Why have the politically, economically, and emotionally significant parcels sent from West Germany to the Socialist East been neglected by social theory? In my talk, I will argue that ideas of modernity on both sides of the Iron Curtain produced a blind spot that is worth reconsidering.

During the time that two German states existed, parcels sent to the Socialist East were politically, economically, and emotionally important. Successive West German government campaigns supported them as symbols of unity through tax releases, school and poster campaigns. Millions of parcels were sent each year and the socialist governments reluctantly learned to rely on their economic value. Increasingly, the exchange included large kinship networks beyond individual relations. After unification, these networks quickly dissolved and the parcels became symbols of difference between relatives, as well as between East and West Germany more broadly. Despite their material and immaterial significance, these kinship practices represent an epistemic void. They play no role in the analyses of family sociologists and students of political transformation. In my talk, I ask why social scientists have not paid attention to these practices and argue that ideas of modernity on both sides of the Iron Curtain produced this blind spot. Taking these exchanges seriously could still eventually lead to new insights into the co-production of state and kinship.

Tatjana Thelen is Professor for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and currently serves as Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair at Stanford. She previously held positions at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and at universities in Zurich, Bayreuth, Halle and Berlin. Her research has centred on postsocialist transformations in Hungary, Romania, Serbia and eastern Germany with a focus on property, welfare, kinship and state. Her latest co-edited book is The Politics of Making Kinship. Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Berghahn 2023).

At Stanford, Tatjana is teaching the course ANTHRO 124C: Anthropology of the State in Winter 2023.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by May 4, 2023.

How much and in what form do politicians accept economic inequality? The talk explores the attenuated response of governments to rising economic inequality in Europe and North America. Political interventions in the economy depend on how elected representatives learn and reason about various forms of inequality and, ultimately, and how they decide when political action is required. Regardless of actual changes in inequality, legislators with leftist identity perceive inequality as rising and unfair, while rightist politicians hold the opposite views. When legislators then think about public demand for redistribution, they rely on their own redistributive preferences as a heuristic: the more supportive politicians are about redistribution, the higher their estimation of support for redistributive policies. Politicians thereby display a false consensus effect in their assessment.

Surveys and interviews with over 800 politicians in five democracies—Belgium, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland—elicit politicians' perceptions of economic inequality, their redistributive preferences as well as their estimates of public support among citizens. Politicians belonging to conservative parties perceive inequality to be smaller than those on the left. They also attribute less unfairness to inequality. Similarly, politicians who strongly oppose a redistributive policy do not believe that a majority of citizens favor it; however, when politicians are supportive of the measure by themselves, they believe that over 60% of citizens prefer a redistributive policy. These perceptions have behavioral consequences: legislators who believe that inequality is rising and unfair raise this issue in their parliamentary speeches. The talk probes into the intentions of elected representatives when dealing with economic inequality, unequal representation and economic policymaking in European democracies.

Christian Breunig is Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics & Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Before coming to Konstanz, he was associate professor in political science at the University of Toronto and held a post-doc position at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. He received my doctorate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington in Seattle. His research concentrates on representation and public policy in advanced democracies and has been published in the leading journals of political science. He is a PI at the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality" and directs the German Policy Agendas project which is part of the Comparative Agendas Project. In 2022-23, he is fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by April 20, 2023.

A wealth of recent political science research focuses on how media consolidation under state rule can exacerbate democratic erosion, among other things by limiting access to narratives that counter the government's viewpoint. Hungary is one of the most frequently cited examples of this corrosive media effect. We disagree with the corrosion hypothesis, and seek to test the individual-level effects of providing information that counters the government narrative through a survey experiment. This lecture will describe the problem, our proposal, and what we expect to discover.

Jason Wittenberg is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. A former Academy Scholar at Harvard University, he has been a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, and a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. Professor Wittenberg’s broad area of focus is the politics and history of Eastern Europe. He has published widely on topics including electoral behavior, ethnic and religious violence, historical legacies, and empirical research methods. His first book, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary (Cambridge, 2006), won the 2009 Hubert Morken award for the best political science book published on religion and politics. He is the co-author, most recently, of Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell, 2018), winner of the 2019 Bronislaw Malinowski Award in the Social Sciences. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current projects explore liberal democratic erosion and the logic of historical persistence.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by March 2, 2023.