About XUBI

Expedition Basic Income has set itself the goal of testing which basic income variant would be best suited to our society. This is to be achieved within the framework of a large-scale, nationwide, state-funded pilot project. Expedition Basic Income aims to get this project off the ground by means of direct democracy and subsidiarity. This is why it is collecting signatures all over Germany from people who want to help their town or municipality qualify for the pilot project. As soon as at least 1% of the population in a city or municipality have signed, the local councils of the respective cities and municipalities decide whether to accept the proposal or not. If the proposal is rejected, all eligible voters can vote on the pilot project in a second step. Once the majority votes in favour of the pilot project, the way is paved for the start. The first model projects can commence with the payment of a UBI in 2023.

How do the UBI pilot projects work? 

Within the framework of the pilot project, one out of every 1,000 inhabitants from the participating cities and municipalities will receive a basic income, i.e., they will receive monthly basic income payments for a period of three years. This means that the costs for the implementation of the UBI experiments will remain manageable for states and local authorities. In addition, various ways of financing a UBI can be tested in different cities and municipalities.

UBI activism as a form of educational work

By directly involving citizens in the political implementation of the UBI, Expedition Basic Income has an important educational function. Citizens learn that, far from being powerless in dealing with the state, they can demand, in a legally binding way, that the local governments introduce a UBI.

How can a UBI be financed at the municipal level?

Financing the UBI at the municipal level could be achieved through the federal system of fiscal equalisation (federal state fiscal equalisation, municipal fiscal equalisation) through tax revenue reallocation instead of additional tax collection. This would speed up the implementation. A research position has been established at FRIBIS to investigate the possibilities. At the same time, fiscal equalisation could be a means of finding out whether value-added tax or income tax revenues should be used to finance basic income.

How does FRIBIS support the Expedition?

The FRIBIS team Expedition Basic Income (XUBI), which consists mainly of founding members of Expedition Basic Income, is supported by FRIBIS in several ways. FRIBIS offers the possibility of establishing networks with international experts from a number of the expedition team on financing issues, the design of the pilot projects and the processing and evaluation of data collected during the pilot project.

In this video, Valentin Schagerl and Joy Ponader, activists of the Expedition, explain what their project is all about.

Research Team

Julia Baumhauer
Ethnologist
Project evaluation and research among others for the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)
Magister Ethnologie (Freie Universität Berlin and Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)
Focus on Law & Economy
Lives in Berlin, Germany

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Schupp
Professor at the Institute of Sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin and researcher at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin).
Main areas of research: Empirical social research, social indicators, social structure and social inequality.
Lives in Berlin, Germany

Simon März
studied economics at the University of Bayreuth, the University of Cape Town and the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. He is part of the Expedition Basic Income team and works closely with the NGO Expedition Basic Income. His dissertation deals with the implementation of UBI pilot projects at municipal level in Germany and their financing through equalization mechanisms of the federal state financial equalization system.
Lives in Freiburg, Germany

Prof. Hanna Schwander
is a full professor and chair of political sociology and social policy at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Located at the intersection between comparative politics, political sociology, and political economy, her research is guided by her interest in how structural changes such as inequality, welfare state changes and climate change affect various aspects of the democratic process. Among others, her research has been published in Journal of Politics, Political Science Research and Methods, Governance & Regulation, and Oxford University Press.
Lives in Berlin (Germany)

Prof. Swen Hutter
is Director of the Center for Civil Society Research and Lichtenberg Professor of Political Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the intersection of political sociology and comparative politics, with particular emphasis on analyzing mobilization dynamics and political conflicts in European democracies. Together with Prof. Dr. Hanna Schwander and Dr. Bastian Becker, he leads the research project monitoring the “Hamburg Tests Basic Income” campaign, studying how mobilization for radical reforms is achieved and how attitudes toward UBI evolve over time. Before moving to Berlin in fall 2018, he was a Research Fellow and Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and a research associate at the University of Munich.
Lives in Berlin (Germany)

Bastian Becker
is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, Humboldt-University of Berlin. He received a PhD in Political Science from Central European University and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Bremen and Bard College Berlin. His main research interest lies in the politics of inequality, redistribution, and development, whereby he draws on comparative as well as behavioral approaches. His work has among others been published in Political Science Research and Methods, Social Science Research, and World Development.
Lives in Berlin (Germany)

Transfer Team