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WZB
Newsletter
1|26
Hello Kathrin Kliss,

Welcome to the first English WZB Newsletter of 2026! In recent weeks, a new study by researchers Julia Baumann and Yiming Liu has received widespread attention—could the dream of getting rich be what keeps income inequality intact? In this issue we present their findings alongside other new WZB research.

News

Backlash Against New Progressive Actors

How do voters react to the emergence of new parties perceived as “radically progressive”? A new WZB study shows that the electoral success of new parties is leading to a counter-movement toward conservative parties. WZB researcher Fabio Ellger used the establishment of the German Green Party (Die Grünen) in the 1980s as a case study: its parliamentary presence mobilized conservative voters and strengthened the CDU/CSU, triggering a kind of conservative “backlash.” Conservative parties benefited from this counter-movement.

Digital Authoritarianism
For authoritarian regimes, exercising comprehensive rule increasingly requires control of the digital public sphere. To finance the costly expansion of internet infrastructure, authoritarian governments often turn to foreign direct investment — in many cases from other autocracies. Lisa Garbe and her co-authors Seraphine Maerz (Uni Melbourne) and Tina Freyburg (Uni St. Gallen) have examined these relationships using data from African countries.

Dreaming Rich
When people are confronted with high income inequality, they develop an unrealistically optimistic view of their chances for social mobility. This misjudgment leads them to show less support for political redistribution—a mechanism that stabilizes social inequality. This conclusion was reached by WZB researchers Julia Baumann and Yiming Liu in their current study, which is based on cross-country survey data and an online experiment.

Call for Papers

12th Annual WZB Conference on Migration and Diversity
Jonas Wiedner
From September 25 to 26, 2026, the WZB will host the 12th WZB Annual Conference on Migration and Diversity, organized by the Research Department on Migration, Integration, and Transnationalization. This year's theme is “The Cultural Evolution of Migration and Diversity.” The call for papers for the conference, organized by Steije Hofhuis, Ruud Koopmans, and Irene Pañeda-Fernández, can be found here.
 

Events
March 26 - 27,
2026

Equal Access to Justice: Between Normativity and Reality
This conference brings together international and German-speaking scholars to explore current issues and research in the field of access to justice research. 
 

#WZBPeople

How do Legal Spaces Influence Each Other?
We are delighted that Dana Burchardt is conducting research at the WZB as a fellow in the German Research Foundation (DFG) Heisenberg Program. In her new research project, “Interacting Legal Spaces,” she is investigating how different international, regional, national, and transnational legal spaces interact with one another. The Heisenberg Fellowship is funded by the DFG for five years. 

More
 
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