Leuphana University Luneburg
TRUEDEM team in Germany is based at Center for the Study of Democracy at Leuphana University Luneburg. The team is led by Prof. Dr. Christian Welzel, Director of the Center and the Political Culture Research Professor at Leuphana University. He is member of the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina). His books include the award-winning Freedom Rising (2013 at CUP), Democratization (with Christian Haerpfer et al., OUP 2019), The Civic Culture Transformed (with Russell J. Dalton, at CUP 2014). Funded by the German Science Foundation’s Reinhard Koselleck Award, Welzel currently directs research on the project “The Cool Water Effect: The Secret Behind the West’s Emancipatory Drive”. The team brings in expertise on human empowerment, emancipative values, cultural change, and democratization. The team leads WP4 “Culture, trust and democracy”.
Christian Welzel, member of the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), is the Political Culture Research Professor at Leuphana University in Lueneburg, Germany. He is also President (emer.) and Vice-President of the World Values Survey Association and Chief Foreign Director of the Ronald Inglehart Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR) at the National Research University-Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. Welzel’s research focuses on human empowerment, emancipative values, cultural change and democratization. Besides his award-winning Freedom Rising (2013 at CUP), the most recent books include Democratization (with Christian Haerpfer, Ronald Inglehart and Patrick Bernhagen, 2nd fully revised and updated edition at OUP 2019), The Civic Culture Transformed (with Russell J. Dalton, at CUP 2014); and Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy (with Ronald Inglehart, 2005 at CUP). Funded by the German Science Foundation’s Reinhard Koselleck Award, Welzel currently directs research on the project “The Cool Water Effect: The Secret Behind the West’s Emancipatory Drive.”
Lennart Joe Brunkert is a PhD candidate at Leuphana University Lüneburg and Research Associate in the DFG project “The Cool Water Effect” and most recently the “TRUEDEM” project. In his PhD project he analyzes questions of regime legitimation from political science and social-psychology perspectives with a focus on quantitative measurement. Brunkert studied European Studies (BSc) and Public Economics, Law and Politics (MA) at the universities of Sønderborg and Lüneburg. Recent publications appeared in Democratization, Frontiers of Political Science and the Journal of Democracy.