The design of social welfare policies is often faced with a trade-off between the aim of not rejecting deserving claimants and the aim of not accepting undeserving claimants. To illustrate, social assistance schemes are intended to ensure that everyone has enough money to cover their basic subsistence costs. However, the government often lacks relevant information about whether or not a person satisfies the requirements for receiving such benefits. This creates the potential for making two types of errors: i. that some people receive benefits they are not entitled to, what we could call type 1 errors, and ii. that some people do not receive benefits they are entitled to, what we could call type 2 errors. We aim to study how people make this tradeoff using both opinion surveys and economic experiments and by doing so we add a new dimension to the study of prosocial preferences. In the survey study, we will present subjects with a vignette where the subjects are asked to assess the relative unfairness of type 1 and type 2 errors in the context of specific welfare policies. In particular, we are interested in describing the heterogeneity in how people make the trade-off between type 1 and type 2 errors. Additionally we aim to examine how these differences in trade-off relate to the support for social welfare policies, and to political preferences. In addition to describing the heterogeneity in how people make trade-offs between type 1 and type 2 errors in welfare policies within countries, we also aim to examine how this heterogeneity relates to attitudes towards welfare policy in countries with different welfare policies. In particular, we will use the survey study to compare attitudes to type 1 and type 2 errors in European countries with generous welfare schemes, such as the Scandinavian countries, to attitudes in countries with less generous welfare schemes, such as the US. The hypothesis we aim to test is that people in the first group of countries are more concerned with type 2 errors than type 1 errors, while the reverse is true for the latter group of countries. We will also conduct economic experiments where participants are faced with a trade-off between type 1 and type 2 errors in real incentivized economic situations. The basic idea behind the design is to have participants decide whether or not to transfer money from people who have earned money by doing a real effort task to participants who have not earned money. The key element of the design is that there is uncertainty concerning the reason why some participants did not earn money: either they did the same work as the participants who earned money (and are thus deserving) or they decided not to participate in the experiment (and are thus undeserving). Our focus is on how the decision to transfer money depends on the probability that the receivers are deserving.

Much modern Muslim thought, particularly around legal issues, is characterised by an emulation of past perfection, and a dissatisfaction with an imperfect present. Muslim communities and movements (be they radicaland violent or liberal and progressive) usually frame their programmes for change as attempts to preserve, revive and recapture the belief and practice of the past Muslim community. From terrorism which claims to be Islamic (most recently the emergence of Islamic State and the Charlie Hebdo attacks) to the European Sharīʿa law debates, the need for a greater understanding of the pivotal role of historical precedent in the construction of contemporary Muslim thinking is clear. It is this need the Understanding Sharīʿa Project aims to address. The participants, all internationally recognised experts in the study of Islamic law, will create a research base and draw on an international networks of expertise. They will also engage in activities whereby this knowledge can be disseminated to a wider, non-academic audience (including both those within and outside of the Muslim community). Understanding the importance of the perceptions of the past, and the authority drawn from precedent for current Muslim thought and practice is too often misunderstood within the academic community (viewing it sometimes as blind imitation of the past), but more crucially amongst policy makers and the general public. This project aims to make a contribution to raising the level of public debate around these issues by emphasising the creative and future-orientation of modern Muslim understandings of the past. The project is a collaboration of four institution: Universities of Exeter, Leiden, Gottingen and Bergen, and in each institution an established academic (Gleave, Buskens, Schneider and Vikor) will work with a a postdoctoral researcher; they project will meet for both academic and public events every six-months, working with both academics and practitioners.

CULTIVATE seeks to understand the role of cultural heritage in shaping sustainable landscapes and communities in the context of societal challenges such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the climate emergency and transitions required to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This research will explore how cultural narratives are co-created, contested and negotiated at community, regional and national scales using methods that bring to the fore cultural values, identity and relationships between people and land. CULTIVATE aims to make conceptual advances by integrating cultural heritage paradigms with socio-ecological systems (SES) to design a methodology to analyse how cultural narratives emerge in relation to stakeholder dynamics, landscape features and drivers of change. CULTIVATE will explore different meaning of heritage through a participatory co-creation approach thereby contributing to JPICH CHIP project and also informing progress towards SDGs. Cultural narratives will be reshaped using the ‘Seeds of a good Anthropocene’ methodology which focuses on using inspirational visions and stories to achieve transformations to sustainability. CULTIVATE will have valuable impact in real world socio-ecological systems by conducting research across 4 Biosphere Reserves which represent a diverse spectrum of rural cultural landscapes with an ethos of scientific-based management and community engagement. Cultural narratives in the BR communities will be contrasted with those at regional and national level to explore how cultural heritage is conceptualised in different parts of SES. Findings will be synthesised for dissemination both regionally/nationally and internationally. A bank of narratives expressed in written and arts-based forms will be produced as a resource and other outcomes will include policy recommendation for the integration of intangible heritage into planning and management. CULTIVATE will have lasting impact on communities through the empowering nature of its co-creation approach. The role of Biosphere Reserves as demonstration regions will lead to international impact through global Biosphere networks.

Recent developments in Hungary and Poland have led to a crisis of the rule of law in the European Union (EU). However, the current approach that emphasizes the legal foundations of the rule of law does not offer a fundamental solution. CITIZENS-LAW therefore uses empirical-legal research to analyse citizens perceptions of law in the Netherlands, Denmark and Hungary. These research results will be translated into a new governance toolkit to strengthen the rule of law in Europe.

The aim of the research project "Fairness, personal responsibility and the welfare state" is to analyze how fairness considerations, in particular with respect to personal responsibility, affect the support and effectiveness of welfare policies. The European welfare states are faced with important challenges, in particular related to financial strains on the welfare system, changing migration flows and increasing inequality. Partly as a response to these challenges, there is an increasing focus on personal responsibility. The proposed research project will provide new knowledge about how the welfare states can meet these challenges and how concerns for personal responsibility can be integrated in the design of welfare schemes in a way that is perceived as fair. The research project has three main parts that all are highly relevant to the call. Part A of the research project studies how people attribute personal responsibility for outcomes and the link between views about personal responsibility and the support for redistributive welfare policies. Part B of the research project studies peoples preferences in situations where it is impossible to implement the welfare policies that are seen as most fair. In Part C of the research project we study what we refer to as reference-dependent social preferences and examine whether such preferences might shed light on cross-country differences in the support for welfare schemes. Taken together, the three parts of this research project represent a unique research agenda addressing questions that are of fundamental importance for understanding the challenges faced by the European welfare states. Four research teams from three countries; Austria, Norway and the Netherlands, will take a cross-disciplinary perspective on fairness and use an innovative combination of methods, including lab and field experiments, survey studies and collection of administrative data. The main applicant, Alexander W. Cappelen, is the director of The Choice Lab at NHH Norwegian School of Economics. Cappelen has extensive experience managing large research programs with international collaborators. The infrastructure at The Choice Lab will provide the basic support for the research project.