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The Regional Manifestos Project is a Spanish project funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and co-ordinated by Sonia Alonso (WZB) and Braulio Gómez (University of Deusto). We elaborate a dataset based on the content analysis of the electoral programs written for sub-national elections in Spain and UK (to be extended to other European countries in the future).

Workshop

Populism can be analyzed as both a threat and a corrective to democracy. In this regard, the East and West European as well as the Latin and North American experiences represent a fertile ground for analysis, particularly given the absence of cross-regional studies on the topic. Following this idea, the workshop seeks to bring together leading scholars of populism and closely related topics. The main objective is to gain further insight into the complex relationship between populism and democracy from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. In addition to the workshop, the revised versions of the papers will be collected in an edited volume to be published with an internationally renowned publishing house.

International coordinated research project within the Open Research Area Progamme (ORA)

The focus of this project is twofold: it is a combined analysis of party behaviour and voting behaviour. On the one hand, the aim is to explain how incumbent ethnic parties use their time in office to craft and to strengthen ethnic identities; in other words, how they establish an electoral clientele for themselves. On the other hand, the aim is to explain how voters judge incumbent ethnic parties. The hypothesis is that incumbent ethnic and class-based parties are differently judged by voters at election time. Incumbent ethnic parties tend to be evaluated according to their defense of the ethno-nationalist programme of national autonomy and/or independence and cultural hegemony.

International research has produced conflicting evidence regarding the question of whether sexual contacts arranged via the internet present greater risks of HIV and STI than contacts with partners from other social contexts. To provide more information on the situation in Germany the Research Group on Public Health at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) has initiated a study regarding the perception and management of HIV risk on the part of men and women who meet sexual partners by way of internet dating. This survey includes heterosexual men and women as well as gay men. A central focus of the study is to examine whether internet daters apply specific strategies to minimize HIV risks and, if so, to describe these strategies in more detail.

Research on AIDS prevention and AIDS policy have been an important part of the work of the Public Health Research Group at the Social Science Research Centre for twenty years now.

Surveys of the preventive behaviour of homosexual men were carried out in 1991, 1993, 1996, 1999; 2003; and 2007 for the Federal Centre for Health Education (BZgA) by Dr. Michael Bochow (2003 together with Dr. Michael Wright). Similar surveys were conducted in 1987 and 1988 for the Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe. These surveys gathered data by placing a four-page questionnaire in the most important monthly magazines for homosexual men in Germany. In 2003 and 2007 the questionnaire was also administered online.

Sub-group analysis of data from the project “Time stability in reducing the risk of HIV transmission among homosexual men in Germany” (Zeitstabilität in der Risikominderung der HIV-Übertragung unter homosexuellen Männern in Deutschland, 8th follow-up survey Gay men and AIDS [GMA] 2007) on the topics sexual behaviour (number of partners, condom use), drug use, taking special account of different age groups, birth cohorts, social strata, HIV-testing behaviour, sexually transmitted deseases
 

MULTILINKS is an EU-FP7 project coordinated by Prof. Pearl Dykstra, Department of Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam. It started in March 2008. It aims at investigating how changing social contexts, from macro-societal to micro-interpersonal, affect social integration, well-being and intergenerational solidarity across different European nations. Its approach builds from three key premises. First, ageing affects all age groups: the young, the middle-aged, and the old. Second, there are critical interdependencies between family generations and between men and women. Third, different analytical levels must be distinguished: the individual, dyad (parent-child, partners), family, region, historical generation, and country.

This strand of research is developed in conjunction with a research group within the European network of excellence ¬EQUALSOC. An edited book as well as chapters for various books and journal articles have been already published. At present the professor-ship is involved in the study of the impact of dependency in old age on social inequalities in the children’s generation and in work-caring conciliation problems arising in the second half of working life when there are caring demands from the older generation.
Together with other members of EQUALSOC, the group has also produced an
> inventory of comparative data sources for the study of intergenerational relations.

This project is part of a larger project on Working and Caring in Europe, funded by the French Ministry of Labour (MIRE) and coordinated by the Ecole nationale de la santé publique (ENSP) at Rennes. The aim is to explore how middle aged women in different working situations and their families deal with the demands of care coming from their frail elderly parents and parents in law in European countries having different institutional frameworks with regard to caring services for the frail elderly. The WZB
research group is responsible for the German case and has so far published a WZB discussion paper SP I 2009-401.