Season's Greetings

The WZB wishes you happy holidays and a good start to the New Year!

This is not a winter landscape. It is a graphic representation of the finding that processes of democratization and autocratization have been spreading across the globe in wave-like patterns. WZB researcher Vanessa Boese-Schlosser documented this based on data from 1900 to 2020. With this image, we bid farewell to a year in which the stability of democracies was a central theme—both as a political challenge and as the subject of our research. “The future of democracy?” was also the title of our 1st Annual Interdisciplinary WZB Conference in October.