Hot Off The Press: “Priority of Needs?”

Members of the interdisciplinary research group “Need-Based Justice and Distribution Procedures”, funded by the German Research Foundation, have summarized the results of more than six years of research in the volume “Priority of Needs? An Informed Theory of Need-Based Justice”, edited by Bernhard Kittel and Stefan Traub. The research group’s mission statement reads:

The objective of the research group “Need-Based Justice and Distribution Procedures” is to empirically contribute to establishing a positive and informed normative theory of need-based justice. This theory should provide answers to four questions: (i) How do individuals identify their needs and which distributions are considered sufficient for those needs? (ii) On the collective level, what is considered need-based justice and which processes lead to acceptance of those needs? (iii) Which collective dynamics unfold during this acceptance process in the context of (un-)stable political compromises? (iv) Which incentive-based effects of the collective level can be observed on the individual level, and is a need-based redistribution sustainable?

See below for the table of contents.

Part 1 – Identification of Needs

• Adele Diederich: Need as One Distribution Principle – Frames and Framing
• Alexander Max Bauer and Mark Siebel: Measuring Need-Based Justice – Empirically and Formally

Part 2 – Structures and Processes of the Recognition of Needs

• Bernhard Kittel: The Social Recognition of Needs
• Markus Tepe and Nils Springhorn: The Political Recognition of Needs
• Tanja Pritzlaff-Scheele, Patricia F. Zauchner, and Frank Nullmeier: Deliberation and Need-Based Distribution

Part 3 – Welfare Consequences of Prioritizing Need-Based Distributions

• Andreas Nicklisch: Need-Based Justice and Social Utility – A Preference Approach
• Stefan Traub, Jan Philipp Krügel, and Meike Benker: How Sustainable is Need-Based Redistribution?

Part 4 – Differentiation

• Kai-Uwe Schnapp: Need and Street-Level Bureaucracy – How Street-Level Bureaucrats Understand and Prioritize Need
• Adele Diederich and Marc Wyszynski: Justice Principles, Prioritization in the Healthcare Sector, and the Effect of Framing

Literature

Kittel, Bernhard, and Stefan Traub (eds.) (2024): Priority of Needs? An Informed Theory of Need-Based Justice. Cham: Springer. (Link)