Concept Note on the Welfare and Democracy Observatory

Across much of the twentieth century, democracy and social welfare were widely understood as mutually reinforcing: democratic competition and accountability could expand social rights, while welfare institutions could deepen citizenship, reduce insecurity, and stabilize democratic rule. Yet the twenty-first century has unsettled this assumption. In many countries, welfare expansion has coincided with democratic backsliding; in others, regimes have used social policy to redraw the boundaries of belonging, consolidate executive power, and manage dissent. The result is a rapidly growing empirical and theoretical gap: we lack an integrated, global framework for understanding how welfare policies shape and are shaped by processes of democratization, autocratization, and regime transformation.

The Observatory on Democracy and Welfare is a new interdisciplinary research network designed to address this gap. Convened through the CEU Democracy Institute in collaboration with the University of Michigan’s Center for Emerging Democracies and partners across regions, the Observatory aims to become a durable hub for comparative scholarship on the welfare–democracy nexus under contemporary political conditions. It brings together scholars working across world regions and methodological traditions comparative political economy, welfare state research, contentious politics, public administration, gender studies, migration studies, and political sociology unified by a common question: when does welfare strengthen democracy, and when does it instead reinforce illiberalism and authoritarian rule?

Why an Observatory now

The Democracy Institute’s existing research agendas foreground structural drivers of democratic change inequality, institutional erosion, crises, and shifting political coalitions. The Observatory adds a complementary focus: social policy as a political instrument that mediates these structural pressures. To justify new research groupings by identifying an under-theorized but increasingly decisive force shaping democratic life, the Observatory starts from the premise that welfare policy is not merely distributive; it is also a way of organizing state–society relations, governing marginality, producing social order, and legitimating authority.

Core conceptual orientation

The Observatory treats welfare systems as political settlements: institutionalized answers to questions of inclusion, deservingness, obligation, and control. In this perspective, the welfare–democracy nexus is not “automatic.” Welfare institutions can expand voice and equality, but they can also become tools of selective incorporation, depoliticization, clientelism, surveillance, and boundary-making. The same policy instrument cash transfers, family benefits, long-term care, labour market interventions can operate differently depending on how it is designed, implemented, and contested.

A second guiding idea is that welfare policy cannot be understood only through “structural” explanations (growth models, globalization, fiscal capacity). The Observatory places emphasis on political drivers: electoral competition, contentious politics, coalition strategies, repression and co-optation, and the institutional pathways through which claims are translated into policy. This includes careful attention to the role of demand who demands welfare, in what forms, and with what organizational capacity as a critical factor differentiating rights-based social citizenship from welfare deployed as counter-insurgency.

Cross-cutting themes

To structure collaborative work and ensure intellectual coherence across regions, the Observatory foregrounds several cross-cutting themes that emerged from prior discussions and the Michigan convening:

1. Migration, labour mobility, and welfare under autocratization
   How welfare systems classify migrant workers and mobile populations, and how these classifications interact with regime strategies in autocratizing contexts.
2. Family, gender, and the politics of welfare in illiberal regimes
   How welfare interventions mobilize meanings of family, gender roles, and care often instrumentalized and appropriated within illiberal and authoritarian projects.
3. Contention, civil society, and the contentious politics of welfare
   How social movements, trade unions, and civil society organizations shape welfare trajectories and how governments use social policy to neutralize, incorporate, or fragment challengers.
4. State capacity, bureaucratic reconfiguration, and governance infrastructures
   How bureaucracies, policy advice, participatory governance, and administrative capacity condition welfare outcomes in autocratizing or authoritarian settings, including the politics of implementation.

These themes are not exhaustive, but they provide a shared language for collaborative research and for integrating the Observatory’s work with broader Democracy Institute priorities on inequality and democratic resilience.

What we have done so far

The Observatory is being built on a set of concrete activities already underway.

1) JESP Special Issue (accepted): A major early output is the special issue “Democracy, Autocracy and the Welfare State in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective”, accepted by the Journal of European Social Policy in March 2026. The special issue provides a shared conceptual anchor and a publication pathway that convenes cross-regional perspectives on welfare and regime change, with publication anticipated in Spring 2027.

2) Doctoral Seminar Series (launched): To broaden the pipeline and cultivate a next generation of scholars, the Democracy Institute launched a doctoral seminar series on the theme, attracting 90+ registrations and building an online forum for sustained scholarly exchange.   The geographic distribution of participants demonstrates both strong European engagement and meaningful reach beyond Europe (including participants from Turkey/Eurasia, Asia, Africa, and the Americas).

3) Institutionalization and teaching-oriented expansion (in progress): A Jean Monnet Module proposal (WelDem – Module on EU Welfare Democracy Policy) was submitted in December 2025 with the aim of institutionalizing the seminar series, expanding guest lectures, and developing a policy lab component over 36 months.

4) Inaugural in-person convening (Michigan workshop): The first in-person meeting at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) marked the transition from a set of related activities to a coordinated network. It combined a public panel on authoritarian welfare with a closed-door workshop focused on research exchange, shared conceptual frameworks, and agenda-setting for the Observatory’s next phase.

What we plan to do next

The Observatory’s next phase focuses on converting convening energy into durable research infrastructure.

1) Develop an articulated comparative research agenda: We will formalize a small number of thematic research clusters (building on the cross-cutting themes above) with clear comparative questions, candidate cases, and shared conceptual definitions. Outputs will include co-authored working papers, comparative research designs, and proposals for joint data and indicator development, where appropriate.

2) Build a sustained convening and feedback architecture: The Observatory will maintain a rhythm of (i) annual in-person meetings, (ii) periodic online workshops organized around cluster outputs, and (iii) structured peer-feedback processes for special-issue and post–special issue publications. The goal is to make the Observatory a site where projects mature through repeated, high-quality exchange rather than one-off events.

3) Expand teaching, doctoral networks, and scholarly exchange: We will deepen the doctoral seminar series and develop mechanisms for co-supervision, committee support, and short-term doctoral exchanges across participating institutions. The Observatory will also explore co-taught modules, guest lectures, and summer-school style offerings building on the demonstrated demand for training and scholarly exchange across regions.

4) Scale the network globally, with a Global South emphasis: The Observatory will actively expand membership beyond its initial core, prioritizing under-represented regions and scholarly communities. The aim is not only geographic diversity, but a genuinely global comparative dialogue in which Global South welfare trajectories are treated as theory-generating rather than as peripheral cases.

5) Secure funding and institutional anchoring: To sustain these activities, the Observatory will identify target calls and funders and match them to cluster priorities. In parallel, we will pursue institutional ties and co-ownership arrangements that embed the Observatory within partner institutions, ensuring continuity in convening, mentorship, and output production.

6) To give this agenda immediate institutional substance, the Observatory will leverage existing mobility and exchange infrastructures on both sides of the Atlantic. At the University of Michigan, the Center for International Experience offers bursaries that can support graduate student research abroad aligned with the Observatory’s themes. In addition to hosting visiting scholars, particularly from the Global South, the Michigan node can also help seed funding for outbound graduate exchanges and short-term research placements connected to Observatory projects. We understand that partners at the University of Toronto and Cornell are exploring similar mobility and exchange mechanisms, which would allow us to build a coordinated pipeline of South–North and North–South scholarly exchange (visiting scholars, doctoral fieldwork support, and co-mentored placements). These concrete exchange pathways will serve as an early, visible deliverable of the Observatory while also strengthening collaborative research clusters and joint funding bids.

Conclusion

The Observatory on Democracy and Welfare is built on a straightforward premise: welfare policy is one of the most consequential yet insufficiently theorized political arenas through which contemporary democracies are tested and through which authoritarian projects are consolidated or contested. By assembling a global network, anchoring collaboration in concrete outputs, and integrating research with training and exchange, the Observatory aims to reshape how we understand the welfare–democracy nexus in the twenty-first century and to build a durable scholarly community capable of carrying that agenda forward.