John F. Kennedy Institute, Sociology Department, Project "The Triangle of German Democratic Capitalism - Growth, Housing and Voting (REG-TDC)": The interplay between democracy and capitalism in the German economic model is predominantly studied at the national level in comparison to other countries, ignoring the large regional variation. While economic historians have made important advances in studying Prussian counties or the “German lands” through regional or urban datasets before 1945, the study of the German political economy in regional perspective post-1945 has not been explored to a similar degree, not least due to a lack of regionally harmonized data. This interdisciplinary project on the regional Triangle of Democratic Capitalism – or REG-TDC – therefore proposes to establish within a first work package a harmonized county-level panel dataset tackling democratic capitalism from three angles: (i) economic growth in the form of GDP, industrial production and employment, and income distribution data, (ii) living standards and spatial social organization in the form of data on housing and house prices, and (iii) democratic politics in the form of a panel of regional electoral data. The outcome of this work package will be a database for common use in the scientific community, accompanied by a data documentation paper, as well as python code allowing future database extensions and flexible adjustment of regional units. REG-TDC then serves as an infrastructural stepping stone for advancing our understanding of democratic capitalism through regional variation in work packages 2 (growth, inequality, voting) and 3 (housing construction, prices and growth). More concretely, we will investigate how industrial change affected inequality and the German growth model, how the evolution of rents and house prices affected voting outcomes and housing construction as well as how the housing sector is associated with the German growth model. The project brings together the expertise of economic history, political economy, historical sociology, and economics in order to study core aspects of democratic capitalism from a regional historical perspective, using cutting-edge econometric methods.

Job description:
- Assist the university instructor of the Dept. of Sociology in research, especially in researching and obtaining literature for research purposes, data collection, maintenance and analysis.
- The student will be expected to contribute in locating, collecting, harmonizing, and systematizing historical data from primary sources for regions and cities in Germany using statistical software, as well as assist in making analyses.
 
Desirable:
- Familiarity with working with quantitative data and ideally historical data sources
- Knowledge of descriptive statistics, GIS and statistical software (e.g. R, stata, Python)
- Interest in economic sociology and political economy in general and housing sociology, growth models and socio-economic inequality in particular
- Excellent English, and also German (at least B1) since German is the source language; German reading skills and prior experience with archival work is an advantage
- BA or MA students in North American Studies (with an interest in sociology), BA/MA students in sociology or related social sciences (esp. economics, history, data science).
- Please send motivation letter, CV, transcripts, and writing sample (term paper, essay or thesis)