Nicola Maggini (Alma Mater Studiorum-Università di Bologna), Ferruccio Biolcati Rinaldi (Università degli Studi di Milano), Giulia Dotti Sani (Università degli Studi di Milano), Simona Guglielmi (Università degli Studi di Milano), Riccardo Ladini (Università degli Studi di Milano), Marco Maraffi (Università degli Studi di Milano), Francesco Molteni (Università degli Studi di Milano), Marta Moroni (Università degli Studi di Milano), Simone Sarti (Università degli Studi di Milano), Andrea Turkovic (Università degli Studi di Milano), Ettore Recchi (Sciences Po, Paris), Emanuele Ferragina (Sciences Po, Paris), Marta Dominguez Folgueras (Sciences Po, Paris), Thierry Gagne (Sciences Po, Paris), Bartholomew Konechni (Sciences Po, Paris), Andrew Zola (Sciences Po, Paris), Anne McMunn (University College London), Alita Nandi (University of Essex), Piotr Marzec (University of Essex), Elias Naumann (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim).
The 21st century has already seen major economic and political upheavals demanding global attention. The 2008 financial crisis, the deep political schisms emerging during the Trump presidency, the departure of the UK from the European Union, increasingly noticeable climate change, an ageing population, perpetual pressures of global migration, and growing levels of inequality have all changed the landscape and prospects of nations and individuals. Against this background, at the start of 2020, as it became apparent to scientists that the newfound virus would spread across the globe, the influential journal Foreign Policy published a special issue where a plethora of specialists and commentators claimed that ‘the pandemic will change the world forever’. Four years into the COVID-19 crisis, the most revolutionary scenarios have not materialized. Hence, an encompassing study of the societal consequences of COVID-19 needs to provide a balanced account of stability and change. Which aspects of social life have changed, and which aspects have remained (surprisingly) resilient to change? Are there societal groups that have been affected more than others? Moreover, we might ask whether the pandemic has triggered social change, albeit in forms and with a latency that makes it hard to detect against other confounding factors. Answering these questions requires thorough empirical analyses of high-quality data capturing a broad range of different aspects of social life. The project sets out to explore the behaviours and attitudes of the general population in France, Germany, Italy and the UK through high-quality representative and longitudinal datasets. More specifically, the interdisciplinary team of scholars (sociologists, political scientists, health experts) examines three key areas of social life: personal and family life, work life, and political life, complementing existing studies which have mainly focused on one of these areas of social life.