Funded research projects

Project title: EUSOL - Solidarity in the European Union

Project description:

Publics across Europe increasingly feel that the EU undermines the problem-solving capacities of its member states and aggravates political, social, and economic inequality both within and across them. For many years, scholars have wondered whether resolving the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ might increase the EU’s legitimacy in the eyes of its constituent peoples. Many have also queried what ideal democratic institutions might look like at the EU level. Yet very few have asked what is, in many ways, a more fundamental question—a question, moreover, that underlies and reinforces the growing malaise among European publics: What principles of justice and solidarity, if any, ought to apply at the EU level? Is the EU unjust? We are familiar with debates on social justice and solidarity at the domestic and global level. But what about principles for an inter-, supra-, trans-national institution such as the EU? EUSOL seeks to provide philosophically sophisticated, empirically informed answers to these questions across a broad range of issues that currently divide the EU.

Expiry: August 2023

Project title: Technological inequality – understanding the relation between recent technological innovations and social inequalities

Project holder: Fabrizio Bernardi, Juho Härkönen

Project description:

Current technological innovations in robotics, artificial intelligence, data, and computing power are nothing short of revolutionary. These developments invite many pressing societal questions. How will work change? Will jobs be destroyed? What new jobs will be created? How will existing jobs change? But also: who will benefit most from these technological developments? How do inequalities change? Are social groups affected differently? And, importantly, what can governments do to cushion technological inequalities? How can we best educate workers to meet the demands of future labor markets? And should we really rethink welfare? TECHNEQUALITY brings together a multidisciplinary group of leading scholars from Europe's most renowned universities and research institutes to answer these questions, and work with policy-makers to co-create policies that work.

Expiry: December 2021

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Project title: The Individualisation of War: Reconfiguring the Ethics, Law, and Politics of Armed Conflict

Project holder: Jennifer Welsh

Project description:

This path-breaking interdisciplinary project critically analyses the impact of the increased prominence of the individual in the theory and practice of armed conflict. The ‘individualisation of war’, while based on powerful normative and technological developments, places enormous strain on the actors most actively engaged in contexts of conflict: the governments and armed forces of states, international security organisations, and humanitarian agencies.

Expiry: April 2019

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Project title: POLCON - Political Conflict in Europe in the Shadow of the Great Recession

Project holder: Hans-Peter Kriesi

Project description:

This ERC research project assesses the contemporary development of European democracies and the politicization of the European integration process in the shadow of the Great Recession which started with the breakdown of Lehman Brothers in Autumn 2008 and is still ongoing. To grasp the political consequences of the economic crisis, the project proposes a combination of a comparative-static analysis of thirty European countries and a dynamic analysis of political conflict in a selected number of cases. It intends to link the study of elections to the study of political protest, covering Western, Southern, as well as Central and Eastern European countries.

Expiry: February 2019

Project Title: NORFACE – Welfare State Futures

Project Holder: Ellen M. Immergut | Scientific Programme Coordinator

Project Description:

Professor Ellen M. Immergut is Scientific Programme Coordinator for the research programme Welfare State Futures (WSF). As Scientific Programme Coordinator, she works to bring together researchers within and outside the programme, to increase the networking, capacity building and impact of the programme. Welfare State Futures (WSF) is a major transnational research programme launched by the New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe (NORFACE) in 2014. The programme features a Europe-wide network of researchers gathered around fifteen different projects and provides innovative research designed to ask, and answer, fundamental questions about the design, delivery and experience of welfare in the 21st century from a variety of perspectives and disciplines.

Expiry: June 2019

Project Title: HEALTHDOX - The Paradox of Health State Futures

Project Holder: Ellen M. Immergut | Project Leader

Project Description:

HEATHDOX (The Paradox of Health State Futures) investigates the current political determinants and policy consequences of post-1989 European health reforms. The end of the cold war was a turning point for many European health systems, with many post-socialist transition countries privatizing their state-run health systems, and many West and Southern European health systems experimenting with new public management and other market-oriented health reforms. The aim of the project is to document the policy changes that have taken place over the course of the 1990s and through the first decade and a half of the 21st century, and to evaluate the consequences of these reforms for health care provision, and especially, how these changes in the public-private mix in health affect individual attitudes towards the health system. HEALTHDOX comprises seven country teams in six countries (Estonia, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden) and has established a cooperative network comprised of researchers from all 28 European Union nations, as well as selected neighboring and accession candidate countries.

Expiry: August 2018

Project Title: The Impact of Electoral Vulnerability on Institutional Change: Recalibrating Public Policies in the Areas of Pensions, Agriculture and Citizenship

Project Holder: Ellen M. Immergut | Principal Investigator

Project Description:

International and domestic developments— both economic and ideational—create challenges for contemporary democracies, such as adapting their welfare states, recalibrating their agricultural policies, and reacting to the phenomenon of growing numbers of immigrants. Such policy recalibration poses a distinct problem for democracy, because recalibration entails a reallocation of resources and recognition from established interests and influential voters to newly mobilizing voters and interests. Thus, we have reason to believe that electoral pressure and political competition might affect the ability of governments to recalibrate public policies. The purpose of this project is two-fold. First examine the variance in legislative responses to these challenges across nations, across time, and across policy areas. Second, we develop a robust measure of the electoral vulnerability of politicians that incorporates both features of political institutions and political competition so as to be able to include the factor of electoral vulnerability in analyses of the political determinants of public policies.

Expiry: December 2017

Project Title: EUROFORT – Fortress Europe? How the Rest of the World Affects European Integration

Project Holder: Ellen M. Immergut | Director, Sophie Meunier (Princeton University) | Co-Director

Project Description:

The European Union (EU) is the unique exemplar of a collective of states which enjoys both supra-national powers and binding procedures for democratic decision-making. Yet in spite of its remarkable accomplishments over more than fifty years, the EU is now in crisis. It is challenged, as perhaps never before, to develop internal cohesion and solidarity while simultaneously opening up its borders in a globalizing world. This creates both opportunities and challenges for Europe. Will the pressures from the rest of the world turn the EU into a fortress, to be built in order to resist change? The program has provide seed money for research collaboration for faculty and advanced graduate students who through research address the above, summer research grants and short field research grants for early doctoral researchers, as well as MA and BA students working on their senior thesis.

Expiry: 2016

Project Title: POLISDATO (Polis Data Tool) – Social Science Data for everyone: an intuitive, interactive and user-friendly dashboard interface

Project Holder: Ellen M. Immergut

Project Description:

This projects' aim is to develop an intuitive, interactive and user-friendly dashboard interface for the visualization, application and evaluation of political data acquired in our research projects. This data visualization tool will provide access to our research data for experts and layman alike and offer opportunities for research and teaching.

Expiry: June 2017

Project Title: Health and Welfare in the 21st Century

Project Holder: Ellen M. Immergut

Project Description:

This structured doctoral program aims to prepare young scholars to take the initiative in developing the next generation of basic research and theory-building on the welfare state. We are specifically seeking researchers that are prepared to apply a global perspective and to undertake pioneering research on the welfare state, and that are willing to enlarge their social scientific perspective to include historical and intercultural dimensions

Expiry: September 2017

DFG GEG

Project title: Gender and Education in Germany

Project holder: Hans-Peter Blossfeld

Project description:

The aim of the project is to study how gender-specific interests, motivations, competences, and decision making unfold over the life course in relation to family background, educational institutions, workplaces, and private life events.The project studies gender-specific disparities in different stages of the educational and occupational career, utilizing longitudinal data from the new National Educational Panel Study (NEPS).

Expiry: October 2017

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Project title: Socioeconomic Status and Health: Disentangling causal pathways in a life course perspective

Project holder: Rasmus Hoffmann

Project description:

People with lower income or lower educational level have worse health and higher mortality. This project addresses the two basic underlying questions for this finding: How does your socioeconomic status determine your health? And how does your health determine your socioeconomic status? The project studies life courses of persons aged 50+ at the time of the interview who were surveyed prospectively, and also retrospectively for their entire life history starting at childhood. Our results will provide important new insight into the dual relationship between SES and health and will help to understand and to tackle social differences in health.

Expiry: January 2017

Project title: Families and Societies

Project holder: Fabrizio Bernardi

Project description:

The main objective of this FP7 project is the analysis of the effects of family forms and dynamics on children’s short- and long-term welfare. In doing so, the work package also investigates how families contribute to the inter-generational reproduction of inequality.

What will families look like in the future? Are existing social- and family policies compatible with changes in family patterns? These and related questions are addressed in the large-scale integrating project FamiliesAndSocieties – Changing families and sustainable societies: Policy contexts and diversity over the life course and across generations, coordinated by Stockholm University.

Expiry: January 2017

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