Aktuelle Publikationen

Does a government in a bicameral system strategically alter the length of the legislative process in the first chamber in anticipation of future majorities in the second chamber? Drawing on an existing formal model of dynamic policymaking, we argue that governing majorities strategically accelerate or delay their agenda when a potential majority change in the second chamber is imminent. If the government fears losing control over the second chamber, then the government accelerates their agenda. By contrast, if the government hopes to gain control over the second chamber, the government decelerates their agenda. We test our argument in Germany's symmetric and asymmetric bicameralism by analyzing 1,966 governmental bills from 1998 to 2013. The analyses confirm our expectations for symmetric bicameralism, thus suggesting that the synchronicity of election cycles should be taken into account both in the analysis of bicameral systems and in institutional design of such systems.

Battery electric vehicles generate a significant share of their greenhouse gas emissions during production and later, when in use, through the energy used for charging. A shift in charging behavior could substantially reduce emissions if aligned with the fluctuating availability of renewable energy. Financial incentives and environmental appeals have been discussed as potential means to achieve this. We report evidence from a randomized controlled trial in which cost-free and “green” charging was advertised via email notifications to customers of a charging service provider. Emails invited to charge during midday hours (11:00 to 15:00) of days with high predicted shares of renewable energy. Results show a significant increase in the number of charging processes in the critical time, and in the amount of energy charged (kWh), despite only marginal monetary savings of 5€ on average. A further increase in kWh charged was observed on weekends. Under the assumption that these charging processes replaced regular overnight charging at home, this represents reduction in CO₂ emissions of over 50%.

The article theorises how covering social risks through cash transfers and in-kind services shapes public attitudes towards including/excluding immigrants from these programmes in Western European destination countries. The argument is that public attitudes are more restrictive of granting immigrants access to benefits than to services. This hypothesis is tested across ten social protection programmes using original survey data collected in Denmark, Germany and the UK in 2019. Across the three countries, representing respectively a social democratic, conservative and liberal welfare regime context, the article finds that the public does indeed have a preference for easier access for in-kind services than for cash benefits. The article also finds these results to be stable across programmes covering the same social risks; the examples are child benefits and childcare. The results are even stable across left-wing, mainstream and radical right-wing voters; with the partial exception of radical right-wing voters in the UK. Finally, the article finds only a moderate association between individual characteristics and attitudinal variation across cash benefits and in-kind services.

¿Cómo se explica la Guerra de Malvinas? En este artículo revisitamos este episodio a través de un análisis contrafáctico utilizando nueva evidencia documental. Estas fuentes ponen en duda la tesis de la guerra de distracción y la tesis del error de cálculo. La evidencia sugiere que dinámicas de poder de largo plazo y sesgos psicológicos afectando a los miembros de la Junta militar argentina explican de mejor manera las decisiones que llevaron a la guerra.

Umwelt- und Klimapolitik ist in den letzten Jahren zu einem äußerst relevanten Themenfeld des Parteienwettbewerbs in Deutschland avanciert, an welchem sich gut beobachten lässt, welche bedeutende Rolle spezifische Themen und Probleme im Wettbewerb um Wählerstimmen spielen. In diesem Artikel demonstrieren wir erstmalig, wie die Methode der Diskursnetzwerkanalyse zur Analyse solcher Themenwettbewerbe eingesetzt werden kann. Diskursnetzwerkanalysen verbinden die qualitative Inhaltsanalyse von Medienberichten mit Methoden der Sozialen Netzwerkanalyse und erlauben es so, über exakte Zeitfenster hinweg die Dynamik eines Themenwettbewerbs und die Interaktion von Parteien detailliert zu verfolgen und zu vergleichen. Dieses Potenzial demonstrieren wir am Beispiel des Issue-Wettbewerbs in der bayrischen Umweltpolitik in den Jahren 2018 und 2019. Ein besonderer Fokus liegt dabei auf der staatstragenden CSU, die im Landtagswahlkampf 2018 noch versuchte, mit ausgeprägten migrationspolitischen Forderungen Wähler der AfD abzuwerben. Ein Jahr später zündete Ministerpräsident und Parteichef Markus Söder hingegen ein ganzes „Feuerwerk“ an umwelt- und klimapolitischen Vorschlägen. Wie kam es zu dieser Neuausrichtung des Diskurses? Anhand von Zeitungsartikeln aus der Süddeutschen Zeitung und im Vergleich dreier Diskursperioden zeigen wir, wie sich die Salienz der Umweltpolitik im Diskursverlauf veränderte. Eine entscheidende Rolle spielte dabei vor allem das überaus erfolgreiche Volksbegehren „Rettet die Bienen“, infolgedessen sich der umweltpolitische Diskurs deutlich intensivierte und diversifizierte. Unsere Analyse zeigt, dass sich die CSU bedingt durch diese Dynamik und die Bedrohung durch die elektoralen Erfolge der Grünen, daraufhin gezwungen sah mit diesen in einen Wettkampf um die Issue-Ownership grüner Themen einzutreten.

In this article, we provide a framework to analyze the foreign policy overstretch of middle powers, that is, their recent tendency to expand foreign policy goals and ambitions beyond their capabilities. We propose that overstretch results from the interaction of permissive international environments and the collusion of domestic actors to produce foreign policy myths. These myths, in turn, justify unsustainable swelling of foreign policy expenditures until they are shattered. After laying out our theory, we test it against the case of twenty-first-century Brazil. First, we document how interest groups logrolled to foster and capitalize on a “myth of multipolarity,” which, once entrenched in elite discourse and public opinion, resulted in a tangible overgrowth of foreign policy. Second, we show the extent of overstretch across four indicators—number of embassies, participation in peacekeeping operations, membership in international organizations, and aid projects overseas—using the synthetic control method to compare Brazil with a plausible counterfactual.

This article investigates the relationship between social resentment and Euroscepticism. It argues that that populist parties mobilize the resentment of the losers of modernization by addressing new cultural and political cleavages as well as the issue of European integration. Using survey data from the Belgian National Election Study 2014, the study covers two research objectives. First, we investigate the role of feelings of resentment in citizens’ support for the EU. We theoretically distinguish three constitutive components of resentment – status insecurity, relative deprivation and powerlessness – and empirically test to what extent these feelings drive negative attitudes towards the EU. Second, we uncover how Euroscepticism is embedded in a populist ‘politics of resentment’, paving the way for further inquiry into how the effect of resentment on Euroscepticism is mediated by different types of blame attribution. Our results reveal that feelings of social resentment translate into stronger Euroscepticism. However, the effect on Euroscepticism is primarily mediated by cultural (anti-immigrant) and political (anti-establishment) blame attributions. In this regard, the study presents a more detailed understanding of the roots and processes that drive mass Euroscepticism.

This review article and special issue introduction argues that studying the relationship between the populist radical right and the welfare state requires bridging literatures that have so far advanced with little mutual engagement: party politics and voting behaviour research on the one hand, and comparative political economy and welfare state research on the other. In this way, the article highlights the advantages of connecting different academic sub-fields in studying radical right politics. First, the literature of comparative political economy on the multi-dimensionality of welfare politics can contribute to a clearer understanding of both the welfare-related causes and consequences of radical right support. Second, the party politics literature on the radical right’s ideology provides theoretical tools to explain the welfare-related consequences of populist radical right parties. The article illustrates the advantages of bridging these literatures through the empirical contributions in this special issue and concludes with avenues of future research.

How does ballot structure affect party choice? We argue that open lists undermine the electoral support of cohesive parties, to the benefit of internally divided parties. We conduct a survey-embedded experiment in the aftermath of the European migrant crisis, presenting German voters with real parties but fictitious politicians. A crossover design varies ballot type and exposure to candidate positions on immigration. We find that the internally divided Christian Democrats gain votes at the expense of the cohesive Alternative for Germany when open lists are used and candidate positions are known. For individuals who are equally attracted to both parties, switching is most likely if their immigration preferences lie near the midpoint between the two parties. Overall, our analysis establishes conditions under which ballot structure can affect the electoral performance of parties in general, and that of the populist right in particular.

When separation is a problem in binary dependent variable models, many researchers use Firth's penalized maximum likelihood in order to obtain finite estimates (Firth, 1993; Zorn, 2005; Rainey, 2016). In this paper, I show that this approach can lead to inferences in the opposite direction of the separation when the number of observations are sufficiently large and both the dependent and independent variables are rare events. As large datasets with rare events are frequently used in political science, such as dyadic data measuring interstate relations, a lack of awareness of this problem may lead to inferential issues. Simulations and an empirical illustration show that the use of independent “weakly-informative” prior distributions centered at zero, for example, the Cauchy prior suggested by Gelman et al. (2008), can avoid this issue. More generally, the results caution researchers to be aware of how the choice of prior interacts with the structure of their data, when estimating models in the presence of separation.

In the past decades, Germany was hit – in equal measure to other countries in Europe and beyond – by multiple transboundary and societal crises. We take stock of the ability of the German state to cope with the ensuing complexity in managing these exceptional situations. Conceptually, we apply a systemic perspective that asks about the resilience of the German state in the subsystems of policymaking in crises, implementation of administrative crisis management, as well as societal responses to crises. The paper draws on findings from a range of empirical studies assembled in this special issue, that focus either on the so-called refugee crisis of 2015/16 or the Covid-19 pandemic since 2020. Strikingly, the overall impression emerging from this research is generally favorable of the ability of the German politico-administrative system to master challenging crises – its resilience. But there are also areas for improvement.

Search engines serve as information gatekeepers on a multitude of topics that are prone to gender, ethnicity, and race misrepresentations. In this paper, we specifically look at the image search representation of migrant population groups that are often subjected to discrimination and biased representation in mainstream media, increasingly so with the rise of right-wing populist actors in the Western countries. Using multiple ( n  = 200) virtual agents to simulate human browsing behavior in a controlled environment, we collect image search results related to various terms referring to migrants (e.g., expats, immigrants, and refugees, seven queries in English and German used in total) from the six most popular search engines. Then, with the aid of manual coding, we investigate which features are used to represent these groups and whether the representations are subjected to bias. Our findings indicate that search engines reproduce ethnic and gender biases common for mainstream media representations of different subgroups of migrant population. For instance, migrant representations tend to be highly racialized, and female migrants as well as migrants at work tend to be underrepresented in the results. Our findings highlight the need for further algorithmic impact auditing studies in the context of representation of potentially vulnerable groups in web search results.

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dc.contributor.author: Jochem, Sven

Though negativity in political debates influences citizens’ attitudes towards legislative institutions, research on how Members of Parliaments (MPs) use negative language remains scant. This study shows how the gender of speakers and the context of debates influence the level of negativity in parliamentary speeches. We argue that female MPs use less negative language than male colleagues due to gender differences in socialisation and stereotypical expectations. Applying sentiment analysis with word embeddings to 20 years of plenary speeches in the Austrian parliament, we find that speeches by women MPs are less negative on average compared to those of their male colleagues. A more balanced gender distribution within a party group decreases differences in tone by lowering the negativity of male speakers. A growing share of women in parliament can thus change the tone of debates, which might enhance the legitimacy of political institutions and the quality of democracy.

Sierra Leone is a successful case of postconflict democratization, but citizens' trust in parliament is low. Using qualitative and quantitative data, this article examines the relationship between MPs and their constituencies. Given the fierceness of the competition at the level of party primaries, aspiring MPs make promises they cannot keep. Confronted with unrealistic expectations, they reduce their presence in the constituency to a minimum. As a result, dissatisfaction increases, and disappointing MPs are voted out of office. The high turnover rate weakens the institutional memory and law-making capacities of parliament, thus creating even more disillusionment. In the long run, the continuation of this cycle may break the links between voters and political representatives.