Wellbeing returns on social investment recalibration (WellSIRe)

Organised by

• Department of Economics
• Department of History
• Department of Law
• Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies
• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• Department of Political and Social Sciences
• Florence School of Transnational Governance
• Inequality, Welfare and Social Justice

A strong reliance on extant welfare paradigms, biased towards redistribution, makes it difficult to grasp the complex dynamics of 21st-century social policy provision. The European Research Council (ERC) WellSIRe Advanced Grant Project proposes a novel theoretical and (pluralist) methodological platform for capturing the ‘social investment’ logic of contemporary welfare states.

Analytically, it re-conceptualizes welfare provision as a configuration of complementary policy functions rather than trade-offs; it theorizes the mechanisms through which compensation and capacitating social policy generate (objective and subjective) wellbeing returns over the life course; and it highlights the importance of analysing the institutional conditions that make social investment complementarities sustainable.

Empirically, the WellSIRe project illustrates how methodological pluralism is key to leverage cumulative causal adequacy by re-engaging sociological and political science enquiry in 21st-century welfare state research. Different – quantitative and qualitative – methods are imperative to explain both welfare outcomes and institutional change in a common research endeavour that involves both generalization and contextualization.