Spending Taxpayers Money – A Survey Experiment in Germany on War Threat and Social Policy Preferences

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered profound political, economic, and social disruptions across Europe. Beyond its immediate humanitarian and military consequences, the war has exposed democratic societies to heightened levels of fear, uncertainty, and material pressure. These developments raise a fundamental question: Does wartime threat shift citizens in democracies toward more particularistic and exclusionary understandings of social policy? As European welfare states confront rising demands from refugees, increasing defense expenditures, and inflationary pressures, conflicts over who deserves support and who belongs to the moral community challenge the existing social contract. We argue that wartime threat shifts the perceived fairness of redistribution and increases particularistic and exclusionary social policy preferences. Our argument builds on research from political psychology and conflict studies showing that external danger intensifies authoritarian value orientations (Jost et al. 2003; Hetherington & Suhay 2011; Leach et al. 2008; Asbrock & Hiel 2017). Under conditions of fear and uncertainty, individuals rely more strongly on insider–outsider distinctions. This, in turn, should translate into particularistic deservingness conceptions, implying welfare support increasingly reserved for the native in-group, while (non-)native out-groups are perceived as less deserving or undeserving of social provision (Ennser-Jedenastik 2018; Schumacher & Van Kersbergen 2016; Rathgeb 2021; Busemeyer et al. 2022). Besides the aggregate hypothesis, we expect the impact of wartime threat to vary systematically with individual characteristics. For example, party support should condition how strongly individuals react to war-related threat. Citizens intending to vote for moderate parties should exhibit the greatest shift toward particularistic policy preferences, whereas the preferences of voters of left parties such as Die Linke or extreme right-wing parties such as the AfD may instead be reinforced in their pre-existing orientations. To test our argument, we employ a pretested and preregistered survey experiment (N=3000) using validated threat primes to identify the causal effects of wartime danger on social policy preferences. We focus on Germany and assign respondents randomly to different war-threat cues, expressing varying levels of escalation. Germany is well suited as a case, since it recently faces credible but distant threat from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and has seen major budgetary changes due to drastically rising levels of military expenditure. The experiment entails a twofold treatment. First, each respondent will receive a short, stylized newspaper article reporting about two proposed hypothetical social policies and either containing a statement on threat from the Ukraine war of varying degree (treatment 1) or not (control). Then, the participants receive iterations of a conjoint experiment, containing redistribution proposals with three treatment dimensions of budget, policy type and target group of both policies (treatment 2). This design allows us to differentiate to what extent war threat affects the preference for social policies of varying design.