Aktuelle Publikationen

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated worldwide research efforts to provide knowledge about the disease. Yet little is known about how Ghana contributed to this critical knowledge production. This scientometric analysis was conducted to ascertain Ghana’s COVID-19 research output within the African context to gain understanding and identify potential future directions. The study retrieved relevant research, spanning 2019 to 2022, from the Scopus database in December 2022. The retrieved data were assessed using various established indices, including collaboration patterns, productive institutions, citation patterns, and major research sponsors, among others. Ghana came seventh in Africa with a total of 1112 publications. For international collaborations, the United States and the United Kingdom were the major partners, while South Africa was the main African collaborator with Ghana. Out of the top 21 most productive authors, 85.7% were males and 14.3% were females, demonstrating a great gender gap in research output in Ghana. Although Ghana has made some contributions to the global COVID-19 research output, there are few intra-continental research collaborations, which limits Africa’s overall research output. Our study demonstrates a critical need for the Ghanaian government to prioritize research and funding and address barriers to women’s research productivity.

In 2020, the German government supported the COVID-19 recovery fund ‘Next Generation EU’, which according to many observers is breaking with the taboo of joint EU debt liability. In this article, we analyse whether this decision marks a programmatic shift towards fiscal integration, taken in isolation by the Chancellor, or whether it can be reconciled with higher-level principles that guided the Chancellor’s previous European policies? Our analysis builds on a synthetic framework combining a multi-level principal-agent account with ideational components. The empirical analysis of Bundestag debates and original public opinion data reveal that the support for ‘Next Generation EU’ neither breaks with the Chancellor’s established ‘conservational-pragmatic’ approach to EU policy-making, nor separates the Chancellor from the preferences of the Bundestag and the public. Content analyses show how the government and its supporting camp in the Bundestag justified the apparent policy shift, underlining a strong agreement towards strengthening the EU in times of an unseen crisis, while at the same time revealing some noteworthy partisan differences.

This study examines whether transitioning from cellular offices to an activity-based flexible office (A-FO) impacts employee absenteeism over time. Based on privacy theory, we hypothesized that changing from cell offices to an A-FO setting would lead to increased employee absenteeism. We further assumed that longer-tenured and female employees would experience greater difficulty with the transition, leading to more absenteeism among these groups. Using a sample of 2,017 white-collar workers tracked over 8 years, we quasi-experimentally investigated if absenteeism in the group with the office design intervention (1,035 individuals) differed from the control group (982 individuals). In the difference-in-difference (DiD) framework, nested negative binomial regression showed no difference in absenteeism between the intervention and control groups. However, a three-way interaction revealed that long-term employees showed higher absenteeism when switching to an A-FO. We discuss our contributions and the implications for corporate leadership, human resources, and change management.

Over the last decades, digital technologies have progressively made their way into the workplace. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important for employees to have digital competencies, which can be measured through digital fluency, including its two sub dimensions, namely digital knowledge and digital self-efficacy. This is particularly the case for older workers, who might be affected by a digital divide that proposes younger and older employees have different prerequisites for digital fluency. Drawing from the stereotype embodiment theory, we argue that age is generally negatively related to self-perceptions of digital fluency and particularly impactful when older employees hold negative age stereotypes against older workers and therefore self-stereotype themselves. Furthermore, we argue that developmental support from the direct supervisor has the potential to either amplify or alleviate this negative relation: While a lack of supervisor support may lead to the activation of internalized negative age stereotypes, strong support by the supervisor could strengthen the employees’ self-perceptions in several ways. Performing multiple regression analyses on survey data collected from 1,007 employees, we find support for our three hypotheses. Negative age stereotypes exacerbate the negative relationship between age and digital fluency, whereas the interplay of high individual stereotypes and low supervisor support is the most negative condition for the relation of age on digital fluency. On the other hand, strong supervisor support with low negative stereotypes counteract existing age differences in digital fluency. Therefore, our findings have important theoretical and practical implications.

This article investigates to what extent citizens’ conceptions of nation-state identity and European identity contribute to the support for populist radical parties along the left-right and the national level and sub-state divide. Drawing on data European Social Survey data, it employs multinomial and logistical regression models to examine the connection between territorial identity and support for majority nationalist Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRP) (9 cases), national-level Populist Radical Left Parties (PRLP) (4 cases), sub-national PRRP (3 cases), and sub-national PRLP (3 cases). The overall findings confirm that nation-state identity and European identity have independent and significant effects. In several of the cases, a strong nation-state identity is positively related to support for (a) majority nationalist PRRP. A (negative) European identity is a central characteristic throughout the sample of majority nationalist PRRP and present in every single case. Sub-state PRRP supporters reject nation-state identity and, interestingly, in one case also European identity more than do other partisans. Identity effects, especially a negative nation-state identity, were present among PRLP supporters too. However, the evidence points to significantly less coherence.

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Background: Abuse and mistreatment of women during childbirth is a major barrier to facility-based delivery, putting women at risk of avoidable complications, trauma and negative health outcomes including death. We study the prevalence of obstetric violence (OV) and its associated factors in the Ashanti and Western Regions of Ghana.

Methodology: A facility-based cross-sectional survey was conducted in eight public health facilities from September to December 2021. Specifically, close-ended questionnaires were administered to 1,854 women, aged 15–45 who gave birth in the health facilities. The data collected include the sociodemographic attributes of women, their obstetric history and experiences of OV based on the seven typologies according to the categorization by Bowser and Hills.

Findings: We find that about two in every three women (65.3%) experience OV. The most common form of OV is non-confidential care (35.8%), followed by abandoned care (33.4%), non-dignified care (28.5%) and physical abuse (27.4%). Furthermore, 7.7% of women were detained in health facilities for their inability to pay their bills, 7.5% received non-consented care while 11.0% reported discriminated care. A test for associated factors of OV yielded few results. Single women (OR 1.6, 95% CI 1.2–2.2) and women who reported birth complications (OR 3.2, 95% CI 2.4–4.3) were more likely to experience OV compared with married women and women who had no birth complications. In addition, teenage mothers (OR 2.6, 95% CI 1.5–4.5) were more likely to experience physical abuse compared to older mothers. Rural vs. urban location, employment status, gender of birth attendant, type of delivery, time of delivery, the ethnicity of the mothers and their social class were all not statistically significant.

Conclusion: The prevalence of OV in the Ashanti and Western Regions was high and only few variables were strongly associated with OV, suggesting that all women are at risk of abuse. Interventions should aim at promoting alternative birth strategies devoid of violence and changing the organizational culture of violence embedded in the obstetric care in Ghana.

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dc.contributor.author: Dollbaum, Jan Matti; Dudouet, Véronique

Digitalisation has changed society, and, as a result, public administrations are required to undergo significant changes to satisfy emergent societal needs. These changes impact all areas of the public sector, including the development and provision of digital services, the design of processes, and the development of policy. To implement the digital strategies and transformation requirements, public administrations must rethink the competences that their workforce as well as the external stakeholders may need. To understand how one nation implements its digital strategy and upskills its civil servants, we conducted a qualitative analysis of 41 Austrian expert interviews. The research shows that different stakeholders require a variety of competences to participate in the digital transformation of its processes and services. The results demonstrate the high level of diversity and the need for a holistic approach to tackle the complexity of the digital public sector, where leadership plays the most important role. In addition, the study shows that the use of competence frameworks for measurement and monitoring needs to be adapted to the local context.

Politicians regularly bargain with colleagues and other actors. Bargaining dynamics are central to theories of legislative politics and representative democracy, bearing directly on the substance and success of legislation, policy, and on politicians’ careers. Yet, controlled evidence on how legislators bargain is scarce. Do they apply different strategies when engaging different actors? If so, what are they, and why? To study these questions, we field an ultimatum game bargaining experiment to 1,100 sitting politicians in Belgium, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. We find that politicians exhibit a strong partisan bias when bargaining, a pattern that we document across all of our cases. The size of the partisan bias in bargaining is about double the size when politicians engage citizens than when they face colleagues. We discuss implications for existing models of bargaining and outline future research directions.

Introduction: Poor access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services threatens population health and contributes to gender and social inequalities, especially in low-resource settings. Despite awareness in the WASH sector of the importance of promoting gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) to address these inequalities, evaluations of interventions focus largely on health outcomes, while gender equality and other social outcomes are rarely included. This review aimed to collate and describe available research evidence of GESI outcomes evaluated in WASH intervention studies.

Methods: We applied a systematic mapping methodology and searched for both academic and grey literature published between 2010 and 2020 in 16 bibliographic databases and 53 specialist websites. Eligibility screening (with consistency checking) was conducted according to predetermined criteria, followed by metadata coding and narrative synthesis.

Results: Our evidence base comprises 463 intervention studies. Only 42% of studies measured transformative GESI outcomes of WASH interventions, referring to those that seek to transform gender relations and power imbalances to promote equality. A majority of studies disaggregated outcome data by sex, but other forms of data disaggregation were limited. Most included studies (78%) lacked a specific GESI mainstreaming component in their intervention design. Of the interventions with GESI mainstreaming, the majority targeted women and girls, with very few focused on other social groups or intersectional considerations.

Conclusion: The review points to various areas for future primary and secondary research. Given the potential contribution of WASH to GESI, GESI considerations should be incorporated into the evaluation of WASH interventions. Regular collection of data and monitoring of GESI outcomes is needed as well as developing new and testing existing methods for monitoring and evaluation of such data.

This article explores individual views of the purpose of education. Most existing research focuses on attitudes and policy preferences; while these types of perceptions have so far been largely overlooked due to a lack of data. Our analysis of original survey data in eight Western European countries shows that personal socioeconomic factors and ideological predispositions shape these individual opinions. Individuals with higher levels of education and income are more likely to view education as aimed at expanding knowledge as goal by itself, and less likely to view it as a tool to promote intergenerational social mobility. Left-leaning individuals are also more likely to regard education as a goal by itself, and less likely to view it as conferring useful labour market skills for the younger generation. Finally, we investigate the relationship between these different views and individual preferences for social policies. Our results show that the perception of education as promoting intergenerational mobility is strongly associated with support for passive transfers, while the perception of education as conferring marketable skills increases support for workfare policies. Social investment policies, because they are widely supported in the population, are not linked to specific views on education.

This editorial introduces readers to the thematic issue on organized interests in the context of democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe.

Ceva and Ferretti provide rich, comprehensive, and thought-provoking answers to the question of what political corruption—understood as corruption that occurs in public institutions—is and when and why it is morally wrong. One aspect that greatly contributes to the book's originality and political relevance is its commitment to a “continuist” conception of (public) institutions (14), according to which institutions are nothing but the interrelated actions of their members—the officeholders entrusted, by virtue of their institutional role, with specific powers that they should always be able to use with a certain level of discretion. This conceptual starting point makes this book a compelling reminder that, even if designing and reforming formal institutions can be done effectively to shape the powers and incentives of institutional actors, we cannot focus only on formal institutional and procedural design to have functioning institutions. As Ceva and Ferretti argue, “no institution can be designed in such a way that makes it immune from political corruption, which may always sneak in per the officeholders’ work” (61)—namely, whenever public officeholders use their entrusted powers in a manner that is incompatible with the terms of their power mandate.

Which legislators become specialized in particular policy areas (hedgehogs), and which develop into policy generalists (foxes)? Instead of focusing on the individual characteristics of MPs, we build on institutionalist literature and argue that an MP's specialization arises from an interaction between MP and parliamentary leadership. These interactions generate demand for policy generalists depending on a leadership position, committee membership, government status, and parliamentary group size. Policy specialization is measured by how many different topics a legislator addresses in Parliament. Using data from Germany from 1998 to 2013, topic-coded parliamentary questions are combined with MPs' personal and partisan data. Descriptively, foxes are common in Germany and dominate in Parliament. The subsequent estimation indicates that policy specialists are related to government status and parliamentary group size.

Collaboration between public administration organizations and various stakeholders is often prescribed as a potential solution to the current complex problems of governance, such as climate change. According to the Advocacy Coalition Framework, shared beliefs are one of the most important drivers of collaboration. However, studies investigating the role of beliefs in collaboration show mixed results. Some argue that similarity of general normative and empirical policy beliefs elicits collaboration, while others focus on beliefs concerning policy instruments. Proposing a new divisive beliefs hypothesis, we suggest that agreeing on those beliefs over which there is substantial disagreement in the policy subsystem is what matters for collaboration. Testing our hypotheses using policy network analysis and data on climate policy subsystems in eleven countries (Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Sweden, and Taiwan), we find belief similarity to be a stronger predictor of collaboration when the focus is divisive beliefs rather than normative and empirical policy beliefs or beliefs concerning policy instruments. This knowledge can be useful for managing collaborative governance networks because it helps to identify potential competing coalitions and to broker compromises between them.

This article maps and investigates public support for different types of differentiated integration (DI) in the European Union. We examine citizens’ preferences for DI using novel survey data from eight EU member states. The data reveals substantive differences in support for different types of DI. Factor analyses reveal two dimensions that seem to structure citizens’ evaluations of DI. The first dimension relates to the effect of DI on the European integration project, the second concerns the safeguarding of national autonomy. Citizens’ attitudes on this second dimension vary substantively across countries. General EU support is the most important correlate of DI support, correlating positively with the first and negatively with the second dimension. Our results underline that while citizens generally care about the fairness of DI, balancing out their different concerns can be a challenging political task.

Interest groups play a key role in the political economy of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Their support for or opposition to a planned PTA tends to be crucial in determining the fate of PTAs. But which PTAs receive support from (which) interest groups? Clearly, the design of a PTA, that is, which types of provisions are (not) included in the agreement, is essential in that respect. We argue that trade and trade-related provisions, such as those that regulate services trade or the protection of intellectual property rights, mainly increase support for PTAs among export-oriented business groups. In contrast, the inclusion of non-trade provisions, namely clauses aimed at the protection of environmental and labour standards, makes citizen groups, labour unions, and import-competing business groups more supportive of trade agreements. Relying on original data from a survey of interest groups across the globe, including a conjoint experiment, we find support for the argument that different types of interest groups value the inclusion of trade and non-trade provisions in PTAs differently. Interestingly, however, we find little difference between export-oriented and import-competing business interests. Our study speaks to research on interest groups and trade policy.