Insuring modern society: A historical-comparative sociology of private insurance, its evolution, origins and consequences

该项目提出了一种私人保险部门在其寿险和非寿险分支(财产、运输等)中的历史比较社会学。从19世纪末开始的20个古老的经合组织国家和覆盖范围较短的15个新兴经济体(拉丁美洲、亚洲、东欧)。保险业每年收取的保费收入约占全球GDP的7%，约占银行业总资产的一半，在气候和巨灾风险上升的时期变得越来越重要。奇怪的是，金融历史学家和经济学家都忽视了这一点，他们把重点放在银行和资本市场上，政治学家也忽视了这一点，他们把重点放在福利国家的公共保险上。社会学家本身已经很好地研究了现代风险社会的许多方面，但在很大程度上忽视了其中的保险部门。该项目旨在通过建立现代保费保险的主要存量和流量变量的跨国历史数据库来填补这一空白，以便研究它们在时间和国家之间的演变，解释它们的增长，并在三个工作包中调查选定的后果。第一个工作方案将建立保险数据库，描述现代保险约200年的发展，并将其增长趋势与其他金融机构和公益国家的增长趋势进行比较。它还将揭示各国不同的保险增长轨迹。第二个工作方案解决了不同增长决定因素的问题，主要着眼于经常讨论的经济和文化因素，即经济发展和保险增长之间的关系，以及新教和不同教派与保险发展之间潜在的韦伯式关系。最终的工作方案侧重于保险的某些后果：该部门是否通过允许更快的经济复苏来防范金融和其他危机？私营保险公司和公共保险领域之间是否存在权衡，特别是在养老金和事故领域？总体而言，该项目在很短的时间内连接到了一些跨不同学科研究的问题，但从长远来看，它发挥了覆盖许多国家的巨大数据优势。除了建立一个未来用于福利、金融和证券研究的数据库外，该项目还为潜在的社会学保险做出了贡献，它与韦伯式的合理化主题、公共福利的不同世界和资本主义的各种形式联系在一起。

This project proposes a historical-comparative sociology of the private insurance sector in its life and non-life branches (property, transport, etc.) in 20 old OECD countries starting in the late 19th century and 15 emerging economies with shorter coverage (Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe). The insurance sector annually collects about 7% of world GDP as premium income, holds about half of total banking assets and becomes increasingly important in times of rising climate and catastrophe risks. This has strangely been neglected by both historians and economists of finance, with their focus on banks and capital markets, as well as by political scientists, with their strong focus on public insurances within the welfare states. Sociologists themselves have covered many facets of modern risk societies very well, but largely ignored the insurance sector therein. This project aims at filling this gap by building a cross-country historical database of the main stock and flow variables of modern premium-based insurances in order to study their evolution across time and countries, to explain their growth and to investigate selected consequences in three working packages. The first working package will build the insurance database and describe the about 200 years of modern insurance development and will compare its growth trends with those of other financial institutions and the public welfare state. It will also uncover countries’ different insurance growth trajectories. The second working package addresses the question of different growth determinants by mainly looking at often discussed economic and cultural factors, i.e. the relationship between economic development and insurance growth and the potentially Weberian relationship between Protestantism and different denominations and insurance development. A final working package focuses on selected consequences of insurances: does the sector macroeconomically insure against financial and other crises by allowing for quicker economic recoveries? Is there a trade-off between private insurers and public insurance domains, particularly in the pension and accident domain? Overall, the project connects to some questions studied across different disciplines for very short time spans, but plays out its huge data advantage of covering many countries in the long-run. Beyond building a future database for practical use in welfare, finance and securities studies, the project contributes to a potential sociology insurance that connects to Weberian themes of rationalization, to the different worlds of public welfare and the varieties of capitalism.