WZB - Berlin Social Science Center

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New series

Coronavirus and its Societal Impact

A series of analyses, considerations and hypotheses by WZB researchers.

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Aktienskurs und Coronavius
wildpixel/iStock/Getty Images Plus
New Article

The Political Consequences of Crisis

What to expect from the political fallout of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic? Three lessons learned from the Great Recession hit Europe in 2008.

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Jianghong Li
David Ausserhofer

Seeing Both Sides of the Coronavirus Crisis

The pandemic's impact is often said to be overall negative. But how about the positive side-effects of COVID-19, asks our health expert Jianghong Li.

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Porträtfoto Agne Kajackaite
David Ausserhofer

COVID-19 and Scarcity of Certainty

Those who excessively absorb news against uncertainty run the risk of impaired cognitive functions, says behavioral scientist Agne Kajackaite.

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Koepp_Roland
WZB/Martina Sander

COVID-19 and the Value of Work

This pandemic has revealed what kind of work deserves to be called “systemically important”. Yet, as Robert Koepp argues, the struggle over labor conditions has only just begun.

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Dr. Florian Butollo
Martina Sander-Blanck

COVID-19 and Global Value Chains

Can coronavirus trigger a sound economic order? Scepticism is advisable, says researcher Florian Butollo.

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Corona-Reihe Foto Humphrey Lechowski
IDS (ids.ac.uk) / Ausserhofer

COVID-19 and European Industry

John Humphrey and Grzegorz Lechowski discuss how the complex value-chain structures in European manufacturing sectors will absorb the wave of economic disruption.

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Sana Ahmad Foto

COVID-19 and the Future of Content Moderation

The coronavirus crisis is disrupting the functioning of content moderation and causing the loss of thousands of jobs in an overlooked profession, finds our research fellow Sana Ahmad.

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Keeping Up with the Electorate

Surveys directly affect the rhetoric of the German federal government. Anselm Hager and Hanno Hilbig, guest researchers at WZB, show in their new study published in the American Journal of Political Science that the German federal government panders its communication to public opinion.The authors compare approximately 150 surveys conducted by the federal press office during the 2009-2013 legislative period tomore than 20,000 public government speeches.

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Blumenstrauß vor den Füßen von Thomas Kemmerich (FDP)
Martin Schutt / dpa
WZB-Mitteilungen March 2020

Democracy's Base

Democratic governance works through delegation. Delegation, in turn, is based on trust. What is the current situation regarding trust in social and political institutions as well as in the people who bear responsibility? The March issue of the WZB-Mitteilungen asks about legitimacy as democracy's prerequisite and bedrock.

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Glasfaser
iStock / Getty Images Plus / AnuchaCheechang
New Publication

High-Speed Internet Helps Populist Parties

The spread of broadband internet and the electoral success of populist parties are closely related, researchers Max Schaub (WZB) and Davide Morisi (Collegio Carlo Alberto) show in a study focusing on the AfD in Germany and the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy.

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Schnecke auf den Schienen
RelaxFoto.de / E+
WZB-Mitteilungen December 2019

Own it, Take it, Save it: An Issue on Time

Speed isn't everything. Sometimes it's better to take your time - as suggested by the cover image of the new WZB-Mitteilungen. The topic of this issue is time, which offers an array of social science approaches. Time is a valuable resource, a benchmark, an aspect of scientific analysis.

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Titelbild in touch

In touch: Research and Society

In the 50th year of its existence, the WZB ventures to take a glimpse into the future. Our jubilee magazine features questions, analyses and prognoses about the society of tomorrow.

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Würfel zeigen Schriftzug Groko
Umkehrer / iStock / Getty Images Plus
New study with the Bertelsmann Stiftung

Great Expectations

Germany’s Grand Coalition has kept most of its promises so far. Fifteen months into the alliance, the government has already tackled over 60% of the plans set out at the beginning of the coalition. But this success has fallen on deaf ears.

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Portraitfoto Hakimov
"My Research in Context"

Towards Fair Appointments

A team led by behavioral economist Dorothea Kübler seeks to interrupt the black market for appointments with online booking systems. Instead, they propose an alternative approach where appointments are clustered and randomly distributed like in a lottery. WZB researcher Rustdamjan Hakimov explains the model.

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Puja Bhattacharya
"My Research in Context"

Who to Trust

Understanding how people communicate is what economist Puja Bhattacharya is after. To her, promises are a particularly interesting form of communication. As experiments have shown, people are more likely to keep a promise if they act as individuals while being less inclined to if they form part of a group.

"My Research in Context"

Path to University Still Lined with Many Obstacles

Children whose parents didn't study are less likely to find their way into universites. Educational biographies in Germany are still strongly affected by social background. In this video, higher education researcher Claudia Finger relates how simple yet effective methods, such as workshops, are able to counter such imbalances.

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Kai Barron im Kurzfilm
WZB
"My Research in Context"

Rose-tinted Glasses: What Stimulates Optimism

Selective perception tends to produce an overestimation of opportunities: restaurant founders, for example, can fail if their predictions are based exclusively on successful cases. Economist Kai Barron examines how convictions and expectations guide human behavior - and how they may deceive us.

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New Publication

Protest and the Decline of Mainstream Parties

A myriad of studies has shown that voting depends on the economic context. Electorates tend to punish incumbents during economic crisis and reward them when the economy is doing well. A new study by Swen Hutter, Björn Bremer and Hanspeter Kriesi aims to shed light on the link between the economy and the electoral fortunes of political parties by drawing a neglected factor into the equation: the level of political protest.

Platform for Protest and Conflict in Europe

The "Observatory for Political Conflict and Democracy (PolDem)" is a new platform that produces and houses datasets on the long-term development of election campaigns, protests, and public debates. The data, based on quantitative analyses of media texts, enables researchers to trace the long-term development of conflict structures and dynamics throughout Europe. It is launched by the Center for Civil Society Research at WZB and the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence.

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People at a crossroad
picture alliance / Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo
Report

The WZB at a Glance

The annual report offers insights into our current research and institutional developments. It includes essays on democracy, labor, digitalization, migration, nudging, behavior, and education.

New Publication

Applying an Identity

Do employers discriminate based solely on an applicant’s name? No, argues a new study published by WZB-researcher Daniel Auer together with Flavia Fossati and Fabienne Liechti. Part of a growing body of research assessing cultural identity and its role on the labor market, the paper investigates the ways in which discrimination seeps into the application process. The authors find that a jobseeker’s chances are not just only by their name or country of origin but also by their attachment to a foreign culture and ability to speak another language.

Events

8 April - 17 June 2020

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Research

The WZB Berlin Social Science Center investigates fundamental societal issues. Our focus is on education and work, markets and choice, migration, democracy and autocracy, international politics and law. At the WZB researchers from various disciplines work together – mainly from sociology, political science, economics, law and psychology.

 

WZB in the media

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 May
Gut geht’s, aber die Familie nervt
Deutschlandfunk, 19 May
Die WHO und ihre Arbeitsweise
hr2, 18 May
Der Sozialwissenschaftler Ruud Koopmans erzählt, welche Reaktionen er mit seinen Thesen auslöst.

Media coverage