Christian Breunig

During his time at CASBS, Christian Breunig will work on a project about political elites and how much and in what form they accept inequality. The project contributes to scholarship that explores the attenuated response of governments to rising economic inequality and surveys elected representatives in Europe and North America. The initial application focuses on the economic realm where redistribution aims at transferring resources, such as income and wealth, from one segment of society to another. The second goal is to develop a more expansive understanding of inequality and to incorporate environmental concerns in elite decision-making. For environmental issues, the distributive choice is intertemporal: short-term costs can secure long-term societal benefits.

Breunig is a professor of comparative politics at the University of Konstanz in Germany. His research concentrates on political representation and public policy in advanced democracies. He currently collaborates on several research activities at Konstanz’s cluster of excellence “The Politics of Inequality”. Breunig also directs the German Policy Agendas project. The project traces policy processes in Germany since the 1970s and is part of the Comparative Agendas project.

For more information, please visit his website: https://www.polver.uni-konstanz.de/breunig/