Tagungsthema

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has triumphed in recent state elections in Eastern Germany. While the public and scholarly debate often focuses on party strategies and protecting institutional buffers against democratic erosion, the rise of the far right in Germany and other European countries has severe consequences for civil society organizations, initiatives, and engaged citizens committed to a diverse and democratic society.

Organizers:Christin Jänicke, Hans Jonas Gunzelmann, Swen Hutter
Location: WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Date: Thursday/Friday, 7-8 November 2024

Political participation is often considered an important way for people to engage in an attempt to influence politics. Whether participation actually translates into more implementation of policies preferred by participators remains an open question, however. 

The increasing availability of digital video material has led to its widespread use in the social sciences, especially in processual and relational approaches. However, methodological reflection has lagged behind this development.

The roundtable participants will discuss the opportunities and challenges involved in combining text and video sources for studying protest in the digital age.

While the literature on populist radical right parties (PRRPs) has focused on PRRPs on the fringes of the party system, little is known about the grassroots activism of PRRPs that have already entered the political mainstream and have become key players in national politics. Using two paradigmatic cases, the Italian League and the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), Adrian Favero and Mattia Zulianello have investigated when, how and why these parties resort to activism on the local level. Adrian Favero will present the findings of the project.

Hate crimes. Misinformation and conspiracy theories. Foiled white-supremacist plots. The signs of growing far-right extremism are all around us, and communities around the globe are struggling to understand how so many people are being radicalized and why they are increasingly attracted to violent movements.

In the context of a two-day workshop on the future of social capital in civil society research, we will host a public roundtable revolving around the central question of the workshop: What is the current state of social capital theory, and to what extent do we require new key concepts?

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.

Lecture by Mark R. Beissinger, Princeton University

Lecture by Nicole Bolleyer, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

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.

This will be 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.

Vortrag und Diskussion

Edgar Grande ist Politikwissenschaftler und Gründungsdirektor des Zentrums für Zivilgesellschaftsforschung am Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB).

While recent developments have impacted the future of the anti-extraction bill movement in Hong Kong, we would like to review what happened in the last year and discuss the more recent actions of the movement. The upcoming webseminar features two scholars from Hong Kong: Samson Yuen, Assistant Professor at the Lingnan University, and Anna Tsui, Research Assistant at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The Center for Civil Society Research at the WZB and the Center for Political Sociology of Germany at the Freie Universität Berlin have organized this workshop on electoral and non-electoral polarization to take place on June 25th and June 26th 2020.

The event will take place via ZOOM.

11 March 2020 - Coronavirus: update
All public events at the WZB have to be cancelled with immediate effect. This measure will be effective until 20 July 2020. It is based on today's decision by the Governing Mayor of Berlin to introduce a range of urgent measures for Berlin's research institutions to counter the further spread of the Corona-virus.

Linsey McGoey, University of Essex

Latin America has seen the rise of social movements and conflicts in the streets in the last year. The continent is in turmoil. In his talk, Federico Rossi will draw on extensive research about the unemployed workers movement (the piqueteros) in Argentina as well as on related mobilizations across Latin America to shed light on these emerging dynamics. The piquetero movement has been the largest movement of unemployed people in the world and transformed Argentine politics to the extent of becoming part of the governing coalition for more than a decade.

The lecture will take stock of the transformation of policy elites and intermediary organizations in contemporary politics. Myriad new spaces of policy, governance, and influencing have opened up over the past several decades, and ever-more intermediary entities and players have arisen to fill them. These intermediaries, increasingly novel entities and players that defy classification, have reorganized relations with states in a remade ecosystem characterized by more porous and blurred boundaries.

Based on a book coauthored with Chris Howell (“Trajectories of Neoliberal Transformation”, Cambridge University Press, 2017), this presentation will document the liberalization that has characterized industrial relations since the late 1970s. The presentation will combine quantitative evidence for 15 OECD countries with in-depth case studies of Germany, Italy, France, Sweden, and the UK. In the presentation, particular attention will be devoted to the German case.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008/09, international cooperation has failed to curb volatile financial markets. Changes in the global rules of finance discussed in the G20 during the last decade remain limited, and it is uncertain whether they are suitable to help mitigate and manage future crises to come. Thomas Kalinowski argues that this failure is not the result of the ‘nature’ of the international system, the clash of national egoisms, or a lack of leadership.

Moderated by Swen Hutter

This lecture responds to two puzzles. The first is why it is not more widely accepted that the neoliberal era can be effectively understood to be a marriage between an Ordoliberal celebration of free markets and the late twentieth-century rational choice revolution in the social sciences. The second is why neoliberalism continues to be confused with classical liberalism, despite the fact that the latter is a normative system of rights, while the former jettisons moral normativity in favor of hypothetical descriptivism.

Europa steht vor großen Herausforderungen. Gleichwohl begreifen viele Bürger*innen diese Herausforderungen auch als Chance, um politisch für ein gemeinsames Europa aktiv zu werden. Im Zuge der Wahlen zum Europäischen Parlament im Mai 2019 gewannen zivilgesellschaftliche Initiativen und proeuropäische transnationale politische Bewegungen jenseits der etablierten Parteien an Zuwachs und Aufmerksamkeit. Die Erwartungen von Seiten der
Zivilgesellschaft und der Politik an diese Wahlen waren groß: Die Europawahl sollte ein Schlüsselmoment darstellen und eine positive Weiterentwicklung

Moderated by Edgar Grande

Diskussion mit Philipp Gassert und Dieter Rucht

Moderiert von Simon Teune und Swen Hutter

Die Digitalisierung, soziale Medien und Phänomene wie Hackerangriffe oder Fake News stellen die Demokratie vor Herausforderungen. Dabei besteht ein Spannungsfeld zwischen den Chancen, die die Digitalisierung für eine optimale Beteiligung von Bürgerinnen und Bürgern am politischen Prozess bietet, und den Risiken, die die Resilienz der Demokratien im digitalen Zeitalter auf die Probe stellen können.

Discussant: Macartan Humphreys
Moderated by Swen Hutter

Discussant: Wolfgang Merkel
Moderated by Swen Hutter

Discussant: Swen Hutter
Moderated by Edgar Grande

The Center for Civil Society Research is launching its lecture series on Conflict, Social Movements, and Civil Society.

Unsere Demokratie steht vor großen Herausforderungen. In einigen europäischen Ländern wird die liberale Demokratie gerade demontiert. In den ostdeutschen Ländern könnten populistische Parteien bald – wie in Italien – eine Mehrheit erringen. Der Konflikt zwischen Offenheit und Abschottung ist zu einer Kardinalfrage für unser politisches System geworden.

Immer mehr Bürgerinnen und Bürger engagieren sich in Citizen-Science-Projekten: Sie sammeln, messen, kartografieren und dokumentieren Flora und Fauna, aber auch Klimaveränderungen oder Luft- und Lärmverschmutzung. Viele begreifen sich als Forschende, die konkrete Beiträge zu wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen liefern. Die Digitalisierung hat es vielen Menschen leichter gemacht, zur Bürgerforscherin und zum Bürgerforscher zu werden und damit Teil einer großen Forschergemeinde zu sein. Doch wie passen Bürgerforschung und Zivilgesellschaft eigentlich zusammen?

Ohne die Zivilgesellschaft können viele Probleme in der Gesellschaft nicht bewältigt werden. Umso wichtiger ist die Erforschung ihrer Grundlagen und Rahmenbedingungen, ihres Selbstverständnisses und ihres Wandels. Das neue Zentrum für Zivilgesellschaftsforschung wird sich diesen Forschungsaufgaben widmen. Am 27. November 2017 um 17 Uhr wird das Zentrum im Rahmen einer feierlichen Veranstaltung am WZB eröffnet.