The Importance of Narratives for Agenda Setting. A Multiple Streams Analysis of Policy Instability in German Unemployment benefits.

After two decades of stasis, basic security benefit for jobseekers in Germany is currently un-dergoing permanent reform. In 2023, the activating Hartz IV was replaced with the less de-manding Bürgergeld (citizen’s benefit). While this reform was initially met with widespread ap-proval, shortly after the agenda setting a much more polarized political and media debate led to significant adjustments of the citizen’s benefit, which is still a main issue in the run-up to the federal election 2025. How can we explain why the reform of the basic security stays on the agenda despite moder-ate unemployment? To answer this question, we combine sociological institutionalism with the Multiple Stream Framework (MSF) and assume that three factors cause policy instability: (1) Incompatible narratives in the politics and the policy stream hinder the formulation of a poli-cy that is both knowledge-based and socially accepted. In the German case, 20 years of eval-uation research found little effect that sanctions and workfare policies in general reduce unem-ployment sustainably. Instead, policies that enhance the employability of the unemployed are increasingly discussed in the policy community. In contrast, the national mood is in favour of imposing sanctions on the unemployed who refuse to accept job and training offers and the once controversial workfare policies of the Hartz reforms have gained in popularity. (2) Polarization entrepreneurs, who have an interest in fuelling conflicts, frame problems and manipulate the national mood strategically. Regarding the citizen’s benefit, tabloid media and the political opposition once again brought up narratives of the lazy unemployed and the insti-tution’s unfairness towards the ‘hard working middle-class’. By emotionalizing the debate, these narratives shifted the problem definition from sustainable labour market integration of the unemployed towards the institution’s social acceptance. The citizens’ benefit advocates failed to counter these debates by establishing their own, matching narrative. (3) In the current times of multiple crises, windows of opportunity to challenge the status quo open in ever shorter intervals. Initially, the Social Democrats and Greens used the covid pan-demic as an opportunity to free themselves from the burdensome Hartz regime that they creat-ed two decades earlier. This was possible as the perception of the welfare deservingness of the unemployed temporarily changed during the pandemic. However, as the pandemic-subsided, the public perception of unemployment as self-inflicted began to take hold again. In addition, a few months later, the government decision to include war refugees from Ukraine in the citizens’ benefit opened a window to set the agenda for a reversal of central elements of the reform. In sum, we use the example of a welfare state policy to examine how contradictory narratives can affect the perception of problems and appropriate policies to tackle the problem – with sig-nificant effects on the stability of policies. Our findings underline that these permanent adjust-ments stand in the way of a proper implementation of a policy and thus of an effective solution of the problem it originally addresses. Against this background, we argue that the MSF can benefit from integrating narratives into the framework.