Social policy and inequality

Our society is facing profound challenges. Long-term transformation processes such as the digital and ecological transitions are converging with acute crises—such as the Covid-19 pandemic—into complex political, economic, and social tensions.

These dynamics affect an increasingly heterogeneous society. Diverging interests, social identities, and normative orientations shape political negotiations. At the same time, digital media and segmented public spheres foster tendencies toward polarization that seriously challenge the functioning of our democratic systems. Each additional crisis therefore carries the potential to further deepen societal divides.

Our research cluster understands distributional issues as a central cross-cutting issue. Social policy not only serves as insure against individual risks or to implement concepts of justice, but also makes a crucial contribution to social cohesion—a prerequisite for the democratic management of contemporary challenges.

Our goal is to connect scholars from different disciplines and to jointly analyze and further develop these interrelationships. Researchers within our cluster work on, among other topics:

• Social norms in economic and political decision-making processes
• The climate crisis
• The Covid-19 crisis
• Political polarization
• Gender and family policy as “permanent challenges”

We look forward to collaborating with other researchers to explore our thematic focus as comprehensively as possible.