People hardly ever change their mind. The more they feel forced to justify themselves, the more they feel questioned, criticized, disrespected, and the smaller the chance that they will open their mind to other positions...

We need to talk. We need to talk about fundamental concepts like democracy, ethical and political pluralism, tolerance, equality and freedom, concepts that many consider as constitutive for the European identity. We need to talk...

The message on my phone said: “I’m so, so sorry”. That’s how I learnt that the UK had voted to leave the European Union. This is something I had feared from the moment the UK...

There are many factors that explain the upheaval of populism. Postmodernism is one of them. In the Netherlands, certainly the columnist represented and helped to shape the postmodernist mood, a mood characterized by skepticism, subjectivism...

At Social Science Works we seek to engage with contemporary political debate and offer solutions to its most pressing problems by applying social scientific thought. In this blog, co-founder Sarah Coughlan and Niklas Kossow explore...

According to European Commission statistics, more than two million people risked their lives since 2015 to reach Europe in search of safety from poverty and war. Most of the refugees came from different parts of...

By international standards, Germany is a highly bureaucratized country. Even German-speaking natives regularly get lost in a forest of laws, regulations, and responsible administrative bodies. German civil servants are also known to be prone to...

The intersection between social science and real life can often seem – even for those on the inside – vague, abstract and frankly unlikely a lot of the time. That is until a government starts...

Most of the people working in academia who watched The Chair, which aired this summer, were probably filled with a bittersweet feeling; indeed, Netflix’s comedy-drama depicted quite vividly American academic life, with its downsides and...

Civil society organisations in Germany need to be directly empowered to use data, in order to maintain their scope for action in a digitalised world. The rise of data-driven decision-making has made huge impact on...

Reading the title of this article might evoke pictures of people violently shouting at each other or bursting out into tears while pleading their cause in front of an audience. Whereas the first case will...

A science is not called a discipline by coincidence: its students are actively and deliberately disciplined to think and behave in the specific ways that define a discipline. They are trained to observe reality in...