The Collaborative Research Centre "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" is represented on Bluesky as well as on Mastodon and X. On these channels you will always find the latest news about the CRC 1342.

Furthermore, we also recommend the blog Social Policy Worldwide of the SOCIUM Research Center Inequality and Social Policy at the University of Bremen.

As part of her work in project A03 "Worlds of Labour: Coverage and Generosity of Employment Law", Andrea Schäfer participated in the international conference "Work, Migration and Society" at the University of Madras in India from 20 to 21 February, 2025.

Through intensive research and networking while preparing her fieldwork in India, Andrea Schäfer was able to establish a cooperation with Prof. M. Thamilarasan (Professor and Head, Department of Sociology, University of Madras, Chennai and Conference Director) and was invited to the conference as a speaker of the plenary session (conference programme).

Around the themes of work, migration, education, social development problems, workers' health and safety, decent work, the many participants discussed challenges in global and national contexts. In her presentation "Worlds of Labour: The Impact of Employment Regulations on Labour Market Inequality and Segmentation", Andrea Schäfer used recent data from the A03 project based on the WeSIS platform to contribute to the current state of inclusion and exclusion of labour regulation worldwide and to present first results on the relationship between labour regulation and labour market inequality based on wage differentials on a global scale.

With WeSIS, the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" at the University of Bremen has published an interactive web-based information system. It offers comprehensive data to describe and explain social policy worldwide.

Based on more than seven years of intensive research work involving around 25 researchers, WeSIS, the "Global Welfare State Information System", closes three central gaps. Firstly, from a geographical perspective, because WeSIS contains data and information on the introduction and design of social welfare programs for all countries in the world with over 500,000 inhabitants. Secondly, from a historical perspective, as it provides a data-based representation of welfare state developments since 1880. Thirdly, WeSIS is designed as an interactive information system and is therefore more than just a database: WeSIS offers the opportunity to describe, map, analyze, and explain state social policies worldwide. Currently, the database is based on around 1,300 indicators per country and up to 1,200 indicators per year – and the trend is rising.

"Our unique research profile, which combines a historical and a global comparative perspective, requires consistent research data that covers the introduction of state social policies and their design in terms of the scope and inclusiveness of social benefits, and that reflects their development over time", explains political scientist Professor Herbert Obinger, CRC spokesperson.

Tailored to the Researchers' Needs

Accordingly, the data in WeSIS is divided into three areas: Firstly, data describing social policy programs in the various fields of social policy – from occupational health and safety and old-age security to health systems, family policy programs, and education policy. Secondly, indicators describing national conditions that social policy reacts to or that are influenced by social policies. And thirdly, data on global interdependencies, which also determine the spread and design of social policy.

"From the outset, our goal was to work with researchers in co-creative processes to develop an information system tailored to their needs. As a one-stop data shop, the data required can be accessed from a single source, eliminating the need for time-consuming data merging from different places. Early Access provides initial visualizations, analysis tools, and country profiles with relevant background information, which facilitates the work of researchers and the interested public", says Dr. Nils Düpont, research assistant and research data manager at the CRC 1342.

Funded by the DFG since 2018

Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" is a network of eight research institutes at the University of Bremen in cooperation with Constructor University Bremen, the University of Bielefeld, and the University of Duisburg-Essen. The CRC 1342 has been supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since 2018. The current second funding period will run until the end of 2025.

Further Information:

https://wesis.org/

https://www.socialpolicydynamics.de/en/

https://www.uni-bremen.de/en/

The 14th NordWel Summer School "State, Society & Citizen - Cross-Disciplinary and Global Perspectives on Welfare State Development" takes place at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense from 18 to 22 August 2025. [Here] you will find the Call for Papers and further information about the Summer School.

As the last event of the Jour Fixe lecture series in the winter semester 2024/25, Prof. Krisztina Kis-Katos from the University of Göttingen was our guest at the CRC 1342 on 29.01.2025. In her talk "Cash Transfers and Violent Crime in Indonesia", she presented the effects of the "Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT)" programme and discussed the interpretations of the extensive data with the participants not only from an economic but also from a social science perspective.

Abstract:

This study investigates the impact of Indonesia’s flagship conditional cash transfer (CCT) program—PKH—on violent crime. Exploiting data from a randomized controlled trial and administrative data from the staggered nationwide program roll-out in combination with different causal identification strategies, we show that communities receiving access to the CCT experienced an increase in violent crime. Examining possible mechanisms, our analysis reveals that the program resulted in an increase in idleness among non-targeted male youth within beneficiary households, which we believe contributed to the rise in violent crime. In contrast, we show that the surge in violent crime is neither related to PKH increasing the (monetary and non-monetary) rewards for committing crime nor to alternative reductions in the (material, psychic, punishment-related) costs of engaging in crimes.

Krisztina Kis-Katos is Professor for International Economic Policy at the University of Göttingen. She studied Economics in Szeged and Konstanz, attended the Swiss Doctoral Program at the Study Center Gerzensee, and received her doctoral degree in Economics in 2010 at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Her research interests lie in the fields of applied development economics and political economy. Her recent research projects focus on the effects of (de-)globalization and more generally of macro-economic processes or related public policies on a range of social and economic outcomes, including labor market and firm outcomes, land use change and deforestation, or conflict.

The B05 project "Inclusion and Benefit Dynamics in the Chinese Welfare Regime" successfully completed another round of field research in China, furthering collaboration with Chinese colleagues on future social policy research.

Dr. Zhe Yan conducted extensive field research from October to December 2024. The purpose of the research trip was to explore how social policies on old-age care and unemployment are affected by demographic change and economic downturn in China. The research is timely as China is experiencing rapid population ageing and rising unemployment.

Dr. Yan visited several rural villages in Jiangxi Province, a less industrialized region in southern China, to understand the process of eldercare service delivery and to meet local actors responsible for policy implementation. One novel aspect is that China is now integrating eldercare and childcare by reallocating local resources in rural areas. Social policy in rural China remains an understudied area and deserves more research attention.

In a pilot for future research, Dr. Yan interviewed local officials involved in mitigating unemployment and had informal conversations with delivery drivers in urban areas, including university graduates and migrant workers, who have recently experienced unemployment and downward mobility. The B05 team aims to identify the outcomes of social policy in this area, and to examine public attitudes toward welfare provision and the function of social policy in maintaining regime stability. 

While in China, Dr. Yan was hosted by Duke Kunshan University as a Scholar in Residence at the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. To support the field research and to meet our main collaboration partner Prof. Yuegen Xiong, B05 project leader Prof. Tobias ten Brink visited Peking University in December.

Dr. Nils Düpont from INF-project has published a new article together with co-authors Nina Wiesehomeier and Saskia Ruth-Lovell on the diffusion of populism in the American Journal of Political Science.

Analyzing diffusion effects among 923 parties in 67 countries from 1970 to 2018 they find that similar levels of political and economic exclusion foster learning from and emulating other parties abroad. Moreover, they also uncover conditional effects for learning from other parties facing similar levels of income inequality or public sector corruption that hinge on a cultural prescreening. For the latter they adapt the idea of "cultural spheres" introduced by CRC project A05, already applied for successfully analyzing the introduction of social policies (e.g., Windzio et al. 2022). With their focus on party-to-party diffusion they complement the CRC’s analysis of possible pathways how ideas and public policies diffuse across borders.

As one of the five key scientific areas that largely define the research profile of the University of Bremen, the social science high-profile area "Social Change, Social Policy and the State" has set up its own new website with the start of 2025. The CRC 1342 "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" is part of this alliance.

In addition to the social science profile and the central research initiatives, the homepage https://www.uni-bremen.de/en/high-profile-area-social-sciences also contains the latest news from the participating institutions. Among these are the Collaborative Research Centre 1342, the SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy and the Institute of Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS).

Inequality, social policy, the welfare state – these are the focal topics of the high-profile area. The researchers analyze societal developments and welfare state dynamics amid contemporary tensions: globalization and liberalization on one side, and geopolitical competition and economic decoupling on the other.

If you have any questions, information or suggestions about the high-profile area social sciences, please contact the spokespersons or the coordination. [Contact]

Dr. Gulnaz Isabekova-Landau, a postdoctoral researcher in the Collaborative Research Centre project B06, which explores social policies in Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia, is on her secondment with the Centre for Women's Research (CENWOR) in Sri Lanka.

International migration is a complex phenomenon, driven by social, economic, political, and climatic issues, and it affects the lives of persons who decide to migrate as well as their families. Acknowledging broader roots and implications of migration, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the “International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families” in 1990. The date of its adoption, December 18, later became International Migrants Day.

Sri Lanka has a long-term history of labor migration, particularly in terms of migrant domestic workers (MDWs), the majority of whom are female. MDWs account for about one-quarter of foreign employment on average (Henderson, 2024, p. 259). Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) remain the top-five destinations for MDWs (Ministry of Labour and Foreign Employment of Sri Lanka, 2023). The work of MDWs in these countries is characterized by multiple challenges, including limited access to social protection and a number of cases of human rights violations.

CENWOR has a long-term history of conducting research on labor migration and migrant domestic workers, returnee migrant women and their health status, and more recently – the COVID-19 repercussions on labor migration in Sri Lanka. Building on this expertise, Dr. Isabekova-Landau is researching the access of returnee migrant domestic workers from Sri Lanka to health and social protection services. Her secondment is supported by a Marie Curie Staff Exchange within the Horizon Europe Programme (PRELAB, grant agreement no: 101129940). The study has only commenced, and more results will be reported at later stages.

Sources:

Henderson, S. (2024). The realities of return migration: Reintegrating women migrant domestic workers in Sri Lanka. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 33(2), 258–278. https://doi.org/10.1177/01171968241263363

Ministry of Labour and Foreign Employment of Sri Lanka. (2023). National Policy and National Action Plan on Migration for Employment Sri Lanka 2023-2027. https://labourmin.gov.lk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/National-Policy-and-National-Action-Plan-on-Migration-for-Employment-Sri-Lanka-2023-2027-English-Ver._compressed.pdf