Archive
Seminar Series 2026
27 January - Mashail Malik (Harvard University)
Seminar Series 2025
April 01, 2025 - Iza Ding
Northwestern University
April 08, 2025 - Sulin Sardoschau
Humboldt University
May 06, 2025 - Dan Slater
Michigan University
May 13, 2025 - Jeremy Bowles
University College London
May 20,2025 - Fabio Ellger
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin
July 01, 2025 - Amber Spry
Brandels University
July 08, 2025 - Delia Baldassarri
New York University
July 15,2025 - Genia Kostka
Free University Berlin
July 22, 2025 - Moritz Bondeli
Humboldt University
September 30, 2025 - Jorge Zavala
WZB
November 04, 2025- Mathias Kruse
Aarhus University
November 11, 2025 - John Levi Martin
University of Chicago
09 December - Anna Skarpelis (City University of New York (CUNY), Berenike Firestone, Irene Pañeda Fernández (WZB)
16 December - Tevin Tafese
German Institute for Global and Area Studies(GIGA)
Seminar Series 2024
November 12, 2024 - Jeffrey Kopstein
University of California, Irvine
November 26, 2024 - Carl Henrik Knutsen
University of Oslo
December 03, 2024 - Adriane Fresh
Duke University
December 10, 2024 - David A. Siegel
Duke University
December 17, 2024 - Seraphine Maerz
University of Melbourne
January 07, 2025 - Tabea Hässler
University of Zurich
January 14, 2025 - Claudia Landwehr
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
January 28, 2025 - David Randahl
Uppsala University
February 11, 2025 - Sabina Čehajić-Clancy
Stockholm University
"America has chosen - what now?"
November 20, 2024, room A 300
The election result in the USA was unexpectedly clear: Donald Trump will move into the White House for the second time in January. What consequences do we have to prepare for? Will Trump “heal” the country, as he announced the day after the election? Can he keep his promise that people will be better off economically under his presidency? What security policy consequences should Europe expect? How will his presidency affect the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine? We want to discuss these questions at the WZB.
Three renowned WZB researchers will analyze the election results through the lens of their disciplines: Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, an economist, will look at trade, inflation and geo-economic implications. Michael Zürn, an expert in international relations, is researching supranational political institutions and their influence on global politics. And the US political scientist Daniel Ziblatt examines the institutions of democracy and the instruments available to societies to strengthen them.
"Democracies: What weakens and strengthens them"
May 23, 2024 at WZB, room A 300
Democracies around the world are facing major challenges. Although more people are taking part in elections today than ever before, the quality of democracies has been deteriorating for years - especially in the USA. In Germany, too, there are concerns that populist parties could win massive numbers of votes in the upcoming elections.
What mechanisms endanger democracy? Daniel Ziblatt, one of the leading democracy researchers and director of the WZB's Transformations of Democracy department, analyzes this in his recently published new book “Tyranny of the Minority” (DVA) with a look at the USA. At the same time, he outlines starting points for reforms. Specifically, he is concerned with a modernization of the US constitution and a return to its former flexibility. The oldest written constitution used to be adapted to social changes with additional articles; today, reform proposals too often fail due to the vote of a loud minority.
Presenter Annika Brockschmidt, author and journalist, has also examined the state of democracy in the USA and, in particular, the increasing influence of extreme right-wing movements in her book “Die Brandstifter: Wie Extremisten die Republikanische Partei übernahmen” (Rowohlt).
On Thursday, May 23, 2024, the two took a joint look at the upcoming elections in the USA and Germany. Where are the parallels and where are the differences? How can the analysis of US developments be helpful when looking at Germany? How can a democracy protect itself against illiberal movements? Daniel Ziblatt and host Annika Brockschmidt will discuss these questions with the audience.
Speakers
Author and journalist
Director of WZB-unit "Transformations of Democracy"
WZB Talk "Race, Class, and What Else? Policies and Politics in American Cities"
December 12, 2023 via Zoom
When and why do race/class interactions shape public policy disputes in American cities? It depends on the policy – very much for policing and housing development, surprisingly little for public schools and public sector pensions. But race reappears, sometimes in surprising ways.
Speaker
Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government, Professor of African and African American Studies, and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and Visiting Researcher of the WZB Research Unit Transformation of Democracies.
You can find an audio recording of the WZB talk here.
Book presentation "Undemocratic Emotions - The example of Israel"
April 24, 2023 at WZB, room A 300
Is it better for a ruler to be loved or feared? Since the two are difficult to combine, Machiavelli prioritizes fear in Il Principe, his famous treatise on the principles of the reason of state. In her new book published with Suhrkamp, Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz and WZB Visiting Research Professor echoes Machiavelli in two ways: she underscores the importance of emotions in politics and she elaborates on how right-wing populists instrumentalize certain emotions.
Since its founding, the state of Israel has been shaped by security issues more than almost any other country. In this situation, Illouz says, longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has managed to be loved precisely because of the fear he sows. Through extensive interviews with human rights activists and others, Illouz shows in her new Suhrkamp book how fear and resentment divide societies and undermine democracy.
Speakers
WZB Visiting Research Professor
Postdoctoral researcher at the WZB Research Unit Global Governance
Head of the Research Group “Sociology of Emotion” at Freie Universität Berlin
Director of the WZB Research Unit Global Governance
Seminar Series 2022: Democracy - Past, Present, and Future
This seminar series explores the past, present, and future of democracy – its institutions and norms – and some chronic dilemmas in the practice of democracy. It convenes important thinkers in Europe and North America to explore what makes democracies work and the challenges they currently face. The series will also serve as a forum for discussion of work in progress and forthcoming books and papers contributing to debates on democracy
Heads
Harvard University
WZB
Conference "Political Violence and Democratic Backsliding"
October 06 and 07, 2022 at WZB
Liberal democracy is under pressure. The U.S. think tank Freedom House recorded a global decline in civil liberties for the 16th consecutive year in 2021, and according to the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at the University of Gothenburg, one-third of the world's population currently lives in countries where democracy is losing quality (research refers to "democratic backsliding"). However, less attention is paid to a concurrent development: the increase in political violence. Events such as the assassination of the British MP Jo Cox and the German politician Walter Lübcke or the increasing tensions between Muslims and Hindus in India show that this trend also affects established democracies.
This simultaneity was the reason for the conference "Political Violence and Democratic Backsliding", which brought together researchers from Germany, Europe, and the USA. The conference asked to what extent violence endangers democratic governance and whether backsliding opens up spaces for violence.
The conference was opened by Nils-Christian Bormann (Witten/Herdecke University) in the panel on political violence in interwar Europe. In his presentation on his ERC research project "Democracy, Anger and Elite Responses" (DANGER), he explored, among other things, the extent to which violence can be the trigger of deconsolidation processes in democracies. The presentation by Ursula Daxecker and Neeraj Prasad from the University of Amsterdam provided a look at the current situation in South Asia. They explored the conditions under which voters tolerate or disapprove of political violence in democracies. They argued that parties instrumentalize violence to mobilize voters and present it as a necessary response to existing injustices. Their experimental study of the 2022 elections in Uttar Pradesh identified support for divisive rhetoric and violence as fundamental threats to democracy.
On the second day, Tore Wig (University of Oslo) presented his research on the extent to which political elites are willing to uphold democratic rules of the game, such as nonviolence. Among other things, he examined whether political elites in Norway sanction norm violations by other politicians. Lilliana Mason (Johns Hopkins University) focused on the U.S. and found increasing support for violence against opponents in the two-party system. A notable finding of her study was that over 10 percent of voters see political violence as a legitimate means of achieving political goals. A comparison was drawn between the U.S. in the Jim Crow era and Democratic backsliding in India under Narendra Modi by Ashutosh Varshney and Connor Staggs (both Brown University). A common feature of both cases is that a majority rule legitimized by elections is used to create a set of laws and practices designed to disenfranchise minorities, expose them to violence, or force them into segregation.
The final discussion focused on the role of different actors (state versus non-state) in preventing or promoting violence, different forms of violence (physical versus symbolic), and perceptions as well as representations of violence. In addition to noting that violence and backsliding can reinforce each other, there was also discussion about the extent to which violence can lead to greater democracy when used by pro-democracy movements.
A German conference report was published in the WZB Mitteilungen (issue 178, December 2022)
Workshop "Meta-analysis"
July 22, 2022 via Zoom
The aim of the workshop was to get familiar with the steps of the meta-analytic process, both from the perspective of a reader of meta-analyses, and from the perspective of a practitioner. The workshop covered the meta-analytic process from specification of hypotheses appropriate for meta-analytic testing, definition of inclusion and exclusion criteria, literature search, coding of effect sizes and study characteristics, statistical analyses (i.e., meta-analytic integration and moderator analyses), and interpretation of findings. Theoretical input was mixed with practical exercises. Statistical exercises were conducted with the "metafor" package for R.
Speaker
Philipps University Marburg
"Local Inequality, Co-ethnicity, and Perceived Economic Satus"
May 05, 2022 at WZB, room A 310
Recent studies have found that the self-perceived, rather than the objective, income position affects individual political behavior. How, then, do individuals self-assess their own position? Based on previous studies, we expect that individuals make social comparisons with those that are nearest to them, taking information from their immediate physical environments. Also, they should focus in particular on people they identify with, which means that comparisons should be most likely within their co-ethnic networks. We use geo-coded Afrobarometer survey data from nearly 100,000 participants in 36 countries to study citizens’ perceived economic position and how this depends on the inequality surrounding them. To measure the latter, we employ a new method to estimate inequality with satellite data of nighttime light emissions. Measuring wealth as light consumption, we calculate the Gini coefficient in a two-kilometer radius around an individual’s location. Lastly, we use spatial data on ethnic settlements to investigate how co-ethnicity affects the relationship between local inequality and perceived economic position.
Speaker
University of Konstanz
Univeresity of Konstanz
Workshop "Data Management for Social Scientists - From Files to Databases"
May 05, 2022 at WZB, room A 310
The "data revolution'' is changing the way we work with empirical data in the social sciences. Increasingly, traces of social and political interactions can be recorded digitally, leading to vast amounts of new data that become available for research. This poses new challenges for the way we organize and process research data. This course aims to provide participants with an introduction to different data management techniques. Departing from simple tools such as spreadsheets, we move on to more powerful data management software such as relational databases for tabular data. The course focuses entirely on data management, using examples from many different subfields of political science. It relies on the free R statistical package and uses material from a new course/textbook. Solid command of R is required and will not be taught as part of the course.
Speaker
University of Konstanz
Seminar Series 2022: "Cleavage Identities in Voters’ Own Words: Harnessing Open-Ended Survey Responses"
March 31, 2022 via Zoom
Fundamental transformations of underlying cleavage structures in advanced democracies should become evident in new collective identities. This paper uses quantitative text analysis to investigate how voters describe their in-groups and out-groups in open-ended survey responses. I look at Switzerland, a paradigmatic case of electoral realignment along a ‘second’, universalism-particularism dimension of politics opposing the far right and the new left. Keyness statistics and a semi-supervised document scaling method (latent semantic scaling) serve to identify terms associated with the poles of this divide in voters’ responses, and hence to measure universalist/particularist identities. Based on voters’ own words, the results support the idea of collective identities consolidating an emerging cleavage: voters’ identity descriptions relate to far right versus new left support, to known socio-structural and attitudinal correlates of the universalism-particularism divide, and they reveal how groups opposed on this dimension antagonistically demarcate themselves from each other.
Speaker
University of Zurich
Seminar Series 2022: "Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy"
March 17, 2022 via Zoom
Radical partisanship among ordinary Americans is rising, and it poses grave risks for the prospects of American democracy.
Political violence is rising in the United States, with Republicans and Democrats divided along racial and ethnic lines that spurred massive bloodshed and democratic collapse earlier in the nation’s history. The January 6, 2021 insurrection and the partisan responses that ensued are a vivid illustration of how deep these currents run. How did American politics become so divided that we cannot agree on how to categorize an attack on our own Capitol?
For over four years, through a series of surveys and experiments, Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason have been studying radicalism among ordinary American partisans. In this groundbreaking book, they draw on new evidence—as well as insights from history, psychology, and political science—to put our present partisan fractiousness in context and to explain broad patterns of political and social change. Early chapters reveal the scope of the problem, who radical partisans are, and trends over time, while later chapters identify the conditions that partisans say justify violence and test how elections, political violence, and messages from leaders enflame or pacify radical views. Kalmoe and Mason find that ordinary partisanship is far more dangerous than pundits and scholars have recognized. However, these findings are not a forecast of inevitable doom; the current climate also brings opportunities to confront democratic threats head-on and to create a more inclusive politics. Timely and thought-provoking, Radical American Partisanship is vital reading for understanding our current political landscape.
Speaker
Louisiana State University
Seminar Series 2022: "Citizens’ Commitment to Judicial Independence: A Discrete Choice Experiment in Nine European Countries"
February 24, 2022 via Zoom
In contrast to the more common focus on judicial independence in relation to government institutions, we study under what conditions citizens are willing to trade democratic principles in favor of expected partisan gains? To disentangle this trade-off, we administered discrete choice experiments in surveys across nine European countries to elicit citizens’ reactions to nondemocratic reform proposals of the judiciary. The findings suggest that respondents in all countries show some credible commitment to judicial independence. They support this democratic principle first and are partisans only second. The cross-national comparison widens the scope beyond the typically studied US Supreme Court and shows that in polarized societies – which more often suffer from democratic backsliding – reforms to limit judicial independence are less sharply rejected. This has major implications not only for the literature on comparative judicial politics and democratic stability but also for our understanding of citizens’ reactions to democratic backsliding.
Speaker
University of Konstanz
"Framing a Protest: Determinants and Effects of Visual Frames"
February 17, 2022 via Zoom
The information that media provides to citizens fuels their attitudes and opinions towards social movements. Although scholars have extensively studied the ways in which media portrays protests, existing analyses have mostly focused on the verbal component of news and have overlooked a crucial element of the communication process: the visual material. Therefore, in this talk, I focus on visual frames of protests. First, I analyze the differences in the framing of the mood and environment that liberal and conservative outlets use when they talk about protests. Results show that in the pictures that media outlets publish about protests, conservative newspapers tend to show a higher proportion of nocturnal and dark elements than liberal outlets. Second, using two experiments, I study how the framing of the level of violence in a protest, using either verbal or visual material, affects attitudes towards the movement. The results show that violent depictions of protests negatively affect evaluations of and engagement with social movements, but especially when the protesters are the perpetrators. These results allow us to have a better understanding of the effects of visual framing on political attitudes and participation, and the variables associated with the generation of these visual frames.
Speaker
Rice University
Seminar Series 2022: "After the arrivals: How rural and urban areas differ in their reactions to asylum seekers"
February 17, 2022 via Zoom
Research has increasingly attempted to uncover the mechanisms of hostility and hospitality towards refugees and asylum seekers. There seems to have emerged a unanimity that mere exposure to asylum seekers and refugees increases hostility in natives, but more and more research points in the direction that prolonged contact between natives and refugees increases hospitality, in line with the contact hypothesis. However, levels of urban density are an important, but yet missing factor, when it comes to measuring contact: refugee arrivals are more visible in a village than in a city, and this fact is likely to determine the level of exposure to refugees among natives. This paper tests the hypothesis that urban density matters when examining natives' reactions by running an original survey among rural and urban dwellers that either witnessed or did not witness asylum seekers' arrivals in their municipality.
Results show that reactions to asylum seekers are more favorable in rural areas that accommodated asylum seekers than anywhere else and this spills over to favorable attitudes to immigration in general.
Speaker
Assistant professor at the department of Social Sciences at Carlos III University in Madrid and a researcher at the Carlos III Juan March Institute.
"Authoritarianism From Above and Below in East Central Europe"
December 02, 2021 via Zoom
Speakers
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University
Grzegorz Ekiert
Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
Workshop “The Rise of Grassroots Radicalism and its Political Effects”
November 05, 2021 at WZB
The Research Unit Transformations of Democracy hosted an in-person workshop on“The Rise of Grassroots Radicalism and its Political Effects”. Organized by Sebastian Hellmeier and Daniel Bischof the unit welcomed scholars from various German and European universities and research institutes.
The first panel included presentations on media reporting of terrorist attacks (Teresa Völker) and civil society coalitions against right-wing populist movements (Larissa Meier and Jan Matti Dollbaum). The second panel looked at the effects of radical right-wing marches on political behavior (Daniel Bischof) and the AfD's "Junge Alternative" (Anna-Sophie Heinze). Right-wing protests and migration (Enzo Brox and Tommy Krieger) and regional radicalization in Germany (Sophia Hunger,Swen Hutter, Eylem Kanol, and Daniel Felipe Saldivia Gonzatti) were the focus of the third panel. The workshop concluded with insights into the effects of protests on spectators (Violeta Haas and Tim Wappenhans) and on the propensity of violence (Sebastian Hellmeier).
The unit thanks all participants for sharing findings from their research, a great discussion, and inspirations for further research.
Workshop "RMarkdown: Writing Reproducible Research Papers with R"
November 01, 2021 via Zoom
This was a one-day event, entirely virtual, focusing on R Markdown—a relatively new document type to analyse data and communicate results, in a reproducible and efficient manner (full description attached). By combining code, text, and resultsin a single document, R Markdown allows automation of otherwise manual—therefore tedious, costly to repeat, and error-prone—steps in writing research papers. Therefore, those interested in writing research-based papers, from essays to journal articles, are likely tobenefit from this course.
Panel Discussion "Democracy Without a Majority?"
October 29, 2021
This seminar focused on Michael Koß's new book, Demokratie ohne Mehrheit? (“Democracy Without a Majority?”) which received widespread media attention in Germany because of its provocative argument that the era of mass parties – the bulwarks of postwar democracy – may be over. How can democracy survive if its primary carriers are disintegrating? Koß makes the case that the end of the Cold War has precariously returned central European politics to the fractious roots that existed before WWII. The discussion has special relevance as negotiations are underway in the Federal Republic of Germany to create a three-party government coalition – a historic first.
Speaker
Professor für Politische System der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und der EU, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
Thomas Zittel
Professor für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main; External Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim; Max Weber Chair in German and European Studies, NYU
Panel Discussion "Populism after Trump"
March 04, 2021 via Zoom
Does the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 election signal the end of populism globally? While some populist leaders, such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, felt emboldened by Trump's presidency, other populist and right-wing movements, including those in France and Germany, were independent of his leadership and remain largely unaffected by his defeat. This seminar will explore the future of populism in Europe, Latin America, and the United States and assess if their fortunes will wax or wane.
Discussants
Senior Fellow of International Affairs and Agora Fellow in Residence, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)
Professor of Government, Harvard University
Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Harvard University; CES Resident Faculty & Seminar Co-chair, Harvard University; Unit Director, Transformations of Democracy, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)
Grzegorz Ekiert
Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
Opening Event "The State of Democracy and Future Research"
November 19, 2020 am WZB
Speakers
Professorin für Politikwissenschaften, Barnard College, Columbia University
Professor Emeritus, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB)
Senior Fellow, SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University
Paul F. McGuire Dozentin für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft und CES Faculty Associate, Harvard University
Laurence A. Tisch Professor für Regierungswissenschaften und CES Direktor an der Harvard University
Director "Transfomationen der Demokratie" Wissenschftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung and Harvard University Professor
