News

Why do equally qualified female students apply to elite universities less often than males — even in a gender-blind admission system? A new study co-authored by WZB researchers reveals that although China’s university admissions are based solely on exam scores, social factors such as parental expectations and gender stereotypes continue to influence students’ choices, resulting in a hidden gender gap. Addressing these deep-rooted sociocultural influences is crucial for achieving genuine gender equality in higher education.

Many memorial sites rely on participatory formats to keep the memory of Nazi crimes alive. A new study has now shown that such formats increase engagement in memorial work.

In the current WZB-Mitteilungen, WZB researcher Minju Choi asks what the declining importance of liberal norms means for the role and authority of academic knowledge.

We welcome Moses Shayo (Hebrew University of Jerusalem),  K.W. Deutsch Visiting Professor at the WZB for 2025. The guest professorship is awarded annually by the WZB in memory of the renowned political and social scientist Karl W. Deutsch, WZB director from 1975 to 1987.

The WZB is dedicating its first annual interdisciplinary conference from 9 to 10 October 2025 to “The Future of Democracy?”. We invite submissions that analyze the obstacles facing liberal democracies and explore potential solutions for safeguarding and strengthening democratic institutions. Our aim is to create a forum for interdisciplinary discussions. Submission deadline: 30 April 2025

How often do established parties cooperate with the AfD at the local level? WZB researchers have analyzed this question comprehensively for the first time and found that the political firewall in Eastern and Western Germany is similarly stable.

An innovative new dataset has been released: ParlLawSpeech (PLS) offers machine-readable full texts of legislative documents from eight European parliaments, including 43,582 bills, 28,124 laws, and 3,092,431 plenary speeches. The three document types are linked by a common identifier, allowing researchers to analyze the entire lawmaking process. ParlLawSpeech has been created by a team including WZB researcher Christian Rauh, under the auspices of the OPTED Horizon 2020 project and supported by the WZB, GESIS and poltextLAB.

Conspiracy narratives have a demonstrably negative impact on social relations. People exposed to such narratives develop more negative attitudes towards outgroups.