The project, titled “Class Representation and the Professionalization of Politics: Career Trajectories and Political Inequality in Comparative Perspective,” abbreviated ClassRep, is led by Lea Elsässer, assistant professor of political science with a focus on comparative democracy research in the European multi-level system at Goethe University Frankfurt. The German Research Foundation has awarded the project funding through its prestigious Emmy Noether Program, which enables outstanding early-career researchers to build and independently manage their own research group for six years. The grant amounts to 777,660 euros over the full duration of the project, which will run until May 2032.

Elsässer frames the problem in stark terms. “The social backgrounds of legislators have changed significantly: people with working-class backgrounds are underrepresented, while at the same time, there is an increasing number of ‘career politicians’ with little professional experience outside of politics-related jobs,” she explains. In her view, the urgency of the question is heightened by the current political climate. “Especially in light of widespread dissatisfaction with politics, we need to better understand how this narrowing of professional backgrounds is affecting political decisions and processes,” she adds. Her remarks point to a concern that extends well beyond descriptive statistics: if the people who write laws increasingly share the same narrow career path, whose experiences inform the policies that govern everyone else?

The premise of the project rests on a growing body of evidence in political science. Recent studies have shown that the class background of members of parliament shapes their behavior once in office. Legislators do not arrive in parliament as blank slates; they carry with them the accumulated experiences of their education, their occupations, and the social milieus they inhabited before entering politics. When those experiences cluster within a narrow band of the social spectrum, the argument goes, the perspectives available in legislative deliberation narrow as well. ClassRep seeks to move this research agenda forward by examining not just who sits in parliaments, but how they got there and what difference their journeys make.

Methodologically, the project represents a deliberate departure from the dominant approaches in the field. Much existing research on the social composition of legislatures relies on relatively coarse indicators: whether an MP holds a university degree, or what job they held immediately before entering parliament. ClassRep instead investigates the entire pre-parliamentary career of legislators. This longitudinal view makes it possible to trace how different educational and occupational trajectories, accumulated over years or decades, shape both the opportunities to access political power in the first place and the behavior of legislators once they have secured a seat. The distinction matters because a single snapshot of a politician’s last job can conceal the winding path that led there, including spells in manual labor, public administration, civil society organizations, or party apparatuses that each leave their own imprint.

Central to the project is the concept of “class experiences,” the formative encounters with work, hierarchy, economic security, and social status that accumulate over a career. Elsässer and her group will explore which of these experiences shape the paths into parliament and the behavior of political elites once they arrive. Crucially, the project will also attend to the different experiences of men and women, recognizing that class and gender intersect in ways that produce distinct career trajectories and distinct forms of political representation. A woman’s route into parliament may pass through different occupational sectors, face different barriers, and draw on different reservoirs of professional experience than a man’s, and the research group intends to capture those differences systematically rather than treating class as a gender-neutral category.

The project unfolds in two major steps. The first concentrates on the supply side of political representation: reconstructing and analyzing the full career trajectories that lead individuals into parliamentary office, and identifying how class experiences along those trajectories condition both access to political power and subsequent legislative conduct. The second step turns to the consequences, investigating how the changing social composition and professionalization of parliamentary elites affects political decisions. In other words, the group will not stop at documenting that parliaments have become socially narrower; it will ask whether and how that narrowing is visible in the outputs of the legislative process itself, from agenda-setting to policy choices.

To carry out this ambitious agenda, the Emmy Noether research group combines project management by Elsässer with two doctoral positions and two positions for student assistants. The structure is characteristic of the Emmy Noether Program, which the German Research Foundation designed to offer outstanding early-career researchers a route to qualifying for a full professorship by independently leading a research group over six years. Eligibility extends to postdocs and to professors in fixed-term positions at an early stage of their academic careers. The program runs for a total of six years, with an application for extension required after the first three, a checkpoint that subjects the group’s progress to external evaluation midway through the funding period.

The award’s namesake lends the program considerable symbolic weight. Amalie Emmy Noether, born in 1882 and died in 1935, was a Bavarian mathematician who made fundamental contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics, work that remains foundational to both fields more than nine decades after her death. That a program bearing her name now funds research into political inequality underscores the breadth of the German Research Foundation’s support for early-career excellence across the sciences, from mathematics and physics to the social sciences. For Elsässer, the award provides not only financial security but institutional independence: the freedom to define a research agenda, assemble a team, and pursue a question over a timescale long enough to produce substantive results.

The questions ClassRep addresses could hardly be more timely. Across many democracies, citizens express growing dissatisfaction with politics and with political elites, and researchers and commentators alike have speculated about the role that the shrinking social distance, or in some respects the widening social distance, between representatives and the represented plays in fueling that discontent. If legislators increasingly arrive in parliament via politics-related jobs, with little professional experience in the industries, services, and workplaces where most citizens spend their working lives, the representational link between parliaments and publics may weaken in ways that descriptive statistics on occupation alone cannot reveal. By tracing entire career trajectories, distinguishing the experiences of men and women, and connecting those patterns to concrete legislative behavior and political decisions, the Frankfurt group aims to give that debate an empirical foundation. The results, expected over the course of the project’s run until May 2032, promise to inform not only scholarly debates about political inequality and representation but also broader public discussions about who governs, how they got there, and what their paths mean for the health of contemporary democracy.

Subject of Research: Class representation and the professionalization of parliamentary careers in comparative democracies

Article Title: How representative are our parliaments?

Article References: How representative are our parliaments?. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: political representation, parliaments, working class, career politicians, Emmy Noether Program, German Research Foundation, Goethe University Frankfurt, Lea Elsässer, political inequality, legislative behavior, class background, democracy research

The German Research Foundation, known as the DFG, is supporting the venture with approximately 1.8 million euros over six years. The Emmy Noether Program is one of the most prestigious funding instruments available to early-career researchers in Germany, designed to allow outstanding scientists to build their own independent research groups and qualify for a university teaching career. For Farnworth, the award provides not only financial security but also the freedom to assemble a dedicated team and pursue a long-term scientific vision without the constraints that often accompany more narrowly defined project grants.

Farnworth arrived in Mainz on August 1, 2026, and his group is based at the Institute of Developmental Biology and Neurobiology, where he works in close proximity to the Neural Circuits Lab. The group is additionally affiliated with the Focus Program Translational Neurosciences and the Institute of Pathophysiology, giving it access to a broad network of neuroscientific expertise. The team he is assembling will consist of one postdoctoral researcher, two doctoral researchers, and a part-time technical assistant, a configuration typical of an Emmy Noether group and large enough to combine genetic experimentation, single-cell molecular analysis, and advanced imaging within a single laboratory.

The central question driving the new group is deceptively simple: why are some neural circuits far more evolutionarily flexible than others? Within a single brain, neighboring structures can follow dramatically different evolutionary trajectories. One region may be extensively remodeled across lineages, with new cell types appearing, cell numbers expanding or contracting, and connectivity patterns shifting, while another region remains essentially unchanged over vast stretches of evolutionary time. Understanding what makes a neural circuit conservative or permissive to change would illuminate a fundamental principle of how brains evolve, with implications reaching far beyond insects.

To tackle this question, Farnworth focuses on two well-characterized regions of the insect brain. The first is the mushroom bodies, paired structures best known for their roles in learning and memory, particularly in the context of olfactory association. The second is the central complex, a midline-spanning network of neuropils that serves as the insect’s navigation and orientation hub, integrating sensory information to control walking, turning, and spatial orientation. Over the course of insect evolution, these two regions have diverged sharply in their histories. Mushroom bodies have been extensively remodeled in different groups of insects, reflecting adaptations to widely varying lifestyles, whereas the central complex has remained comparatively conserved, preserving a recognizable ground plan across lineages.

Farnworth’s hypothesis is that the answer to this contrast may lie in development. During the development of an insect, many thousands of nerve cells and millions of connections arise from a comparatively small number of neural stem cells. Specific developmental programs determine which cell types are formed, how many cells of each type are produced, and which connections they establish with one another. We want to understand how these programs change over the course of evolution and how these changes allow neural circuits to adapt to different lifestyles and environmental conditions, Farnworth explains. If the developmental programs governing the mushroom bodies are inherently more modular or more tolerant of variation than those governing the central complex, that could explain why one structure has been free to diversify while the other has been locked in place.

Testing this idea requires a comparative framework, and the group has selected four insect species that together span a wide swath of the insect evolutionary tree: the common fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum, the clonal raider ant Ooceraea biroi, and the Indianmeal moth Plodia interpunctella. Each species represents a distinct lineage, and each brings a different lifestyle to the comparison. The fruit fly is the canonical genetic model with a compact brain; the beetle represents holometabolous insects with a different larval development; the clonal raider ant offers a social species in which brain regions involved in learning and communication have adapted to colony life; and the moth adds a lineage with sophisticated olfactory-driven behaviors. By comparing homologous brain structures across these species, the researchers can distinguish features that have been conserved from those that have changed.

Methodologically, the project combines single-cell analyses, genetic tools, and high-resolution imaging. Single-cell approaches allow the team to catalog which cell types are present in each brain region of each species, effectively producing molecular census lists that can be compared across lineages. Genetic methods make it possible to trace the lineages of neural stem cells and to manipulate developmental programs experimentally, revealing how changes in stem cell behavior translate into changes in adult circuitry. High-resolution imaging, meanwhile, documents the anatomy of the resulting circuits, from the positions of cell bodies to the fine structure of the connections they form. Together, these techniques allow the researchers to determine which components of neural circuits have been conserved over evolutionary time and where changes have occurred in cell types, cell numbers, or connectivity.

The work exemplifies an approach often described as neuro-evo-devo, the intersection of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and developmental biology. Rather than studying a single model organism in isolation, this framework treats development as the mechanism through which evolutionary change is enacted. Mutations do not reshape adult brains directly; they alter developmental programs, and it is these altered programs that produce different cell types, different cell numbers, and different wiring patterns in the next generation. By reading the developmental programs of multiple species and comparing their outputs, researchers can reconstruct how evolutionary transformations in the brain actually happened, and potentially predict which kinds of changes are easy for evolution to make and which are difficult.

For Farnworth, the move to Mainz represents the culmination of a research trajectory that has taken him through several of Europe’s leading institutions. He has been studying the evolution and development of the insect brain since his doctoral research. At the University of Göttingen, he investigated the development of the central complex in fruit flies and red flour beetles, gaining firsthand experience with the comparative approach that now anchors his independent program. Most recently, at the University of Bristol, he studied the evolution of neural circuits in butterflies, extending his comparisons to a lineage in which visual and cognitive adaptations are especially pronounced. JGU provides an excellent research environment for my neuro-evo-devo approach, which seeks to understand brain evolution through its development, Farnworth says. This combination of strong developmental and evolutionary biology is rare. JGU also offers excellent core facilities, particularly in imaging. With the Emmy Noether funding now secured and the group taking shape in Mainz, the coming six years promise to shed new light on one of neuroscience’s deepest questions: how the tiny brains of insects are built, and why evolution has rewritten some parts of their blueprint while leaving others untouched for hundreds of millions of years.

Subject of Research: Evolution and development of neural circuits in the insect brain

Article Title: Evolutionary neurobiologist Max Farnworth joins JGU from Bristol with Emmy Noether Funding

Article References: Evolutionary neurobiologist Max Farnworth joins JGU from Bristol with Emmy Noether Funding. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: neuroscience, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, insect brain, Emmy Noether Program, DFG, mushroom bodies, central complex, neural circuits, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, single-cell analysis, neuro-evo-devo