With the press release "Federal Ministries: Hardly any East Germans in Top Positions," the research project running since 2017 "New Elites - Established Personnel? (Dis-)Continuities of German Ministries in System Transformations" concluded on January 12, 2022. One of the many revealing findings of the study shows that there are few top East German officials in federal ministries and how drastic the imbalance has been for decades. Even under the new federal government, little has changed.

The press release received a great deal of media coverage, including reports by Der Spiegel, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk and Deutschlandfunk, and from the international field by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Click here to go directly to the press release. Further interesting study results are freely available as data reports here.