Welfare States and Protest: Understanding the Contentious Outcomes of Social Policy in Africa (B13*)

• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 374666841

B13 will systematically analyze for one world region in the Global South (Africa) how the socioeconomic effectiveness and political integration of social policies affect the levels of contention around these policies, and how the inclusiveness and scope of benefits of social policies interact with other factors like perceived grievances, political and discursive opportunity structures, and resources available to protesters and governments. This addresses the absence of the welfare state in protest research and will provide reliable data on protests in Africa by applying state of the art LLMs and integrating multimodal information sources in the analysis.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
• Applicant Institution: Universität Bremen
• Project Heads: Professor Dr. Sebastian Haunss; Professorin Dr. Sophia Hunger