Society in Motion and Public Policy, Strategy AV21

The programme focuses on complex socio-economic phenomena in modern societies, including those that arise unexpectedly, such as epidemics, wars, and extreme weather events. A range of researchers from various disciplines and institutions are involved, from the Academy of Sciences, Czech universities, local and foreign non-academic institutions.

One strand of the programme focuses on interactions between society and its formal and spontaneous institutions, and policies related to schooling and education, labour markets, taxes and benefits systems, poverty and inequality, population ageing, and public finances. Based on rigorous empirical investigations utilising rich data, we explore the focus and impacts of public policies. The research combines knowledge and approaches from behavioural sciences, particularly economics, but also including sociology, psychology, law, ethics, and operations research.

Another agenda focuses on mobility and migration. Today’s unprecedented movement of people, ideas, and resources is affecting every aspect of our lives, including state sovereignty and perceptions of identity. Mobility and migration disrupt the dominance of national identities and citizenship in favour of transnational and hybrid identities. They also contribute to rising xenophobia and populism, because they can be perceived as threatening to long-established social orders. We investigate phenomena including the relationships between mobility and governmental or international regulations, border processing capacity, the strengthening of regulation and street-level bureaucracy, the transformations of national identities and citizenship, and the ubiquity of and reasons for migration.

We devote special attention to the housing market and trends in it. In particular, we focus on the shrinking availability of affordable housing for young people, the operations of private rental housing, and the widening gaps between large urban centres and less densely populated regions. Working together with financial institutions, we monitor the trends in the differences between purchase and assessed housing prices to mitigate systemic risks in the Czech banking sector. We have created a web platform to list top private landlords who agree to provide secure, long-term rental homes to their tenants. We also prepare recommendations for regulatory policy measures related to housing and housing markets.

Another prominent area of our research focuses on ethics and social responsibility. Modern technologies are challenging many traditional aspects of personal and collective responsibilities. In traditional ethical teachings, responsibility is a matter for individual persons, but today’s scientific and technological developments are expanding the stylised concept of humans as the exclusive responsible agents. In today’s world, robots and other autonomous machines may be seen as independently responsible entities. New forms of responsibility also include individual people’s responsibility for preserving the environment for future generations.