Project Details
Projekt
Project 1: RISS II CoRE – Conceptualizing Reconfiguration for Empirical Research
Subject Area
Empirical Social Research
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439346934
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. Building on recent welfare state research, we will construct country-year/period-specific institutional and policy measures to compare key welfare state dimensions across European countries. The measures will refine empirical expectations regarding welfare state effects on reconfiguration and politicization, strengthen comparative analyses within RISS II, enable longitudinal testing of the reconfiguration and politicization propositions, and anchor the countries and periods in focus in the single projects. 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. The RISS Reconfiguration-Int Data Set extends the German Reconfiguration Data Set to a cross-national level, harmonizing secondary data to trace macro-level social structural reconfiguration across European countries over past decades. The RISS Politicization Data Set maps national political discourse across Europe, using natural language processing combined with social scientific expert knowledge to provide a detailed classification of group appeals, issue salience, and contestation in party manifestos and parliamentary debates since the 1980s. It captures references to uni- and multidimensional social structural groups and distinguishes between economic and/or cultural framing relating to these groups, offering a sophisticated tool for studying changes in political discourse. The RISS Politicized Identity Survey is a cross-national survey designed to capture how individuals internalize social structural reconfiguration and how politicization shapes co-orientations and co-interactions in seven European countries. 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.
DFG Programme
Research Units
