The WZB Transformations of Democracy unit hosted a great workshop on how ideas of Democracy evolve over time . A great group & lots of scholarly progress.

2/ in the first comprehensive analysis of all Council meetings of Germany's 401 local districts between 2019 and 2014 (over 11,000 meetings), they find the differences in cooperation between east and west were lower than often portrayed; and overall lowe than popular portrayal suggests.

1/ Our unit's new working paper by Daniel Ziblatt, Florian Bochert, Wolfgang Schroeder, on the surprising * endurance * of the firewall in Germany against the Radical right-- has been written up in the national weekly DER SPIEGEL...

Pleased to announce our semester speaker series!

🚩 Wir haben Neuigkeiten: Am 15. Mai erscheint "Die Tyrannei der Minderheit" von @dziblatt.bsky.social und Steven Levitsky auf deutsch!
Alle Infos ➡️ www.penguin.de/Buch/Die-Tyr...

This lack of trust does not only concern the government or its policies in general but also appears as a specific form of distrust in healthcare services provided by the state.

Individual autocratic experience makes citizens (and former citizens of such countries) distrustful of government policies that infringe civil liberties.

We find that having experienced life under an authoritarian government is a crucial but previously overlooked factor in determining citizen compliance with government health policies and vaccinations in particular.

During 2021, we realized Covid-vaccination rates differed considerably between several otherwise comparatively similar* European countries: So we asked: Why does vaccination hesitancy vary between countries?

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*(from a global perspective)