In December, 2022, the call for the A.SK Social Science Award will go out for the ninth time. It is endowed with a prize sum of 100,00 euros. There will no longer any fellowships connected with the prize; instead and for the first time, two additional awards will be presented to younger social scientists on the postdoc, assistant, or junior professor level. With a prize sum of 20,000 euros each, they honor research on public policy with a focus on economic and governmental reforms. 

The A.SK Social Sciences Award has been awarded every two years since 2007. Endowed with 100,000 euros, it is one of the world’s largest in the social sciences. 

Former recipients are the economist Sir Anthony Atkinson (2007/University of Oxford), the legal scholar and philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum (2009/University of Chicago), Transparency International (2011/Berlin), the economist Paul Collier (2013/University of Oxford), the developmental economist Esther Duflo (2015/MIT), who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019, the political scientist John Ruggie (2017/Harvard) and Harvard economist Raj Chetty (2019). In 2021, the A.SK Social Science Award went to James C. Scott  (Yale). He received the award for his life-long research on agrarian societies and the importance of place and environment in relation to politics and social organization. His analysis of the limits of state planning led him to be an advocate of the possibilities of “not being governed”, of the capacity of people to govern themselves in local communities. Through his work, James Scott has become one of the most influential social scientists of the last 50 years.

The prize recipient is selected by an international commission chaired by Dorothea Kübler, director of the WZB's department Market Behavior. The A.SK Social Science Award 2021 was presented to the winner on November 2nd, 2021, at the WZB.