Simon Morris-Lange

Dr. Simon Morris-Lange is a DAAD/AGI Research Fellow in Fall 2026. He is Head of Research at Allianz Foundation in Berlin, where he leads the Foundation’s research and knowledge-sharing portfolio. His work focuses on civic action and democratic resilience across Europe, with a particular emphasis on younger generations. Prior to joining Allianz Foundation, he served as Deputy Head of Research at the Expert Council on Integration and Migration (SVR), a leading non-partisan think tank on migration and immigrant integration. He holds a doctorate in International and Comparative Education from Humboldt University of Berlin and writes regularly on democratic resilience and education reform.

Dr. Morris-Lange’s research at AGI examines the political appeal of nostalgia-based narratives and tactics. A central aim of his fellowship is to refine a novel backlash diagnostics tool, which he previously co-developed with political scientists at the WZB Social Science Center Berlin, the SINUS Institute, and with support from the psychometric scale experts at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. The instrument measures citizens’ susceptibility to backlash politics (Alter and Zürn 2020)—a distinct form of political populism that fuses nostalgia for a supposedly better past with radical tactics aimed at forcing society back to that prior condition.