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In her PhD project, Agnetha Orth focuses on further education during retirement. At this stage in life, non-monetary benefits such as subjective well being are essential. She analyses the connection between these aspects with the data of the NEPS panelstudy.

This project focuses on the relationship between family formation processes and participation in job-related non-formal training in Germany and the UK. Even today in times of increasing labor market participation of women, motherhood still has disruptive effects on female careers. Regular participation might be an important tool to stabilize labor market trajectories of mothers and to attenuate motherhood penalties. However, childcare and other family responsibilities are perceived as major barriers to job-related training participation, especially for women. As a consequence, differences in the relationship between family formation and training participation might additionally foster gender inequalities in the labor market.

Far-right parties have made significant electoral gains in many Western democracies. Political parties, civil society organisations, and the media respond to this development in different ways, ranging from opposition and counter-mobilisation to accommodation and the normalisation of far-right actors and ideas. Yet we still know comparatively little about what shapes these responses and their consequences.

Many diagnose that representative democracy is in a state of crisis, with an increasing alienation between citizens and elected representatives. In this crisis of representation, other political actors, such as protest activists, enter the stage and increasingly claim to represent either parts of the electorate or subjects without formal representation. One example are the environmentalist activists from the Last Generation who declared to speak on behalf of both the entire humanity and nature. Another example is the xenophobic movement PEGIDA, who publicly stated they speak for the entire ’German people.’ Such actors have no official electoral mandate and selfauthorize their representative claims.

For a social constitutional state, it is elementary that the social rights it grants are (or can be) actually realized. In Germany, there has been hardly any research on this for decades, neither theoretical-conceptual nor empirical.

At the same time, however, there is reason to suspect that - possibly as a result of growing inequalities and despite new digital means of enforcing rights - a number of social groups do not have adequate access to justice. Our project aims to pave the way for closing the existing research gap by creating a renewed theoretical and conceptual basis for research into access to justice in German-speaking countries.

The project “Access to the Right to Protection Against Violence” investigates on an empirical basis to what extent victims-survivors of intitmate partner violence and stalking can actually make use of the measures laid down for their protection in the Civil Law Protection Against Violence Act and what barriers they experience in doing so. In addition to social, financial and institutional barriers to access to justice in general, additional complex hurdles become apparent in the context of protection against violence, which result from dependencies in violent relationships, a lack of awareness and sensitivity in authorities and institutionalized family court procedures, among other things. 

In my PhD project, I investigate whether and how further training participation of temporary workers differs from that of permanent workers, and which individual-, company- and job-specific factors promote or hinder training. I also examine returns of non-formal further training participation. Specifically, I analyse if training leads to more and faster transitions.

The Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany protects the freedom to establish and operate private schools in Art. 7 para. 4 sentence 1. However, the constitution also contains provisions in Art. 7 para. 4 sentences 2 to 4 that are intended to ensure that private alternative schools are subject to supervision by the school authorities, comply with certain quality criteria and are accessible to pupils from all income groups. The latter is intended to prevent the emergence of socially segregated elite or class schools.

The ‘third wave of democratization’ left aside a considerable number of well-functioning autocracies. How has authoritarianism in an age of democratization been able to survive? We want to address three shortcomings in the literature: First, most of the studies rely on one-dimensional typologies, focusing on the structure of autocratic domination, but ignoring specific reproduction mechanisms of autocratic regimes. Second, studies juxtapose separate theoretical strands we seek to synthesize by linking structure and agency in an historical institutionalist approach. Third, little attention is paid to the genesis and development of institutions that bolster autocratic regimes.