David Brady joins the WZB as new director

Social inequality has been one of the core themes of the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) over the past decades – and it will continue to be in the future. After Jens Alber retired last fall, American sociologist David Brady will join the WZB as director of the unit Inequality and Social Policy starting August 2012. He will move to Berlin from Durham, North Carolina, where he served as an associate professor in the sociology department of Duke University.

Among David Brady’s main fields of interest is poverty and inequality, in particular their causes, measurement and consequences. His lead question is: what explains the vast differences in poverty and inequality that exist across countries? In his 2009 book Rich Democracies, Poor People: How Politics Explain Poverty (published by Oxford University Press) he analyzed how politics explain why poverty is so much higher in the US than in other affluent democracies. At the WZB, he will conduct research on trends in racial differences in poverty in the US. Among the questions to be addressed are: how well do different measures of socio-economic status predict permanent income? How do race and class intersect to shape inequalities in life chances?

In another key area of interest, work, labor and economic sociology, David Brady investigates the role of institutions, social relations, and structural changes for the organization of work. In recent years, he has conducted a number of studies on the causes of deindustrialization, the sources of labor unionization, and the consequences of economic globalization. An ongoing project investigates the economic sociology of female sex work in India.  

A third focus of David Brady’s research is social policy and political economy, with a particular emphasis on understanding policy outcomes. Presently, he is studying whether rising immigration to affluent democracies is altering attitudes regarding social policy. In the quarterly journal WZB-Mitteilungen, he explained that welfare state support does not necessarily diminish when immigration is on the rise – at least it generally doesn’t do so in the 17 affluent democracies he has examined so far. He plans to expand research into the question on the social bases of cross-national differences in public support for social policy.

To the article in the quarterly journal WZB-Mitteilungen (PDF)

Press contact
Dr. Paul Stoop, Head of communications, phone +49 30 25491 513, mail: paul.stoop@wzb.eu