21.10.2026: Antrittsvorlesungen Prof. Dr. Gessler und Prof. Dr. Zimmermann
Prof. Dr. Theresa Gessler
Titel: "We need to talk (about democracy)"
Democracy, its advancement and erosion are among the most intensively studied concepts in political science. Yet the meaning of democracy is itself contested, and the concept is frequently used strategically, invoked by governments and their challengers alike to justify and criticize very different projects. These differences are not merely semantic: how elites and citizens talk and think about democracy is consequential for whether democracy endures.
The lecture follows two lines of inquiry: The first traces the politicization of democracy in elite communication and party competition, using computational text analysis to show which actors challenge or claim which democratic principles for which purpose. The second turns to citizens: how their own understandings of democracy shape which violations of democracy they notice and condemn, and how, under sustained pressure, rival understandings of democracy can harden into political divides.
Prof. Dr. Kaspar Zimmermann
Titel: "Scale and the Reshaping of the Market Economy"
When Adam Smith described the market economy, he imagined a decentralized economy of small producers. Over the next two and a half centuries, however, large firms emerged, and the market economy outgrew this blueprint of “atomistic” capitalism. Today, the largest 1,000 American companies account for roughly half of private-sector output.
This lecture draws on a research program on the long-run evolution of businesses, built from newly assembled data covering the past century in the United States and other market economies across four continents. It asks three questions. How pervasive is the rise of scale across time, industries, and countries? Has the concentration of output been matched by a concentration of employment? And do new giants emerge at a steady pace, or do some generations of firms dominate for a century?
The answers speak to the organization of production, business dynamism, and the old question of the boundaries of the firm.