distribution, and these biases can shape political attitudes and voting behavior.

· Automation and Conflict within Firms: The German Way – Sebastian Findeisen
Automation does not automatically increase inequality — in Germany, firms with works councils often adopted technological change while providing job security and a fairer distribution of productivity gains.

· Integration at Work – Florian Kunze: Political polarization can spill over into the workplace: migrant apprentices experience more social undermining in regions with stronger right-wing voting, negatively affecting their work satisfaction and exhaustion.

· Political Elites and Inequality: Information, Heuristics and Policy – Maj-Britt Sterba: Politicians’ perceptions of inequality shape their support for redistribution — and legislators are often more ideologically polarized than citizens.

· Perceptions of Wage Inequality – Thomas Hinz: Whether workers perceive their wages as fair depends strongly on absolute wage levels; relative comparisons matter mostly once basic material security is ensured.

· Climate Inequalities in the Global South: from Perceptions to Protest – Gabriele Spilker: Climate change-induced environmental events and the related inequalities do not necessarily lead to protest; rather, environmental mobilization is most likely when degradation is severe, persistent, or linked to concrete health risks.

Key Takeaways

Objective factors are not the only game in town: Whether people support redistribution, accept automation, feel fairly paid, or mobilize against environmental harm depends on how inequality is perceived and interpreted.

Institutions matter too: works councils, firms, political parties, and local communities can either reinforce or help mitigate the political consequences of inequality.

The episode highlights the Cluster’s broad interdisciplinary approach — combining surveys, experiments, administrative data, fieldwork, and new datasets to understand inequality across different contexts.

Links & Further Reading

More about the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”: www.exc.uni-konstanz.de/inequality

· In_equality Conference 2026: https://inequality-conference.de

· Download the slides here: https://t1p.de/n8x55

Contact: cluster.inequality@uni-konstanz.de

New episodes every first Wednesday of the month – subscribe and stay tuned!

Transcript

In_equality Podcast: Research Highlights in a Nutshell. Live Podcast at the In_equality Conference

Gabriele Spilker
Welcome to a new episode of the In_equality Podcast. My name is Gabriele Spilker, and I am a professor for International Politics and Global Inequality and co-speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality”. And next to me as always is… 

Marius Busemeyer
Marius Busemeyer. I am a professor of Comparative Political Economy and speaker of the Cluster here in Konstanz.

Gabriele Spilker
The following episode is a special episode of our In_equality Podcast. It was recorded during the third Inequality Conference, a scientific conference that brings together researchers from different disciplines, all interested in research on the politics of inequality. The conference took place from April 15 to 17 in Konstanz. Marius Busemeyer and I used the conference opening as an opportunity to record this live podcast and to showcase the highlights of our research of the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” at the University of Konstanz. Therefore, we interviewed several researchers, and everyone spoke for just about five minutes. Since it was a live recording, there were people in the audience and slides illustrating the main findings. The slides are available in the show notes. Enjoy listening to this rather different and special podcast.
 
Marius, you will be the first one to be interviewed. And we will talk about a very peculiar or special project of ours: The Inequality Barometer. So, what is it?

Marius R. Busemeyer

The Inequality Barometer is, indeed, a little bit of a special project because it's a cross-cutting project that involves a lot of people. We have done this project since 2020. When we did a first wave of our Inequality Barometer survey, where we basically looked at different perceptions of inequality and we're measuring perceptions of inequality in very different ways. We also measure attitudes that are related to these perceptions of inequality as one of the big research topics in the cluster. And it's special because it has a core part where we focus on these perceptions, but then it also involves a lot of additional researchers that can submit modules and sometimes also individual questions to this Inequality Barometer that then allows us to focus also on other stuff that is related to inequality.

Gabriele Spilker

Before we go to these modules, first question: What is this fancy core of the Inequality Barometer? What are you mainly interested in with this Inequality Barometer?

Marius R. Busemeyer

A big goal here is really to come up with good measures of perception of inequality. And to be honest, it turns out that this is more complicated than we initially thought.

Gabriele Spilker

Why?

Marius R. Busemeyer

It's because inequality as such is such an abstract thing. People have very different understandings of this because it has concrete manifestations in different lives. So one thing that we have replicated—other people have found it too—is this very famous centrist bias that people in the upper half of the income distribution think they are actually less rich than they objectively are, and people in the lower half of the income distribution think that they are less poor than they actually are. So, it leads to this very strong centrist bias. But we also have other things: People are very pessimistic to some extent about inequality. They distrust the welfare state. They think inequality has increased a lot, especially in Germany, even though it has remained relatively stable in the last ten years at least. We also try to see whether there are certain biases in these perceptions of inequality and whether these biases might then lead to different political outcomes.

Gabriele Spilker

Very interesting. And as you can see, there are three pictures on the slide here. I think you can tell us a little bit more about the more specific projects and what you have found out with this Inequality Barometer data.

Marius R. Busemeyer

Yes, thanks. These pictures are taken from publications that came out of the Inequality Barometer. I can start with the last picture at the bottom, and of course, everybody in the room can see exactly what it shows, but I briefly explain it anyway. It shows basically the relationships between individual ideology, partisan ideology, and this perception bias of inequality. And it turns out that you need to measure ideology not in this classical left-right sense, but you need to measure ideology in a two-dimensional way because that's the way most political scientists are doing it now. The first dimension is this classical economic dimension between a strong state versus strong markets. The second one is about social values, about whether you support globalization or oppose it; whether you like environmentalism or not. And there it turns out that people who are conservative on the social values dimension, they severely underestimate their position in this income distribution. They are much more pessimistic than you would think. And they are also more likely to vote for the AfD, the right-wing populist party in Germany. So, it has real-world implications. And that's just one example.

Gabriele Spilker

And what are the other two examples?

Marius R. Busemeyer

Just very briefly: I think one other important focus in the Inequality Barometer is whether the selective provision of information can actually change perceptions of inequality. And here I just brought two examples. One is from a paper with Liam Beiser McGrath, who I think is also in the audience. In the paper, we looked at how information about the distributive effects of carbon taxation actually changes people's attitudes towards…

Gabriele Spilker

And does it change people's attitudes?

Marius R. Busemeyer

It does. It's not such a big effect, but it does. And the other one (example) is about student tuition fees, where in Germany, most people are very much opposed to student tuition fees. But if we provide information about the inequality of access to higher education, people get more supportive of this because they realize that financing higher education via general taxation is a subsidy for rich children, basically.

Gabriele Spilker

Very interesting. And if you have to somehow summarize all these findings in potentially one or two sentences, what would be the main takeaway?

Marius R. Busemeyer

Perceptions matter a lot. And that's, I think, one of the big findings also from the first cluster period. And we're still working on that, so to speak.

But I think then we can move on to our second project. The second project is by Sebastian Findeisen. It's on a different topic, obviously. So, Sebastian, just tell us what this is about?

Sebastian Findeisen

I work on automation. And in general, there's a lot of anxiety about automation. There are now fears about AI taking away jobs. But there's always a bit of a disconnect because clearly, as societies, we don't automate as much as we could, what is technologically feasible, right? We could have more self-driving cars if we really wanted to. We could automate more processes now, but we don't do it because there are decision makers involved. And typically, we think of the decision makers as being the firms, the managers, right? So, if you run a company, you produce and you decide how you want to produce it, you can hire workers or you can hire robots, you can hire machines. And a common way to think about it is: You would automate if it's profitable. This is what we would predict. 

Marius R. Busemeyer

That's an economist’s perspective!

Sebastian Findeisen

That's not economic, that is what I think many people would perceive is going on, right? So, companies do it. They don't do it when Sam Altman from OpenAI tells them to automate because he's going a bit crazy and says, "Whatever can be automated, should be automated. This is the goal of the company”. It’s more like firms see these new AI processes and if they think it makes sense for them, if the bottom line is good for the management, then they're going to automate. This is, I guess, a standard way to think about it. What we do here is study the German case. We study how automation actually happened in Germany in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. So, this is the wave of automation where industrial robots were installed en masse, for example, in the car industry, but also other manufacturing industries.

Gabriele Spilker

And is the German case, a typical case, or a special case to some extent?

Sebastian Findeisen

Let me come to that: So, this is where we can debate if it's special or not. The German way is a bit different of how automation was done in the '80s, '90s, and 2000s. Different, for example, from the American way or the Japanese way.

Marius R. Busemeyer

Because of work councils and unions and so on?

Sebastian Findeisen

Exactly. Germany has a special industrial relations model. So actually, we have work councils, which are important institutions in labour relations in Germany. And work councils, they have pretty explicit say, which is anchored in labour law.

Gabriele Spilker

Maybe for the non-Germans. What is a work council and which firms do have a work council?

Sebastian Findeisen

Work councils are a form of what is called “shop floor representation”. So, the workers can themselves decide who's elected. And then these work councils, they have rights which are anchored in labour laws. And if the firms violate, for example, not consulting with the work councils when they want to automate, they get pulled in front of a labour court. So, it's pretty explicit. And for example, in the case of automation, work councils have to be consulted and have to sign off often on whether you can install 10 of these industrial robots and change how productivity is done.

Marius R. Busemeyer

Do you find evidence that they are very protective and maybe also resistant to innovation, or what do you see?

Sebastian Findeisen

So that's where it gets interesting. You see from this graph in the upper right that the upper black line is automation in Germany compared to other regions in the world. I think it's the US and Western Europe. Germany automated pretty heavily in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Germany was at the forefront of automation, together with South Korea. Work councils were very open to the idea of automation. But we don't find any evidence that work council firms automate less. If anything, they automate more and more heavily. This is a more descriptive finding. However, there's something going on in the background. And we can characterize the negotiation, which goes on in the background, because work councils have this veto right. What they often buy themselves is job security for the workforce. There are often explicit clauses that nobody can be laid off. So, firms decide to bring in robots, but then the work council says, "Okay, for the next five years, nobody can get laid off". And also, we find evidence—this is the graph down there on the right—that work councils also use these episodes of automation to compress the wage distribution within firms. What they do is, they prevent raises for managers, and they set wage floors for all the workers who remain in the firm. Automation happening in non-work council firms is a bit different. They also automate, but there we see wage inequality within the firm strongly shooting up. So, what happens is non-work council firms, they install robots and then the firm gets more productive. That's why they do it. That's a typical profit argument.

Gabriele Spilker

Do firms with work councils and robots also get more productive?

Sebastian Findeisen

They also get more productive. Even more so. But if you don't have work councils, you also automate. But we typically see that some of the gains go to the management. Wages rise, you produce more, probably you export more and then the question is: Who gets part of this pie? And what work councils do is they enforce basically that the stronger part of this growing pie also goes to the lower ends of the internal wage distribution.

Marius R. Busemeyer

That sounds pretty optimistic to be honest, but I mean, this is a story about robots. How does potentially everything change when AI is in play?

Sebastian Findeisen

Let me first say something about the “optimistic”. Of course, it has a cost, right? Probably, firms didn't want to do it themselves because you also need to attract managers. You also need to attract talent, right? So, it could be a question. And then AI: It's a very interesting future question, because work councils traditionally have been the institution for blue-collar workers. AI is going to be a shock to white-collar workers. We don't know yet how things will happen. But I think Germany is an interesting proof of concept: When we think about automations, there's always an institution, a decision maker involved between the technology being invented and how it's actually used. And there are different ways of thinking about it. And I guess, every country will make different choices depending on their existing institutions and new institutions.

Gabriele Spilker

And the good thing is, there will be more to study for you in the future, right?

Sebastian Findeisen

That's a good thing. And AI will help me with that, ironically.

Gabriele Spilker

We have to move on, and Florian Kunze, who's a professor for organizational behaviour, will talk a little bit about his project, “Integration at Work”. So, Florian, what is Integration at Work?

Florian Kunze

So that's not only my project. Other people in the room also participated here. Claudia Diehl is sitting here, who was one of the sociologists. Sebastian Koos was also in there. And I see also Sophie Moser, who was also working heavily here in the data collection. What we did in that project, it's already in the name. We looked at integration processes in the workplace in Germany. Looking from a broader perspective, if migrants come to another country, they want to get integrated, many of them. And how do they get integrated well? If they're successfully integrated in the labour market. That also happens differently in different countries. So here in the German case, again, it's often done via apprenticeship. That's how you enter a labour market. You learn a new job by going to a firm or public organization, while also going to school; that lasts for three years. And if we look at the data for this: Does that work out? We have relatively high quit rates in general for these apprentices, but we have super high quit rates for non-native people. So up to 50% are not finishing this apprenticeship. Those are not too nice numbers! The idea of this project was to better understand the micro-social processes that take place within organizations when migrants, and comparatively native Germans, enter the workplace through an apprenticeship. 

Gabriele Spilker

And how did you do that? I guess that's not easy.

Florian Kunze

Exactly. So that was one of the big challenges: recruiting these people. Our ambition was to get a good sample. We didn’t succeed in obtaining a representative one. But to reach this population across Germany, we designed a specific smartphone app for this research project, where we approached these apprentices and they were surveyed from day one of the apprenticeship in the first three months, every week. Thereafter, they were surveyed every three months again. So, we tried to follow up over the whole three years.

Gabriele Spilker

And how many of them did stay in the first three years?

Florian Kunze

In the beginning, we had 1,100. That was nice. The dropout rate over time was then relatively high. But especially in the specific study I’m presenting here, we had a really good retention rate during the first three months, and we have had really dense and unique data, on which we are still working.

Gabriele Spilker

What are the specific findings you brought with you?

Florian Kunze

One of the most interesting things is that there are several findings in this study that we looked at, including interesting insights from a cluster perspective on how micro- and macro-level perspectives interact. We looked at how over these first three months, the perception of perceived undermining - that's an indirect form of discrimination - is different between natives and migrants, depending on the political climate in the region. We had apprentices from all over Germany, and we could map them within the voting districts. And we could see in the 2021 federal election results how much support for the right-wing AfD there was in these areas. Then we integrated that data with our micro social interaction data and could see that there is a steep increase in perceived social undermining for migrants, but only if there's a high right-wing voting happening in these areas. So, what are the implications here? We then looked at how it affects outcomes, satisfaction with apprentices, and emotional exhaustion later. There's an effect on this later. The key takeaway is that macro political polarization spills over in the workplace and influences micro social interaction at the workplace.

Gabriele Spilker

Does this also affect the later outcomes, such as quitting their jobs?

Florian Kunze

We still have intermediate outcomes. Feeling exhausted by this, not being satisfied with your apprenticeship. Unfortunately, our initial goal was also to look really at the turnover, but that was super difficult because people were dropping out of our survey and we were not sure if they were quitting our survey or their apprenticeship. So, we could not really use that measure. So, it's still an intermediate measure. But I would say there is a strong prediction that this also leads to turnover intentions later on.

Gabriele Spilker

And just to conclude, what would be your policy recommendation for that?

Florian Kunze

So first of all, that's not too nice of a story right now. But still, you can tell companies. And that's what we are also doing via communication. We also had one of these policy papers of our clusters on this. That even smaller companies, where a lot of these apprentices are working, can change the concrete social interaction, can make a difference within their specific culture and climate in the organization and can train especially the people responsible for the apprentices to care about this.

Marius R. Busemeyer

Very interesting. Thanks a lot. So, we're moving on to the next project. And the next project is also going to be a very interesting project on the role of political leaders in responsiveness and policymaking, information, juristic, and policy. We have Maj-Britt Sterba, who is a postdoc in that project. Let me start with a very general question. What is the project about?

Maj-Britt Sterba

As Marius also told us, we know and learn more and more about what citizens think about inequality. And here in this project, we would like to know how people, who are actually making choices about inequality-reducing or -enhancing measures, think about these issues. And in democracies, these are elected politicians. This is our sample, which is kind of the main selling point for our project. And specifically, we want to know how this very special selection of people learns about inequality. Also, how accurate they are in their perceptions of inequality in society, and how they process it. Here, the underlying assumption is that these are people who get tons of information from all sorts of directions, all sorts of actors. They have high time constraints, so they also have to judge which information to take into their opinion formation. And then how do they make decisions on inequality?

Marius R. Busemeyer

Just to clarify, you actually interviewed a lot of politicians, right? Who were these politicians and how many did you have in the sample in the end?

Maj-Britt Sterba

Yes, we had different data collections. In the first one, it was only Germany. We looked at the state-level politicians. There we have over 500 people. A response rate of 50%, which also wouldn't have been feasible without a big group of student assistants. So yes, thanks again to them. And then we also have an international collaboration going on where we collaborate with 14 other countries. There we look at the national level. There, the response rates are lower, but then you pool the data together and that still allows you to also do experiments with these persons.

Marius R. Busemeyer

Experiments with politicians?

Maj-Britt Sterba

Exactly.

Marius R. Busemeyer

How do they react? Are they cooperative? And what do you find basically when you do these interviews?

Maj-Britt Sterba

I mean, for the process, I think I was also asked that before, the typical reaction that you get is no reaction, I would say. I mean, it's not that you write an email and then they like knock on your door and want to talk to you. But that's why you really have to make an effort to follow up. But once they're actually, yes…very helpful, very cooperative.

Marius R. Busemeyer

Do you find differences in how elites perceive inequality compared to citizens? Or is this very similar? It's all human beings after all …

Maj-Britt Sterba

Maybe I can go a bit specifically to the findings where we partly compare them to citizens, but partly also not. So here in the first figure on the left, we let politicians, here's just the German sample, estimate also the income distribution in society. And then we asked them about their policy preferences with respect to redistribution. And there we find a kind of a similar finding like in the Inequality Barometer. Here, also for politicians, their ideology kind of shapes how they perceive inequality in society. So right-leaning politicians think that society is actually more equal than it is and also that it's more affluent and richer than it actually is. And when we then relate that to their policy preferences - if you look at the kind of right panel now on this figure, where in the model we use their perceptions of affluence and of inequality to predict their policy preferences - you see that it's the level of perceived inequality that remains a significant predictor also when we account for ideology already.

Marius R. Busemeyer

Maybe for the non-academic audience, what does it mean in normal words?

Maj-Britt Sterba

That their perceptions of social circumstances, let's say, of the inequality in society, derive from how much they are in favour of redistribution. The more inequality you perceive, the more you are in Favor of redistributive policies. But they misperceive it!

Marius R. Busemeyer

 do they perceive it as less of a problem, the elites? Or is this something that you don't find in the data?

Maj-Britt Sterba

I mean, maybe we can actually jump to the other figure, which is also based on other data. So here it is now European data. It's based on five European countries. And here we don't really look at the perceptions, but we look more on the normative side. How much inequality do they actually find fair? And how does this then depend also on the source of inequality? Is it rather due to merit or is it rather due to luck? I'm an economist, so we also have an interdisciplinary project. And this is coming a bit from economics that you let them do these abstract redistribution games, where in one case inequality is due to luck, in another one it's due to merit. And then they can make a redistribution decision. And what we here see, and here we directly compare citizens to legislators, is that both legislators and citizens distinguish between the sources of inequality and always redistribute more, implement a lower degree of inequality when it's due to luck. And we also find that across ideology. But here I think the interesting part is that you see that actually left-leaning politicians are much more misaligned with their voters than right-leaning politicians.

Marius R. Busemeyer

That's an interesting finding. I would actually expect, maybe if the left-wing parties used to be rooted in working-class movements, that there would be a stronger connection to the people. But you find the opposite.

Maj-Britt Sterba

Exactly. And you could also have expected that maybe because they are silly leads and they mingle with affluent people, that somehow, they are just all more conservative than their voters. That the left-leaning politicians would be kind of less in favour of redistribution than the citizens. But it's not what we find.

Gabriele Spilker

Do you have an explanation for that?

Maj-Britt Sterba

In general, I would say that legislators are much more ideologically polarized, let's say, than citizens. We find that across studies, across different topics. I mean, here maybe there's an upper limit to how much you can be against redistribution for the right people. 

Gabriele Spilker

Super interesting. Let's move or rather let's stay within the realm of perceptions, but let's move from politicians to workers and talk to Thomas Hinz, professor of sociology. Thomas, what did you study?

Thomas Hinz 

I mean, this is a project done by some colleagues who are also in the room. We have a cooperation between sociologists. I'm a sociologist. We have an economist on the PI level, Nick Zubanov. And Susanne Strauß is also with us. And much of the work was done by our doctoral student, who is now a postdoc. Ole Brüggemann is also with us today. We study one very important inequality in our society. And that's the wage inequality. And not the wage inequality itself, but how people perceive the wage inequality. Do they find it fair or unfair that peer workers earn a bit more, a bit less, or much more, or much less? And what we did here is we built on a very, I would say, high-quality data sample. We cooperated with the IAB, Institute for Arbeitsmarkt. It builds on a random sample of workers. 5,400 in 500 firms. And we did some sort of selection criteria for these firms representing different degrees of within-firm-level inequality and all these kinds of things. Some sort of innovation in this project is that we were able to do this sort of survey experiment with a focus on a colleague in the same firm in a similar job. And that's something that was new to the research. So that addresses the vagueness of some previous literature, where the reference person that is evaluated in these third-person evaluations is unclear.

Gabriele Spilker

To be precise, you did an online survey, if I'm not mistaken, with a lot of workers in a lot of firms. And they had to do a survey experiment. What did the survey experiment exactly look like?

Thomas Hinz 

This is depicted here on the slide. It's very small. It's a sample vignette. It's a written description of a person who is in the same firm as the respondent and is in a position that is similar. And then we have varying characteristics of what is happening on the job. And most importantly for today's talk, we varied the income that this person receives here. The respondent is asked for his or her evaluation of this, as fair or unfair. We varied this from minus 40% to the actual income of this person, who is working in the firm where we're doing the survey. So, we have clear reference points.

Gabriele Spilker

So, you have exact data on how much people earn in each firm?

Thomas Hinz 

Yes. I mean, if people provided this in the online survey, we use this as a reference point to calculate the income in the vignette. So, this is to some sort dependent on the information that we received.

Gabriele Spilker

And what do you find?

Thomas Hinz 

I mean, what I'm focusing on today is something that sociologists often talk about: Relative deprivation or some sort of relative effects. Relative effects are often more important than the absolute standing in a distribution. And to us, it's a very common thing and it's very important. When we research this in this study, we see that it's not that easy. So that means that when we look at the absolute standing in the income position, meaning totally in all incomes that we measured, that dominates clearly in the effect sizes as compared to the relative position. The relative position is also important for the feeling of being under-rewarded or over-rewarded, depending on the amount of variation. But the absolute position is much more important than the relative one.

Gabriele Spilker

And you expected that to be the other way around? Is that correct?

Thomas Hinz 

Yes. Actually, that was a bit of our expectation. Because from the literature, the relative position is often highlighted as a very important one. When we have colleagues from the same university as we are, we can talk about our income and compare to each other. And this gives us much more relevance.

Gabriele Spilker

We could even measure a gender pay gap!

Thomas Hinz 

Maybe, yes. We can ask about that. But we saw that for the workers that we did the research on, it's much more important how the absolute positions are.

Gabriele Spilker

What are the implications of this finding, Thomas?

Thomas Hinz 

I mean, for us, it's a challenge to deal with that because we expected something different. Of course, this is also some way to make progress in science. I think it's important to learn more about the implications that the results have for the pay schemes that you implement in firms. And it's also an interesting thing that it seems that there is some sort of threshold effect at the material level. The absolute material level is something that has to be secured. And then people think about some differences concerning the relative position. This is depicted in the other very complicated graph I had.

Gabriele Spilker

That means that as long as you're really insecure economic-wise or if you earn not too much, then you really are concerned about the absolute values. But once you are safe, then suddenly the relative positions are more important.

Thomas Hinz 

Exactly. That's the finding that is depicted here in this figure.

Gabriele Spilker

Very interesting. And this is not dependent on the specific firm? You find that across the different firms?

Thomas Hinz

Yes. I think one last point about that is that we also looked at the inequality experience in the firm. So higher wage inequality or not. The result is also very telling. It's only relevant when it comes to the feeling of under-reward. Then you look at the inequality at the firm level.

Marius R. Busemeyer

Thanks a lot, Thomas, for this very interesting project. And last but not least, we move on to a very different project from the ones that we heard so far. It's about the Global South. And it's about climate change. And this is a topic that Gabi Spilker has been involved in the last few years. So again, starting with a very general question, what is this about?

Gabriele Spilker

Before I tell you what the project is about, I also want to say that it's not only me who works on this project. But there are a lot of people involved. I can see at least one person in the room. That's Summer Isaacson over there, she's involved. Sebastian Koos, whom I don't see yet, he's my project partner. Then we also have Viktoria Jansesberger, who will present a paper out of this project tomorrow. And Rebecca Strauch. And what we try to do is to expand a little bit the focus of the cluster in terms of which countries to study. So, we don't only study Germany, although Germany is, of course, an important case, but potentially a special case. And we decided that we really want to broaden the focus inequality-wise and focus on something different. In particular, climate-change-induced inequalities. And here we observe something, I think, really special, and something that makes climate change such a difficult problem to tackle. Namely, that it strong inequality-related consequences in those countries that did the least in terms of contributing to the problem of climate change. Namely, those countries in the Global South. They are, on average, those who already suffer most from these consequences today. And we really wanted to know more about these inequalities and about one specific manifestation that can arise out of these inequalities. And that's: When do these climate-change-induced environmental extreme events result in protest?

Marius R. Busemeyer

Can you give a concrete example of such an event? It's a rather abstract term. Floods? 

Gabriele Spilker

Exactly. And we investigate everything. So, it can be floods. It can be prolonged droughts, heat waves, fires. But we also collected data on various different environmental protests. And that's potentially also getting to one of our first findings. Namely, that we expected many more environmental protests that are related to environmental disasters. And we do see that. But that's not the most typical form of protest that we are observing. The most typical forms of environmental protest we are observing are, in fact, water-related protests. So often because there is too little water or water is polluted.

Marius R. Busemeyer

Is it also maybe because if there's a flood or disaster, you may have other concerns rather than going to a demonstration?

Gabriele Spilker

Absolutely. And that's an important point of the story. Namely, that protest is a resource-intensive thing to do. You need to have, a) the time to go to protest. You also need to potentially have either the money, or you have to be okay with not earning money or doing something else during the time you go to protest. So, protest is really an intensive activity. And we don't see it as often as one might expect. And it's often really the most intense events in terms of environmental degradation that then really lead to protests arising.

Marius R. Busemeyer

And if you compare that to other grievances that might get people to go to protest on the street, how important is climate change then? Do they care more about climate change relative to democracy, autocracy, or is it very hard to compare? 

Gabriele Spilker

No, it's not so hard to compare because … That’s also why our protest data set has this slightly funny name, ECO-MMAD. This is not a coincidence because MMAD is the Mass Mobilization in Autocracies database that already existed beforehand. And we were able to build on this existing database that records protest events for everything else but for environmental events. And what we did is, we took the same countries, then expanded it to all democracies in the Global South and coded also these environmental protests. And what that allows us to do, and this is depicted up here in this world map, these are all protest events happening around the world, or at least the Global South world. And what we see is that, in fact, environmental protests are a very tiny minority of protests worldwide. What we often see is that in circumstances that are very repressive … One of the countries where we see the most environmental protests is in Iran. Often, environmental protest is potentially a type of protest that allows people to protest. But not directly against the government, but rather against something that is potentially still okay to protest about.

Marius R. Busemeyer

And maybe also some final words about the field research that you did, because you also did concrete fieldwork in two countries, in Chile and South Africa. You did face-to-face interviews. How did that experience change your insights? How did it contribute to the project?

Gabriele Spilker

These were really two exciting trips. And I was able to be in Chile where we were able to get many insightful aspects. The other graph I brought with me here refers to this. One type of protest we also see is related to resource extraction-related processes, because many resource extraction activities are very dirty, to say it bluntly. At the same time, these resource extraction activities, of course, provide jobs for individuals. And so, there's a big trade-off for communities in terms of jobs versus environmental degradation. And what we wanted to know is, on the one hand, when are these trade-offs being accepted? But also, when do they trigger protests? And what types of protest do people on the ground really support? And this is what this graph shows. And what we were interested in is whether it's important that the environmental degradation has very clear health impacts. And what we can see is that as soon as we have health issues, that's often a trigger that makes the protest really start. And in this case, also, what we see is that even violent forms of protest are slightly more acceptable to people on the ground than other times when violence occurs and there are no clear health implications of these environmental events.

Marius R. Busemeyer

Great. Thanks a lot to you, Gabi. To you all here on the stage for these insightful insights into your projects and into some of the research findings from the cluster's first funding phase. Thanks to all of you for listening. And that concludes our special episode.

Gabriele Spilker

And if you want to listen to more podcasts, you can do that on all the regular podcasts where you get podcasts from. And every first Wednesday of the month, there is a new podcast. And this one will be out in May. Thanks for listening! 

   (This transcript was created using AI.)