Projects

Christian Breunig (Political Science), Friedrich Breyer (Economics), Guido Schwerdt (Economics), Wolfgang Gaissmaier (Psychology) and Maj-Britt Sterba

Some societies are willing to tolerate certain forms of inequality in markets and society more than others. How much and in what form inequality is accepted is a collective choice. Political elites are able to make authoritative decisions affecting inequality. To determine how political elites make policy decisions is thus crucial. In this project we study how political elites, in this project elected representatives, learn and process information about inequality. We employ survey and experimental research designs to study how political elites acquire and process information about inequality when making decisions on (re-)distributional issues. We focus on three decision-making features:  policy-relevant information and its ability to change preferences, the role of the demands of the electorate, and heuristics and social sampling mechanisms.

For more information click here.

Christian Breunig und Chris Koski (Reed College)

Public budgets are characterized by periods of incrementalism interspersed with massive change. Both phases are conceptualized as parts of a punctuated equilibrium. The project aims at assessing how much agenda-setting and veto powers of governors contribute to the punctuations in budgets. We examine this question using budgetary from the American states since the 1980s.

Christian Breunig

The German agenda-setting project is developing several data sets on issue attention and policy-making in Germany. The following data are coded (1978-2008): Most important problem surveys, media, lobby groups, parliamentary questions, executive speeches, bill proposals and adopted laws. All data are classified by policy topic according to the Comparative Policy Agendas system and will become available at German Policy Agendas.

Benjamin Guinaudeau

The recent government shutdown in the USA as well as the failure of the British executive to get parliamentary approval on Brexit reminds us of the importance and powers of parliaments. These conflicts stem from a fundamental attribute of democracies: the separation of powers. A well-functioning democracy requires the three branches of government to be independent from each other and to balance each other. In parliamentary democracies, the conventional wisdom of political scientists is actually that parliament is dominated by the executive branch. My dissertation investigates this struggle for power in order to not only assert whether but also to what extent and under which condition, parliaments are dominated by governments. Using data from the German, British, French and Danish parliaments, I employ text-as-data methods and attempt to bring new insights to this ancient debate.

The first two projects of my dissertation investigate the specific impact of legislative review on policies. Policies are usually drafted and implemented by governments. Between the introduction and implementation, they can be amended by parliament. Using the text modifications undergone by bills between their introduction and adoption, I intend to measure the extent to which legislative review affects policies.  In a second project, I ascertain, the institutional and political factors determining the extent to which parliaments shape policies using my measure.  The third project complements the analysis of texts and focuses on parliamentary debates. More specifically, it exploits the reforms of parliamentary standing orders to causally identify whether the amount and the quality of parliamentary debates affect parliament’s capacity to decide policies.

Javier Martínez-Cantó

The aggregative function of political representation seeks to translate the interest of different social groups to the political arena, most notably to the parliament. We can expect that the progressive transformation of the European political landscape over the last decades has had a profound impact on how, when and why parties and legislators perform their representative function. Traditional parties, in parliament and the central party office, need to adapt their behaviour to compete with new competitors whereas new parties need to learn how to operate within institutions.  

Political parties and legislators have to strategically decide which activities do they undertake and which topic do they bring to the public eye in a context of limited time and resources. In my research, I seek to understand what issues do legislators and parties address, when are they more likely to address them, and why. This will be a function of several factors like the available legislative instruments, incentive structures, political competition, personal motivations and conflicting interest between parties and legislators. Within this frame, I am developing several studies about the determinants of legislators developing constituency representation, the composition of MPs and parties political agenda and how the increasing political fractionalization changes them. 

Christian Breunig, Gerald Schneider, Daniel Thym and Christina Zuber

Foreign nationals face a considerable risk of both negative and positive discrimination when they are applying for visa, work permits, asylum or passports. The AdmIn project examines the unequal decisions of German administrators and judges with regard to naturalization and visa applications and how the perceived inequities influence the behavior of the potential applicants. The key objective is to offer systematic assessment of administrative decision-making discrimination towards foreign nationals with a limited set of outside options. To this end, AdmIn will develop and test a new unifying model of administrative leeway with the help of original administrative and interview data.

More information at the The Politics of Inequality Cluster website.

Benjamin G. Engst and Thomas Gschwend (University of Mannheim)

How do highest courts exercise substantive political power through opinion writing? To understand the influence of highest courts, current research focuses on the result of judicial decisions, i.e., whether a referral by a plaintiff is justified or not. This is insufficient because focusing on binary outcomes does not provide information about the substantive considerations that lead to decisions. This project takes a broader perspective and examines the political and societal influence of decisions by means of differences in judicial opinion writing.

We advance legal and political science scholarship by identifying features of opinion writing that are theoretically compelling to explain the extent to which decisions become part of political and societal discourses. For example, legal language originates from ordinary language but incorporates its own specialized vocabulary. Judges can write opinions using easily understandable or technical terms. Understandable opinions are accessible to a wider audience than technical ones. Thus, opinion writing influences the extent to which decisions enter discourses. However, judges rely on political and intermediary actors to implement decisions. We therefore assume that judges adapt their opinion writing to these actors.

Consequently, judicial opinions are also strategic instruments. On the one hand, judges develop opinions strategically to influence the societal domain. On the other hand, judges adapt their opinions to the political domain. Thus, it is necessary to examine judicial opinion writing to understand the substantive political and societal impact of highest courts. We combine features of opinion writing that influence the perception of judicial decisions in a theoretical model. Afterwards, we quantify those features utilizing Natural Language Processing and aggregate them in a Judicial Argumentation Strategy Score. Variance in the scores should lead to variance in the public perception of opinions.