The morning’s lessons are for the Jordanian children, in the afternoon it’s the Syrians’ turn. Jordan is using a model called Double Shift in order to provide schooling for hundreds of thousands of school-age refugee children from neighboring, war-torn Syria, alongside Jordanian pupils. How is a small country like Jordan able to overcome such a huge challenge? The WZB Berlin and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) undertook a joint research project to examine the Jordanian school system. The results of the project will be documented on the multimedia Double Shift website. The website has won the German Design Award in the catagory 'Excellent Communications Design/Web'. more

Existing research suggesting that humans cooperate if they know more about their own payoffs has been rebutted: In the long run, access to information about payoff distributions leads to less cooperative behavior, finds a recent study in Nature Communications by Steffen Huck, Johannes Leutgeb (both WZB Berlin Social Science Center) and Ryan Oprea (University of California, Santa Barbara). The study also shows that knowledge about earning possibilities leads to smaller earnings in the long-run. more

The freedom of research and teaching and the autonomy of scientists are under attack worldwide: in Turkey and Hungary, as recent incidents have shown, but also as a result of further restrictions such as the executive orders of US president Donald Trump. The WZB is deeply concerned about this trend. We believe that freedom of science is one of the key principles to ensure that society is ready to meet the challenges of the future. That is why we support the March for Science on April 22, 2017, an event for people worldwide to show their support for academic freedom. As an institute devoted to problem-oriented social science research, the WZB has produced empirically based answers to questions on social change since its foundation in 1969. The free exchange of thoughts and opinions among researchers worldwide is the lifeblood of our work. more

In Montevideo, citizens are not forced to bite the bullet when they notice potholes in the road or vandalised public spaces. They can register these problems connected to public services in the online geolocation platform “For My Neighborhood”, which forwards them immediately to the city’s Single System of Complaints. This is merely one of many cases the project “Latinno” is currently compiling in the first comprehensive and systematic database on new forms of citizen participation in Latin America. The new database, which has been developed under the guidance of WZB-researcher Thamy Pogrebinschi, will be allowing comparisons across about 2000 institutional designs in 20 countries, including their effectiveness and impact. more

A team of WZB researchers has compiled a comparative dataset of election surveys covering 128 national elections in 51 countries from 1994 to 2011. These election surveys had been collected by the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). The new dataset, which was assembled by Bernhard Weßels, Heiko Giebler, Josephine Lichteblau, Antonia May, Reinhold Melcher (now Fern-Universität Hagen) and Aiko Wagner was made accessible via the CSES website on June 1st. more