Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung

President Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln has led the institute since 2024, following Jutta Allmendinger's tenure from 2007 to 2024. Marcus Kölling serves as Managing Director, handling administration. Additionally, Tarik Abou-Chadi, a political scientist from Oxford, will become a director responsible for building a new democracy research department starting in January 2027.

The WZB is a public-law institution funded by the German federal government and the state of Berlin. It is a member of the Leibniz Association, a network of 96 independent, publicly funded research organizations. This structure gives it institutional autonomy while its researchers simultaneously hold joint professorships with Berlin universities like Humboldt-Universität, Freie Universität, and Technische Universität.

The WZB organizes its work around five thematic areas: education and labor, migration and integration, democracy, markets and decision-making, and international politics and law. Its researchers come from sociology, political science, economics, law, and psychology, and their output ranges from peer-reviewed studies on AI in the workplace to surveys of democratic attitudes among German citizens.

Yes. Two affiliated entities support its work: the A.SK Foundation, which focuses on social-science research and related awards, and Freunde des WZB e.V., an association that promotes the institute's activities. Neither entity serves as an investment vehicle for the institute.

It operates at the intersection. Researchers produce academic publications but also contribute to policy discourse directly. Recent examples include a study co-authored by Fuchs-Schündeln on cross-country differences in workplace AI adoption and a project examining how climate change affects return-migration plans among West African migrants in Germany — each designed to inform both scholarship and policymaking.

Unlike a university department, WZB controls its own budget, hiring, and long-term research agenda under the Leibniz Association framework, which mandates academic independence. Its researchers hold joint professorships with Berlin universities, which embeds them in teaching, but the institute itself carries no undergraduate or graduate teaching load. This hybrid model supports multi-year, interdisciplinary projects that are harder to sustain inside a typical faculty structure.

Tarik Abou-Chadi, currently at the University of Oxford and a specialist in comparative politics, will join in January 2027 to establish a new department for democracy research. This signals an expansion of the institute's existing work on democratic attitudes and institutional legitimacy, a theme already central to its output as shown by its 2023 survey of political definitions among Germans.