Equal access to education is one of the central goals of European education policy. At the same time, research shows that educational inequality often persists even in education systems where policies aim to support equality. Moreover, these inequalities are often regarded as fair and natural. EDUMERIT asks why education systems can still be perceived as fair when they fail to ensure equal opportunities for all, and how these perceptions shape beliefs about meritocracy and policy attitudes.
The EDUMERIT project aims to understand how the implementation of school choice policies shapes parents’ perceptions of educational fairness, meritocracy, and social mobility, and how these perceptions influence both trust in the state and attitudes towards education policy. The project links policy feedback theory with the sociology of education and welfare state research, shifting the focus from policy design to policy implementation and further developing the conceptualisation of social mobility, including the interpretation and measurement of forward-looking mobility. The project focuses on policy implementation as a critical mechanism through which both objective policy effects and subjective policy feedback effects — that is, public attitudes and support for policies — are formed. Understanding this mechanism makes it possible to better explain why education systems may be perceived as fair even when they do not in fact ensure equal opportunities, and under what conditions education policy supports or undermines social solidarity.
The project combines international comparative analysis with in-depth research in Estonia, Poland, and Sweden. Its multi-method research design brings together existing survey and register data, survey experiments, qualitative interviews, and the analysis of social media and public discourses.
Meet Our Team
TRIIN LAURI
Triin Lauri is Professor of Comparative Politics at Tallinn University, Estonia. Her research focuses on education governance, comparative welfare policies, with a particular interest in how these policies feed back in public attitudes.
She is PI of EDUMERIT, and is responsible for its overall implementation and comparative research design.
Beyond EDUMERIT, Triin contributes to several international research projects on welfare states, education, and well-being. She leads Estonian team in ERC CoG Welfare Experiences and the research unit of welfare policies at the Estonian Centre of Excellence for Well-Being Sciences (EstWell). She also leads a working group within the IMO research infrastructure that brings together, harmonizes, and develops longitudinal education-related data infrastructures in Estonia.
triin.lauri@tlu.ee / ETIS / LinkedIn / BlueskyKAIRE PÕDER
Kaire Põder is an education economist who works on various topics related to educational equity and inequality. Her methodological toolbox covers various tools regarding quasi-experimental evaluation methods, which allow her to contribute to evidence-informed policies and practices in education. She has been a member of the expert group Investing in Quality Education in the European Commission, leads the Labor Market and Economics research group in EBS and presents and publishes in various journals in the fields. She has been a principal investigator of EC and local research projects regarding higher education financing and policy, school and school network efficiency, and evaluations of social and family policies. Kaire has teaching experience in various fields of Economics (Education Economics, Institutional Economics, Game Theory, Microeconomics) in various universities in Estonia and abroad. More recently, she has concentrated her teaching on causal methods and applications in R. She has supervised students working on evaluation studies in education and the labour market. kaire.poder@ebs.ee / ETIS / ORCID / Google Scholar
KATRIN TIIDENBERG
Katrin Tiidenberg is Professor of Participatory Culture at the Baltic Film, Media and Arts School of Tallinn University, Estonia. She is the author and editor of multiple books on social media, digital visual cultures and digital research methods, including, most recently “Hot Connections, why sexual platforms matter” (2026, co-authored with Jenny Sundén and Susanna Paasonen). She is wrapping up an international research project on visual digital trust (TRAVIS), leading the Participatory Wellbeing Research Group of the Estonian Centre of Excellence of Wellbeing Sciences (ESTWELL) and contributing to research projects on health meaning making and everyday visual misogyny online. Her research interests span social media, digital visual cultures, internet governance and wellbeing. At EDUMERIT, Katrin leads interpretive WPs in understanding parental experiences with school choice policies and the role of social media in these.
katrin.tiidenberg@tlu.ee / https://katrin-tiidenberg.com / ETIS / Bluesky / LinkedIn
Joonatan Nõgisto is a junior research fellow at Tallinn University School of Governance, Law and Society. His main research interests include the theory of explanation, mechanism-based theorizing in the social sciences, and relational theories of social inequality. At EDUMERIT, he focuses on understanding the relational mechanisms linking experiences with school choice policy implementation and social mobility to policy beliefs and fairness perceptions.
joonatan.nogisto@tlu.ee / ETIS / LinkedIn
LAURA HOWELLS
Laura Howells is a PhD candidate at Princeton University and visiting researcher at Tallinn University’s School of Governance, Law and Society. Her dissertation project concerns how the state, majority, and minority individuals negotiate the process of nation- and state-building. Laura contributes to the quantitative and qualitative empirical work packages of EDUMERIT.
laura.howells@princeton.edu / lhowells@tlu.ee / ETIS / X / Bluesky / LinkedIn
KRYSZTOF CZARNECKI
Krzysztof Czarnecki, PhD in Economics, is a researcher at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University. He specializes in student funding and higher education, social policy, and comparative political economy. His current research focuses on two main areas: the causes and consequences of student funding policies, and organizational stratification in European higher education systems. At EDUMERIT, Krzysztof will contribute to survey experiment design and the comparative analysis of Sweden, Poland, and Estonia.
krzysztof.czarnecki@sofi.su.se /
www.su.se/english/profiles/k/kczar
Franco Bastías holds a PhD in Psychology and completed postdoctoral research at Université Grenoble Alpes and the University of Marburg. His work in social psychology examines the psychosocial mechanisms that sustain economic inequality, with particular attention to its perception and legitimisation. At EDUMERIT, he contributes to the quantitative empirical work packages, including the design of surveys and experiments.
bastias@tlu.ee / ResearchGate
JAANA DAVIDJANTS
Jaana Davidjants is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Baltic Film, Media and Arts School, Tallinn University. Her research concerns social media-based communication of war and conflict, humanitarian communication, digital visual trust, mediated suffering, and the representation of vulnerability. At EDUMERIT, she will focus on the qualitative part of the research, examining the lived experiences of actors navigating educational choices, as well as the role of informal online parental networks in navigating the school system and related inclusionary and exclusionary practices.
jaana.davidjants@tlu.ee / ETIS / LinkedIn
Abubakari Fusheini is a Junior Research Fellow and PhD researcher in Government and Politics at Tallinn University. He holds an MA in Quantitative Economics from the University of Tartu and a BSc in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Ghana. His research interests lie at the intersection of education policy, political economy, inequality, and quantitative social science.
His doctoral research examines the political consequences of school choice, focusing on how parents’ experiences with school choice shape perceptions of fairness and meritocracy, and how these perceptions may influence attitudes towards redistribution and the welfare state. His research uses comparative European evidence to examine how these relationships vary across socioeconomic groups and different institutional and welfare-state contexts.
