Many important societal debates revolve around questions of deservingness, especially when it comes to debates related to inequality and social protection. It is therefore unsurprising that a growing body of research spanning the social and political sciences is concerned with the determinants of deservingness perceptions. In this contribution, we engage with the currently central theoretical framework used in deservingness research and point out an important weakness: Partly ambiguous definitions of the framework’s central concepts, the criteria for perceived deservingness. We also highlight the negative consequences this has for empirical research, including notably varying and overlapping operationalizations and thereby a lacking comparability of results across studies. Our main contribution is a redefinition of the criteria for perceived deservingness and a demonstration of the empirical implications of using this new set of criteria via original vignette survey experiments conducted in Germany and the United States in 2019. Our results provide a clearer image of which criteria drive deservingness perceptions.

许多重要的社会辩论都围绕着应得性的问题展开，尤其是在涉及与不平等和社会保护相关的辩论时。因此，越来越多的跨越社会和政治科学的研究关注价值观念的决定因素也就不足为奇了。在这篇文章中，我们参与了当前在价值研究中使用的核心理论框架，并指出了一个重要的弱点：框架核心概念的部分模糊定义，即感知价值的标准。我们还强调了这对实证研究的负面影响，包括显着不同和重叠的操作化，从而导致研究结果缺乏可比性。