Rittershaus, Simon

Simon Rittershaus is a doctoral researcher at the University of Konstanz.

Research Group:

• Varieties of Egalitarianism: Mapping the Politics of Inequality with Online Crowdcoding (Emmy Noether Group)

Doctoral Project:

"Does the green state undermine equality in advanced democracies?"

Abstract:

The dissertation project addresses tensions and reciprocity as well as developments, patterns, and varieties of and between equality-enhancing and climate mitigation policies. Inequality and climate change are undoubtedly two of the most pressing issues of modern societies and require massive state action. While resource scarcity may simply imply spending trade-offs between the policy areas, countries facing pressure to act on different issues might as well establish diverging sets of policies. State interventions in both areas, such as minimum wages and carbon emission limits; redistributive policies, such as explanatory welfare states and environmental taxes and their compensation; or future-oriented investment policies, such as education spending and balancing green investment against fossil fuel subsidies; are ways to deal with inequality and climate change. At the policy level, different measures might create distributive conflicts and crowd out or reinforce each other, shaping countries’ enduring policy trajectories. How these policy patterns look like and how they have changed over time is the subject of this dissertation.

Research Interests:

• Comparative Public Policy
• Politics of Inequality
• Environmental Politics