Paulus Wagner

Paulus Wagner’s research at Science Po/ LIEPP focuses on citizen attitudes on social policy. In his dissertation, he is interested in ‚welfare chauvinism‘, a phenomenon linked to right-wing populist politics. Using a mixed methods approach, he conducted 150 biographical interviews with German and Austrian citizens, half of them manual workers by occupation, to analyse the genesis of these attitudes. Testing a theory on the relationship of populist attitudes to problems experienced especially by the working classes („modernization loser theory“), his thesis formulates the theory that in fact the genesis of welfare chauvinist attitudes is often linked to the experience of problems in the fields of work and contact with the welfare state. These problematic situations, in turn, are produced by the dynamics of social disintegration especially at the „meso“ level, i.e. within organisations and in the contact of organisations with citizens. During his PhD, Paulus did a research stay at the Department of Sociology of the University of California at Berkeley with Michael Burawoy and Arlie Russel-Hochschild. Before starting his PhD, he obtained a Master of Research in Social Sciences (with a specialisation in comparative development studies) at EHESS, Paris, a Master of Arts in International Political Economy at King’s College, London and a Bachelor of Arts in Translation and Interpretation from the University of Vienna and the Russian State University of Humanities in Moscow. Apart from his academic background, he has gained experience in other professional fields through internships in journalism (with DIE WELT in Berlin and ZDF in Vienna), diplomacy (in the Austrian Embassy in Zagreb, Croatia) and in the oil and gas industry (with OMV in Vienna).