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There is growing concern over the electoral support for far-right parties among security forces, particularly police and military personnel, given their role in upholding the state’s monopoly on violence. This affinity is seen as especially dangerous due to the potential for ideological alignment with far-right principles to influence law enforcement. Existing explanations often emphasize authoritarian values and a preference for law-and-order policies as drivers of far-right support. Using data from the European Social Survey and the Comparative Manifesto Project, our analysis tests a range of potential explanations for far-right voting, including law-and-order preferences and immigration attitudes.

This project was inspired by the large wave of protests against the AfD in early 2024. What was particularly striking in this context were the ambivalent reactions of conservative elites, especially politicians from the CDU/CSU, to these protests. While Friedrich Merz, the CDU chairman, praised the protesters for their engagement `for democracy, our rule of law, and our freedom', he and other CDU politicians also criticized the demonstrations for being dominated by left-wing extremist Antifa-groups (among other things), who excluded CDU politicians from speaking at some demonstrations.

As digital platforms have become more integral to not just how we live, but also to how we do politics, the rules governing online expression, behavior, and interaction created by large multinational technology firms—popularly termed ‘content moderation,’ ‘platform governance,’ or ‘trust and safety’—have increasingly become salient sites of international political contestation. This project seeks to conceptually and empirically advance our understanding of both public and private rulemaking in and around social networks and other important online platforms, and push the boundaries of work at the intersection of technology and global governance, bridging political science, law, and media studies. 

Every time someone trains, deploys, or queries an ‘artificial intelligence’ system, whether they know it or not, they are implicating the practices and services of an enormous number of interlinked businesses in the AI ‘stack’. These actors — data generators, collectors and labellers; model developers, finetuners and hosting marketplaces; and cloud hardware, compute and storage providers —have a huge impact on the prevention (or not) of emerging AI-related harms, such as the generation of synthetic child sexual abuse material, the leakage of personal data from foundation models, and the creation of sophisticated fake content by scammers and confidence tricksters.

The PROSOCIAL project is a large collaborative project funded by Leibniz 2025-2028. Institutional partners involved are, among others, RWI Essen, University Hamburg, PIK and many expert individual researchers like Mark Andor (RWI), Andreas Lange (U Hamburg), Lorenz Goette (NUS), René Bekkers (VU Amsterdam), Steffen Huck (WZB), Isabel Thielmann (MPI), Linus Mattauch (PIK & TU Berlin), and others.

The Network

In this research field, we conduct projects at both the meso and macro levels of social formations. We study past struggles between competing factions of firms and social partners concerning climate policy and future planning (futuring), which involve various, to some extent mutually exclusive, ideological and political perspectives.

a) The Atlas Network-led coalition of 500 neoliberal and conservative think tanks, many of which are committed to obstructing climate policy and global climate governance.

Objective 1 of the Einstein Center Population Diversity (ECPD) – Unfolding unequal life courses within diverse families in aging societies.

The ECPD is a multi- and transdisciplinary research endeavour. The research is carried out by a consortium of seven partners in Berlin, including the WZB, that will study the consequences of increasing population diversity for social inequality and health disparities by focusing on the growing diversity of families, including changing conceptions and boundaries of the family itself.

Objective 4 of the Einstein Center Population Diversity (ECPD) – Unfolding unequal life courses within diverse families in aging societies.

The ECPD is a multi- and transdisciplinary research endeavour. The research is carried out by a consortium of seven partners in Berlin, including the WZB, that will study the consequences of increasing population diversity for social inequality and health disparities by focusing on the growing diversity of families, including changing conceptions and boundaries of the family itself.

Objective 2 of the Einstein Center Population Diversity (ECPD) – To understand mental health in migrant families.

The ECPD is a multi- and transdisciplinary research endeavour. The research is carried out by a consortium of seven partners in Berlin, including the WZB, that will study the consequences of increasing population diversity for social inequality and health disparities by focusing on the growing diversity of families, including changing conceptions and boundaries of the family itself.