The political participation of young people in general and rural youth in particular is not optimal. Consequently, they are underrepresented in politics, which in turn affects the extent to which their interests are reflected in...

The calm after the storm has settled in London. The UK has had its third national election in as many years after Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap election to shore up her party’s...

In August 2018, I spent one month volunteering at Centro Donna Giustizia (CDG) an organisation that works to end gender violence in Ferrara, Italy. The CDG hosts a number of projects and services including a...

  Complex social issues are often more easily resolved when they are connected up with other societal problems. Habitual approaches to thinking and problem solving, as well as the ways we have divided up our...

Robert Dahl (1915 – 2014) is one of the most influential political scholars of the last century. His ideas on political scholarship, pluralism, democracy and deliberation also influenced Social Science Works. On Dahl, Hans Blokland...

Democracies around the world seem to lose appeal for growing numbers of citizens. Partly explaining this trend, citizens seem less and less able to steer, on the basis of substantial rational considerations, the course their...

At the end of 2024, there were approximately 3.5 million refugees living in Germany, including 1.2 million people from Ukraine. Around 20% of these people, or roughly 700,000 individuals, were housed in so-called Gemeinschaftsunterkünften (shared...

Many of today’s democracies are in crisis, when considering the decreasing levels of voter turnout, party membership, and trust in established political institutions and actors (Blokland 2011, 1ff; Dalton et al. 2004, 124). Political democracy...

This year we have been working with the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung in Brandenburg to recruit German and German-speaking men to work with refugee men in Brandenburg in our buddy project. The idea of the...

In the wake of the turbulent US election, social theorist Nancy Fraser wrote that the progressive neoliberal politics of the establishment served as a major factor in ensuring the success of Donald Trump in ascending...

The interplay between Elon Musk and the social democratic government in Brandenburg, where Tesla recently opened a Giga factory, illustrates what Charles Lindblom termed in 1977 the privileged position of business. To make sense of...

De politieke participatie van jongeren in het algemeen en die van jongeren op het platteland in het bijzonder is niet optimaal. De betrokkenen zijn dan ook ondergerepresenteerd in de politiek, hetgeen weer gevolgen heeft voor...