Collaborative Research Center SFB 884

Funded by the German Research Foundation (2010–2021)

Our society faces great economic and social challenges. There is widespread consensus that reforms are necessary to cope with these challenges. Yet, we experience that reform initiatives are frequently delayed, compromised, or fail altogether.

The goal of the interdisciplinary SFB 884 was to provide scientific insights into success and failure of reforms, determined by competing interests (Group A), contexts (Group B) and the political process of reform-making (Group C). As the core infrastructure, a data center collected new data on these three dimensions.

The SFB 884 brought together about 150 researchers from economics, political science, sociology, statistics and computer science. Their joint interest was to advance the theoretical and empirical foundations of quantitative research on societal decision-making in general, and the understanding of reform-making in particular.