Profound change in social structure has repercussions for social and political orientations. Research has documented rising political alienation and polarization, alongside newly emerging cleavages that challenge established systems of resource allocation and representation. Relating these trends to underlying shifts in the social structure poses a critical puzzle: How can we reconcile the notion of an increasingly permeable social structure with the rise of major social and political conflicts

Social structural change and its connection to political orientations is more complex than research has commonly acknowledged. We adopt a decidedly multidimensional and multilevel perspective on social structural change and its implications and critically engage with the seminal approaches in the field.

The RISS research group unites sociologists, political scientists, and computer scientists to capture the complexity of social structural change and its political implications. Our approach advances theories on how social structural change shapes individual and collective orientations and outcomes, ultimately leading to a better understanding of our troubled times.

Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Daniela Grunow
Co-Spokesperson: Yassine Khoudja, PhD.
Duration: 2026-2029
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

This project plays a central role within the RISS II consortium. Following the key aims of RISS II, it ties the individual RISS II subprojects together by a) extending the conceptual framework and methods established during the first funding phase, b) coordinating the joint development of the RISS II data infrastructure, and c) providing macro-comparative assessments of the first two research questions guiding RISS II. These efforts enable the joint comparative analysis of social structural reconfiguration and the associated processes of internalization and politicization.

Against this background, our projects' objectives are threefold. First, it refines the conceptual framework for analyzing how cross-national variation in welfare state characteristics shapes social structural reconfiguration and its implications for political conflict. Second, the project coordinates and manages the development of the RISS data infrastructure, including the RISS Reconfiguration-Int Data Set, the RISS Politicization Data Set, and the RISS Politicized Identity Survey. Third, the project leverages the RISS II data infrastructure to address the key substantive questions of RISS II. While the other RISS II projects focus on specific countries, periods, topics, and domains, this project will examine three of the RISS II Propositions from an overarching perspective.

Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Daniela Grunow, Yassine Khoudja, PhD., Prof. Dr. Steffen Eger (Technische Universität Nürnberg)
Duration: 2026-2029
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
This project is part of the DFG Research Group RISS II / FOR 5173.

This research project investigates how political discourse and social-structural facts jointly shape social policy preferences in reconfigured societies, focusing on the politicization of migration and welfare. The study builds on findings from the first funding phase, which revealed that social identities and threat perceptions indeed influence social policy preferences, but that objective structural facts about migration alone do not automatically affect these attitudes. Therefore, we propose that the political framing of migration and welfare in the political party discourse is an important element to understand how the migration-welfare nexus shapes public opinion towards social policy.

The project has four key objectives: (1) develop a fine-grained empirical measure of the politicization of migration in relation to welfare policies, (2) analyze the interaction between social-structural facts and politicization in shaping public perceptions, (3) examine how these dynamics vary across different welfare states and social policy areas, and (4) conduct survey experiments to provide causal evidence on these relationships.

This project contributes to the literature by integrating perspectives from political science and sociology, addressing key debates on welfare state support, group threat perceptions, and political framing. The results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications and will provide insights into the broader societal consequences of migration and welfare policies in diverse political contexts. Within the RISS research group it contributes to the general understanding of how the politicization of social structure shapes individiuals' social identities, perceptions, and attitudes. 

Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Julian Garritzmann; Prof. Dr. Alexander Schmidt-Catran
Duration: 1.4.2026-31.3.2030
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
This project is part of the DFG Research Group RISS II / FOR 5173.

The project is part of the research Group “Reconfiguration and Internalization of Social Structure" (RISS). The project focuses on the group of the low-educated as the most obvious “loser" group of today's societies, characterized by massive educational expansion, large-scale social-structural reconfiguration, and a shift towards post-industrial knowledge societies. While existing work does point at the crucial role of education and educational groups in contemporary societies and politics, most work focuses on the high-educated. 

This project, in contrast, zooms into the group of the low-educated, arguing that substantial and systematic variation exists within this group. We analyze the political preferences, politicized identities, and political behavior people in the low-educated group, aiming to uncover the major social-structural subgroups and their political implications in this crucial group.
The objective is to contribute to a better, theoretically guided and empirical sound understanding of the political dynamics within this group, which is crucial to better understand major political phenomena of our time, including the rise of (radical right) populism or electoral realignment.
Empirically, we employ several research designs, combining descriptive social-structural analysis with survey research. More specifically, we study the political preferences, politicized identities, and political behavior of low-educated people in-depth with new survey data (to be collected with the RISS group) as well as across a large range of countries around the globe, and over time.

Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Julian Garritzmann
Duration: 1.4.2026-31.3.2030
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
This project is part of the DFG Research Group RISS II / FOR 5173.

The project analyzes norms regarding gender and parenting which relate to the share and intensity of mothers' and fathers' allocations of time for their children. Such norms are highly contested in present societies, both between and within social structural groups, for example among women or the highly educated. In line with the general RISS II framework, we will focus on the politicization of gender and parenting issues. Our main research questions are: 
RQ1: In how far are individuals' gender and parenting norms shaped by the social-structural and political context of their country and how do such contextual characteristics modify the association between individuals' social-structural group memberships and their gender and parenting norms?
RQ2: Under which political and social structural conditions and for which (sub-)groups do gender and parenting norms become politicized and associated with individuals' political attitudes and (voting) behaviors?
RQ1 focuses on gender and parenting norms as dependent variables that may be shaped by societies' social-structural reconfiguration and the degree of a countries' politicization of gender and family issues. RQ2 analyses gender and parenting norms as independent variables that may become politicized under specific macro conditions and influence individuals' political preferences and voting behaviors. In order to analyze our research questions, we consider national variation in gender and parenting norms as both dependent and independent variables.

Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Birgit Becker, Prof. Dr. Daniela Grunow
Duration: 2026-2029
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
This project is part of the DFG Research Group RISS II / FOR 5173.

The continuation of this project addresses the relationship between young adults' socio-structural group memberships (social origin, immigrant background, and gender) and their political attitudes and (voting) behaviors ('political engagement' in the following). We take a dynamic, longitudinal perspective on the most important factors shaping the development of individuals' political engagement in a crucial developmental phase during their lives. As in the initial project, we focus on efficacy beliefs as a core mediator between group memberships and political engagement. Efficacy beliefs refer to individuals' beliefs that they can achieve certain goals, which we differentiate on three dimensions (personal, system, group), i.e., their beliefs about what they can achieve as an individual (e.g., in education, in politics), whether the respective societal system is responsive to their needs, and whether the system is responsive to the demands of their social group.

We seek to explain how educational/occupational and political efficacy beliefs develop and how they affect political engagement by examining intra-individual changes over time in the critical phase of young adulthood. This stage of life is characterized by major transitions, especially school-to-work transitions. These transitions indicate 'success' (e.g., entering university) or 'failure' (e.g., dropping out from school). They also reflect changing social contexts (e.g., new educational institutions or workplaces with potentially different socio-structural and political compositions than previous contexts) that are often accompanied by changing networks (e.g., new colleagues). The overarching aim of the project is to understand how such transitions and related context and network changes affect young adults' efficacy beliefs and political engagement. We particularly analyze how young adults' efficacy beliefs and political engagement develop if new social contexts and network members challenge their previous beliefs and attitudes.

Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Birgit Becker, Prof. Dr. Lars Leszczensky, Prof. Sigrid Roßteutscher, Ph.D.
Duration: 1.1.2026-31.12.2029
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
This project is part of the DFG Research Group RISS II / FOR 5173.

This project examines how religious organizations respond to the  challenges caused by secularization, and thereby possibly contribute to increasing social and political divides in German society. We study religious organizations, since they are especially under pressure, as secularization is not just any crisis for them, but questions their whole existence. We assume that some local communities do traditional   business as usual (‘attenuation’), while others opt for politicized responses, be it to adapt to the more liberal-secular mainstream or to actively oppose this trend by accentuating conservative-fundamentalist positions (two strategies of ‘innovation’). We do not expect this to differ between but rather within denominations. Our study will provide important insights on how organizations react to existential stress, and, in a second step, what this does to their internal coherence, including possible gains and losses of members (‘closure’), depending on the chosen strategy. We assume religious organizations’ choices depend on i) the preferences of local professional leadership; ii) the social and political composition of their (active) membership, iii) the preferences of higher-order structures (and the dependence on such preferences) and iv) the socio-political composition of their local environment. We will furthermore shed light on the question of how representative religious organizations (leaders and activists) are compared to the German population in general, in order to analyze whether religious organizations mirror society at large in terms of political attitudes or behaviour, or whether they are political ‘niches, no longer able to impact German society.
 
Our analytical strategy is multi-dimensional, with the local religious organizations being at the center of our attention and forming our most important units of observation. We consider Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish and Free Church religious communities in Germany. Data collection will include original survey data on the single communities for which community leaders and active members will respond to questionnaires, enriched by geographical data on the socio-political environment and the analysis of online text documents published by the higher-order level of religious organizations. Joining the RISS Politicized Identity Survey will enable us to compare active members of religious organizations with the German population.

Project Leaders: Prof. Sigrid Roßteutscher, Ph.D., Prof. Dr. Claudius Wagemann
Duration: 1.4.2026-31.03.2030
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
This project is part of the DFG Research Group RISS II / FOR 5173.

The war in Ukraine and the larger confrontation with Russia have revitalized a looming risk of interstate war, fueling widespread fear of an escalation throughout Europe. However, since few interstate conflicts have occurred in the past decades, scholars have focused on other forms of violent conflict. As a result, there is limited academic evidence on how the threat of war affects reconfigured European societies that have been fundamentally transformed by decades of migration, social mobility, social conflict, and cultural change. This project investigates how the perceived threat of interstate war affects social identity, preferences, and behavior. Contributing to the overarching RISS Conceptual Framework, this project theoretically and empirically expands the RISS II framework to incorporate external events that originate from interaction between nation-states rather than within societies. We argue that the perceived threat of interstate conflict activates identification with superordinate groups, making these groups appear more homogenous. Once the group seems more homogenous, individuals develop more similar political preferences and become more likely to sacrifice personal interests for the benefit of the group. However, due to diverging threat perceptions, reactions to interstate conflict risks may not be homogenous, raising the question of whether and how this heterogeneity moderates the postulated effects of interstate conflict risk. 
The proposed project examines these questions using survey experiments embedded in the cross-national RISS Politicized Identity Survey, using state-of-the-art methods to detect heterogeneous treatment effects. It explores how individuals perceive the risk of interstate war and how it alters individuals' threat perceptions. Furthermore, it evaluates how the risk of interstate war shapes individuals' multidimensional social identity, leveraging an innovative measurement strategy with a conjoint experiment developed and applied during RISS I. In a further step, it assesses how the risk of interstate war alters individual political preferences, specifically, support for military spending. Finally, concerning behavioral intentions in the case of a war, it investigates how the threat of interstate wars alters individuals' willingness to fight for their country, arguably the most extreme form of in-group conformity and self-sacrifice. These questions have implications for the study of International Relations (IR), as they cover central determinants of national capability and resolve. Applying the RISS framework to these questions, the project also proposes a conceptual framework to study the domestic consequences of international relations.

Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Constatin Ruhe
Duration: 1.2.2026-31.01.2030
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
This project is part of the DFG Research Group RISS II / FOR 5173.

Bias has become a key concept in Natural Language Processing (NLP). One reason is that the ever more mature NLP technologies carry the risk of  negatively affecting society by reinforcing societal biases hidden in the underlying methods and data.
In this project, we concern ourselves with social biases such as migrant or gender bias, where key NLP technologies may make decisions deemed unfair as they discriminate against certain actors and sub-populations.
Our study will fill the gap in the NLP literature with respect to text-based analysis of bias in a historical and cross-cultural context, which can put current results on bias (for modern English) into perspective. We hope to be able to initiate new fruitful research directions which will help foster the understanding of how social biases have developed over time and across cultures and how they will likely develop in the future, to gain better empirically supported insights into the variability of bias. This better understanding in turn will contribute to greater fairness of machine learning approaches building on textual data.

Project leaders: Prof. Dr. Daniela Grunow; Dr. rer. pol. Steffen Eger, TU Nürnberg; Prof. Dr. Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Universität Mannheim
Duration: 33 months, Start 2025
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

The debate on gender issues is more politicized today than ever before. It moves between progressive demands for equality and diversity and conservative positions that see these developments as a threat to the social order.

The work package examines whether gender discourses actually lead to a division in society. It analyzes the dynamics they develop in different areas and how they influence voting behavior. More information.

Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Daniela Grunow, Prof. Sigrid Roßteutscher, PhD, Dr. Gregor Wiedemann
Duration: 2024-2029
Funding: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF, Federal Ministry of Education and Research)

Gainful employment secures a livelihood and creates social contacts. It thus forms the core of social integration in modern society. Compared to men, women participate less in working life. Nevertheless, they feel more socially integrated. This work package explores the question of how this paradox comes about. More information.

Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Daniela Grunow, Prof. Dr. Wiebke Schulz
Duration: 2024-2028
Funding: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF, Federal Ministry of Education and Research)

The Research Institute Social Cohesion (RISC) started working in June 2020. The researchers from the Frankfurt division are analysing new forms of social diversity and their impact on social conflicts. For more information about this research cooperation, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), please visit this webpage.

Project leaders: Prof. Dr. Nicole Deitelhoff & Prof. Dr. Christopher Daase (joint speakers), Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst (co-speaker), Prof. Dr. Daniela Grunow (co-speaker) RISC, Frankfurt division
Duration: 2024-2029
Funding: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF, Federal Ministry of Education and Research)

Profound change in social structure has repercussions for social and political orientations. Social scientists have documented rising political alienation and polarization as well as the surfacing of new cleavages that challenge existing systems of resource allocation and representation. Relating these trends to underlying shifts in social structure poses a critical puzzle. How can we reconcile the notion of a dissolving 'individualized' social structure or the end of a 'politicized' social structure with humans' propensity to attach themselves to groups and with current social and political conflicts?

Social structural change and its connection to social and political orientations is more complex than research has commonly acknowledged. Established concepts of status inconsistency and cross-cuttingness produce contradictory predictions regarding the internalization of social structure and the prospects of social cohesion and political stability. RISS aims to resolve and settle this contradiction.

The RISS research unit brings together scholars of social structure with political sociologists and proposes a fresh view. Whereas the social structure has changed dramatically, it retains its power to shape the life and orientations of individuals. In order to grasp the social and political transformation of our times, we need to take a closer look at these new social structures and understand how they shape the views, beliefs and preferences of individuals.

The key to this understanding is to view social structure as fundamentally multidimensional where numerous social positions combine in intricate ways. Scholars have focused on single dimensions including education, socio-economic status, gender relations as well as migration and ethnic diversity. What we lack, is an understanding of how changes in these dimensions combine to produce reconfigurations in the current social structure. We also need to grasp how individuals internalize and make sense of these reconfigurations, especially new combinations of formerly disconnected social positions. And we must learn how these changes affect individual and collective behaviors and outcomes.

We aim to establish a multidimensional conceptualization of social-structural change and develop innovative empirical strategies to capture this complexity. The promise of our approach lies in the ability to build richer theories of how the social structure shapes individual and collective orientations and outcomes and, ultimately, in a better understanding of our troubled times. For more information, see press release and website.

Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Daniela Grunow
Co-Spokesperson: Yassine Khoudja, PhD (since 05-2024) and Prof. Dr. Richard Traunmüller, University of Mannheim (until 04-2024) 
Duration: 1.10.2021- 31.03.2026
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)

This project takes up a special role within the RISS consortium. Following the joint key objectives of the research group, it will build a conceptual framework tying the different RISS subprojects together and, simultaneously, anchor the key theoretical concepts and mechanisms for analyzing the reconfiguring social structure and its effects on individuals' social identities within a state-of-the-art empirical foundation. Against this background, the projects' objectives are threefold. The first objective is to further develop and expand the multidimensional perspective on the reconfiguration and internalization of social structure. For this purpose, it conducts a theoretical-conceptual analysis that aims to integrate available approaches (including the concept of cross-cutting cleavages, status inconsistency and intersectionality) into a common multidimensional macro-meso-micro framework of social structure and how it relates to social identity. The theoretical implications of this framework for the social identification with society and specific societal subgroups will then be examined with a simulation study. The second objective is to coordinate and manage the data collection efforts related to the RISS Reconfiguration Data Set and the RISS Internalization Survey. These data sets are designed to study the reconfiguration and internalization of social structure from a multidimensional perspective. The RISS Reconfiguration Data Set will extract and pool information from secondary data on the multidimensional macro-level reconfiguration of the German social structure in the period 1980-2020. The RISS Internalization Survey' s main aim is to study individuals' internalization of the reconfigured social structure. It will collect cross-sectional data on a statistically representative sample of the German population and on selected oversamples of theoretically interesting target groups. Besides conventional questions on the socio-economic position, the survey will focus on innovative instruments for the measurement of social identity. The third objective is to address the key substantive issues raised by the RISS Main proposal using the collected data. Whereas the other individual RISS-projects will bring depth and (potentially) validity to the general RISS framework by applying it to particular societal topics or domains, this project will examine the key RISS propositions from an overarching perspective.

Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Daniela Grunow; Yassine Khoudja, PhD., Prof. Dr. Richard Traunmüller (University of Mannheim)
Duration: 1.10.2021- 30.11.2025
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)
This project is part of the DFG Research Group RISS / FOR 5173.

The project analyzes norms regarding gender and parenting which relate to the share and intensity of mothers' and fathers' allocations of time and (emotional) support for their children. Such norms seem to be highly contested in present societies – not only between but also within various social groups, e.g. between women and men, among the highly educated. We analyze in how far this situation can be explained by the socio-structural reconfiguration of gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and immigrant background. Multidimensional social changes have dramatically altered the covariance of these characteristics, potentially with severe repercussions for family life and gender relations. We investigate to what extent reconfiguration and cross-cutting of these characteristics resulted in new social identities, which can explain the variance and contestation regarding gender and parenting norms. In addition, we assess which social groups are better able to put their parenting preferences into practice. For the empirical analyses, we combine different data. The core of the project will be an own data collection as part of the RISS Internalization Survey. We plan to conduct an online survey with individuals from different educational and migration groups in order to maximize variation regarding parenting norms. New and innovative measures of individuals' social identities and their gender and parenting norms will be developed in this project. This data will allow for analyzing in detail how the cross-cutting of gender, SES, and immigrant background is represented in different social identities including sub-groups (e.g. identification as a female academic with Turkish origin), and how these (new) social identities are related to different gender and parenting norms. In addition, we will conduct a secondary analysis of the Panel Study “Labour Market and Social Security" (PASS) where we examine in how far parents manage to put their parenting norms into practice.

Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Birgit Becker, Prof. Dr. Daniela Grunow
Duration: 1.10.2021- 31.03.2026
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)
This project is part of the DFG Research Group RISS / FOR 5173.

This project compares work-family trajectories of parents born in Germany between 1930 and 1949 with those of their adult children (born 1958-1981) and siblings' work-family and socio-economic status (SES) trajectories: mother-daughter, father-son, brother-brother, and sister-sister pairs, using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We aim to investigate the contributions of inter- and intragenerational similarity or divergence in trajectory patterns on the reconfiguration of social structure in Germany after reunification. With work-family trajectories, we mean sequences of marital status, parenthood, and the gendered division of labor. SES trajectories are sequences of educational attainment, occupational status, and income. We ask: 1) Under what conditions have sons and daughters reproduced or deviated from their fathers' and mothers' work-family trajectories? 2) Under what conditions are siblings' work-family and SES trajectories similar or different? Similarity in work-family and SES trajectories within and across generations depends partly on support from existing social structure. Tremendous recent economic, demographic, and cultural shifts in Germany suggest that children may not replicate parents' life course trajectories and resulting positions in the social structure, and that siblings may live very different life courses, with East-West differences likely. To compare trajectories, we attend to features such as movement or the lack thereof, the direction of movement, the sequence and timing of events and states, and rates of change. These features tell us how individuals move through and alter the social structure, not simply about the positions they occupy in it at certain times. We want to understand the reconfiguration of socio-structural dimensions of gender and SES in Germany in recent decades by highlighting the conditions that contribute to inter- and intragenerational dynamics in the Eastern and Western parts of Germany. For our empirical analysis, we use the SOEP: longitudinal survey data from a representative sample of about 11,000 German households and more than 20,000 persons. SOEP is well-suited for comparing parents and children and siblings because it allows survey respondents from two generations and siblings within one family to be linked and tracked longitudinally. To compare mother-daughter / father-son pairs, we employ data on children's employment and family history with retrospective data on employment and family history from their parents. To compare siblings, we employ data from individuals in the SOEP who were born in the same household to the same parents Data on both Eastern and Western Germany is available starting in 1990; we draw on data from that year to the present.

Project Leader: Prof. Heather Hofmeister, PhD.

Duration: 1.10.2021- 30.09.2025

Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)

This project is part of the DFG Research Group RISS / FOR 5173.

Due to processes of social change, particularly in terms of educational expansion and mass migration, not only can a general increase in higher secondary education be observed in recent decades, but also a reconfiguration of social origin, immigrant background and positioning in the German education system; more young people of a low social origin or with an immigrant background find themselves in higher secondary schools. However, this also results in more status inconsistencies, e.g., for adolescents from high-SES families with less successful school careers, or for students with an immigrant background who perform very well. In this project, we investigate how such contradictory influences in the family and in school affect adolescents' efficacy beliefs at different levels (personal, group, system), i.e. their belief regarding what they can achieve as an individual, as a member of a particular social group and within a certain social system. We consider schools to be crucial in this respect, since adolescents not only spend a lot of time at school during a very formative phase of their lives, but also because they have their first experiences with a social institution and its representatives (the teachers) there, and because they learn how they and their group are treated in this system. We assume that these experiences are not only influential for efficacy beliefs in the domain of education, but are also generalized to other social subsystems such as politics and therefore also affect individuals' behavior in various areas of life. Concretely, we examine 1.) how an advantaged vs. disadvantaged family background (operationalized by social origin and immigrant background) interacts with a successful (or less successful) educational career in shaping adolescents' (personal, group, system) efficacy beliefs in the educational domain, 2.) whether and how these efficacy beliefs developed in school are transmitted to the domain of politics and 3.) how these efficacy beliefs impact actual behavior (i.e. educational decisions and political participation). We examine these questions by combining our own data collection (as part of the RISS Internalization Survey) with the analysis of existing panel data. Research questions 1 and 2 are examined using the data from the RISS Internalization Survey, where we plan an online survey of around 3,000 15-17-year-old adolescents with new and innovative measures of efficacy beliefs. The implementation of efficacy beliefs in later behavior (Research Question 3) is examined both by using secondary data analyses and a panel-design aimed at re-interviewing our respondents after completion of secondary education and – depending on migration status - the acquisition of full citizenship rights.

Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Birgit Becker, Prof. Sigrid Roßteutscher, PhD.

Duration: 1.10.2021- 30.09.2025

Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)

This project is part of the DFG Research Group RISS / FOR 5173.

This project investigates cultural and economic group conflicts between natives and immigrants and explores the consequences of such conflicts for redistributive preferences and social cohesion. These research fields gained considerable attention in recent years, particularly since recognized scholars claimed that immigration may be generally incompatible with a large welfare state and a cohesive society (Alesina & Glaeser 2004; Putnam 2007). The underlying argument behind these claims is that the characterization of immigrants as out-group members undermines natives' social trust and support for redistribution. As part of the RISS Research Unit, this project takes a fresh look at these prominent research topics by integrating them into the overarching theoretical framework of RISS. This framework emphasizes the interplay between the changing social structure at the macro-level and the social identity of actors at the micro-level. The data collection within the RISS project will provide innovative empirical measures of these two important concepts and thereby allow to contribute to the existing research from two directions. First, the role of the social-psychological process of social identification will be investigated and allow to better understand the process of in-group-out-group classifications. These psychological mechanisms reside at the micro-level foundation of the aforementioned claims. Second, the social structure at the macro-level will be measured as a multi-dimensional concept; thereby allowing to test how the integration of immigrants into various dimensions of the social structure mitigates the potentially conflict laden relationship between immigrants and natives. With increasing integration into the host societies, immigrants occupy more cross-cutting positions in the multi-dimensional social structure. This increasing heterogeneity within the immigrant population may reduce the saliency of group boundaries between immigrants and natives. Consequently, group conflicts, as well as their prominent consequences—such as decreasing social trust or reduced support for redistributive policies—may be generally reduced in a reconfigured social structure, where the vertical and horizontal dimensions become less associated. Using a complementary approach to the other projects in the RISS Research Unit, this proposal looks at the effects of the reconfiguration of social structure from a contextual perspective. The integration of immigrants into the multi-dimensional social structure will be measured at the contextual level. Employing multilevel models, the project will study how integration affects the relationship between immigrant presence and natives' in-group-out group classifications; and, consequently, their attitudes towards redistribution and their levels of social trust.

Project Leader: Prof. Dr. Alexander Schmidt-Catran

Duration: 1.10.2021- 30.09.2025

Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)

This project is part of the DFG Research Group RISS / FOR 5173.

Despite extensive research over the past decade, Muslims' strong preservation of religious traditions remains an unsolved puzzle in Western European immigration societies. A dominant explanation of religious identity is the discrimination or exclusion of Muslim immigrants by the majority population. However, beyond the often individually experienced discrimination in everyday situations, Muslim individuals are subject to a more severe and increasingly visible form of xenophobia: violence and acts of terror, which explicitly target Muslims indiscriminately. Moreover, radical Islamic terror organizations try to fuel this vicious cycle. Caught between a faction of radicalized Muslims as well as hostile, Islamophobic elements of the majority population, secular segments of the Muslim population are in an awkward position, where they feel resentment and pressure from different sides. Surprisingly, however, we have very little empirical research on how this two-pronged threat of violence affects Muslims in Germany. The proposed research project addresses core questions within this research gap: How does religiously motivated violence alter religious identity? How does identity, discrimination and violence affect civic or political behavior? And how do these reactions vary with the social position which individuals occupy? After all, social mobility has fundamentally altered and diversified German society, including the largest Muslim-origin immigrant group, the Turkish guestworker communities. Today, many Muslim-origin immigrants of all generations hold a wide range of positions in politics, economy and society, with the result that religion cross-cuts many other dimensions which are potentially relevant to individuals' social identity. We build on the theoretical framework of the overarching RISS research and expand it by illuminating how exogenous events, such as Islamist and anti-Muslim violence, perturb the association between social structure, identity and behavior. The proposed project examines these questions using an original survey of German Muslims, which we will collect as part of the RISS Internalization Survey. We rely on innovative measurement strategy using a conjoint experiment to estimate the importance of religion within individuals' multidimensional social identity. Furthermore, our proposed empirical analysis uses an experimental design to evaluate how social identity as well as political preferences and behavior are linked to perceptions of violence and discrimination.

Project Leaders: Prof. Sigrid Roßteutscher, PhD., Prof. Dr. Constantin Ruhe, Prof. Dr. Richard Traunmüller (University of Mannheim)

Duration: 1.10.2021- 30.09.2025

Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)

This project is part of the DFG Research Group RISS / FOR 5173.

Ongoing changes in modern labour markets increased inequalities in earnings in many countries and led to a growth of low-wage employment and precarious household incomes. Whereas traditionally welfare states mainly catered to the needs of groups outside the labour market, the provision of social security to employed households therefore becomes increasingly relevant. The proposed project provides an in-depth study of in-work benefits – broadly understood as public cash benefits that are paid to employees with low household incomes – and their effect on labour markets as well as individuals' life courses in international perspective. I will extend previous research by building comparative indicators of in-work benefit systems in a large sample of countries. Using multi-level models, I will assess effects of different characteristics of in-work benefits on employment, wages and in-work poverty risks. I will complement these analyses by studying two countries in more detail – Germany and the United Kingdom – as examples of different designs of in-work benefits. Focusing on claimants of in-work benefits and using sequence analyses and statistical matching to describe individual life-courses and to estimate causal effects of benefit take-up, I will study implications for household composition and individual life courses.

Principal Investigator: Jan Brülle

Duration: 1.4.2022-30.3.2025

Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)

The project examines the relationship between rising economic inequality and some of the foundational elements of liberal societies. Specifically, the project will provide new empirical evidence on the negative “Spirit Level" relationships between inequality and social mobility, support for democracy, and social cohesion in affluent Western countries. The challenge addressed by the project is foremost empirical: for each of these dimensions, there are straightforward theoretical arguments to link rising inequality with declining societal openness. In each case, there also is widely-known empirical evidence to support a negative relationship in bivariate cross-sectional cross-country data. In each case, however, the best available research that uses longitudinal data to identify the impact of inequality from within-country changes over time more often than not fails to confirm Spirit Level-type negative relationships. To possibly reconcile the discrepancies and to adjudicate the substantive question with new data, the project will combine survey microdata across more than 30 countries and over an observation window that ideally extends back to the 1970s in order to gain leverage for an encompassing and stringently longitudinal empirical analysis. Based on this database, the project will provide detailed analyses of inequality trends, a disaggregated description of trends in social mobility, social cohesion and support for democratic governance, and a differentiated causal analysis of the role of economic inequality for some of the fundamental dimensions of liberal Western societies. An important goal of the research will be to establish where and when negative effects of rising inequality are occurring, and to possibly identify societal and institutional sources of resilience from our analyses.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 833196).

Principal Investigator: Markus Gangl

Team: Simon Bienstman, Carlotta Giustozzi, Svenja Hense

Duration: 01.04.2020-30.03.2025

Funding: European Research Council