SOCDEBT · Towards a Sociology of Debt Stratification and its Moral Foundations Across Countries

The financialization of households in the 21st century has made credit and debt central to economic disparity, reshaping financial burdens and opportunities. Debt shackles the poor, limiting mobility, yet also offers leverage for the wealthy, enabling further investment, accumulation, and opportunity.This paradox of debt lies at the heart of SOCDEBT, which is built around four key goals: (1) SOCDEBT will examine debt stratification across 35 countries over three decades, identifying the social groups most likely to be indebted, the types of debt carried, and variations across countries and time; (2) the project will explore debt accumulation, particularly in response to (adverse) life events, and how this process varies across social groups and national contexts; (3) it will investigate debt practices and the factors influencing individuals' decisions to take on debt, strategies for repayment, and the role of social influences, such as peers; and finally (4) SOCDEBT will explore the moral economy of debt, examining how different social groups view debt and credit across countries, examining cultural and moral dimensions and how evaluations vary between working and middle classes. SOCDEBT transitions from investigating micro-level variations in household debt stratification to exploring meso-level debt practices and moral evaluations. This comprehensive approach will address critical gaps in understanding how debt stratification and accumulation vary across societal settings. By combining innovative statistical methods with multiple nationally representative household surveys for up to 35 countries across all continents and over time, along with new survey-experimental data and focus groups in five European countries, SOCDEBT will challenge and reshape our understanding of contemporary economic inequality dynamics around the world. Lastly, it will establish a new subfield of sociological inquiry: the Sociology of Comparative Debt Stratification