Institute News

Lisa Suckert joined the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Antwerp in mid-November. As associate professor of social theory and cultural sociology in UAntwerp’s Department of Sociology, she teaches general and cultural sociology while continuing to pursue her main research interests to date. more

Fritz W. Scharpf, emeritus director at the MPIfG, is to receive the first ever lifetime achievement award to be conferred by the German Political Science Association (DVPW). The award will be presented on September 26 during this year’s DVPW congress at the University of Göttingen. more

Renate Mayntz and Fritz W. Scharpf, emeritus directors at the MPIfG, have been awarded honorary doctorates by the Hertie School. Its president, Cornelia Woll, praised the two directors for inspiring “generations of scholars and policymakers” with their research and shaping “how we think about our capacity to steer politics and society.” more

August saw the publication with Chicago University Press of Failure by Design: The California Energy Crisis and the Limits of Market Planning by Georg Rilinger. In his book, the former MPIfG postdoc develops a new theoretical framework for studying markets as the product of organizational planning and for understanding the limits of market design. more

In August of this year, the IMPRS-SPCE doctoral researchers elected Robin Hetzel to be their new spokesperson. more

For long-term stability, Germany should not only focus on exports, but also strengthen its own domestic market. more

Jens Beckert more

Arianna Tassinari more

Düzgün Arslantaş more

Lucio Baccaro, Björn Bremer, Erik Neimanns more

Institutstag 2024 more

Institutstag 2024 more

Institutstag 2024 more

Institutstag 2024 more

Institutstag 2024 more

The main cause of the climate crisis is the burning of fossil fuels. This talk will turn the question around and aim at identifying the social problems that were meant to be solved by burning fossil fuels, looking in particular at critical junctures in human history. more

What is trust and how should it be studied? In his talk, Gil Eyal argues against conventional approaches to studying trust in the social sciences and proposes an alternate strategy focused on “trust methods.” Instead of treating trust as a static property that can be measured by close-format survey questions, he conceptualizes trusting as a skillful act that is highly context-dependent and attuned to temporal variables such as speed, duration sequence, and timing. To illustrate this approach, Eyal draws on interviews with long Covid patients focusing on how they account for who, what, when, and how they distinguish responsible trust from blind faith. more

We live in an age of migration, and of migration control. Global mobility and the political responses it has engendered have impelled governments in many countries to strengthen border policing and crack down on unauthorized migrants. These practices offer a vantage point for analyzing the development and operation of state power. In her talk, Kimberly Morgen will discuss the extensive buildup of border policing and immigration enforcement in the United States since the start of the 2000s as an example of state expansion. She will analyze how and why governing power has been mobilized and deployed in this way, and what larger ramifications this has for how we theorize and study states. more

In his talk, Michael A. Wilkinson reflects on postwar Europe from the perspective of the long durée of European constitutional history and the interwar breakdown of liberal democracy. He suggests that far from “revolutionary,” as it has been characterized, postwar European constitutionalism is better understood as elitist and even counter-revolutionary in trajectory. more

The lecture will explain how rating agencies award sovereign ratings; why they impose penalties on certain political and policy choices; why they are in a position to interfere with politics and policy in the first place; and why it is unlikely that these unelected, unappointed, unaccountable profit-seeking institutions would be stripped of their power, which rivals that of institutions at the peak of global governance, like the IMF or the World Bank. more