Aktuelle Publikationen

Policy processes are affected by how policymakers assess public support for a policy. But is public support for a given policy itself affected by characteristics of the policy process, such as cooperation or confrontation amongst policy actors? Specifically, if different branches of government hold conflicting positions on a given policy, do clashes affect public support for the policy? To address this question, we exploit an unexpected clash amongst the executive and judiciary in New Delhi, between survey waves, over exemptions for women in the context of the odd–even rule, a policy intervention to reduce air pollution from transportation. We find that public support for the contested policy was not undermined by the executive–judiciary clash. However, the clash polarised public opinion by gender, based upon the policy exemptions. Our findings shed new light on the broader question of how conflicts amongst different parts of government influence mass public policy preferences.

The study examines the relationship between sudden- and gradual-onset climate events and migration, hypothesizing that this relationship is mediated by the adaptive capacity of affected individuals. We use survey data from regions of Cambodia, Nicaragua, Peru, Uganda, and Vietnam that were affected by both types of events with representative samples of non-migrant residents and referral samples of migrants. Although some patterns are country-specific, the general findings indicate that less educated and lower-income people are less likely to migrate after exposure to sudden-onset climate events compared to their counterparts with higher levels of education and economic resources. These results caution against sweeping predictions that future climate-related events will be accompanied by widespread migration.

How do prime ministers manage investors’ expectations during financial crises? We take a novel approach to this question by investigating ministerial appointments. When prime ministers appoint technocrats, defined as non-partisan experts, they forgo political benefits and can credibly signal their willingness to pay down their debt obligations. This reduces bond yields, but only at times when the market is sensitive to expected repayments—that is, during crises. To examine the theory, we develop an event study analysis that employs new data on the background of finance ministers in 21 Western and Eastern European democracies. We find that investors reward technocratic appointments by reducing a country’s borrowing costs. Consistent with the theory, technocratic appointments under crises predict lower bond yields. Our findings contribute to the literature on the interplay of financial markets and domestic politics.

What explains the emergence and persistence of institutions aimed at preventing any ruling group from using the state apparatus to advance particularistic interests? To answer this recurring question, a burgeoning literature examines the establishment of power-sharing institutions in societies divided by ethnic or religious cleavages. Going beyond existing scholarly work focused on these specific settings, we argue that political power-sharing institutions can also be the result of common disputes within the economic elite. We propose that these institutions are likely to emerge and persist when competition between elite factions with dissimilar economic interests is balanced. To address the possibility of endogeneity between elite configurations and public institutions, we leverage natural resource diversity as an instrument for elite configurations. We show that, where geological resources are more diverse, competition between similarly powerful economic groups is more likely to emerge, leading ultimately to the establishment of power-sharing mechanisms that allow elite groups to protect their diverging economic interests.

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.

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%.

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.

¿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.

Besides the increasing scope of transnational activities of civil society actors, international relations of national legislatures have long been expanding, yet without attracting substantial scholarly attention. We can observe that national Members of Parliament meet in various bi-and multilateral organisational forms within and beyond international organisations to fulfil parliamentary functions. We present a conceptual framework differentiating between two forms of international parliamentary relations: multilateral vs. bilateral organisation. We argue that multilateral participation is mostly driven by the supply of such organisations and can mainly be found in Europe and Africa. On the contrary, the capacity of chambers can explain the realisation of bilateral channels. We test our claims with data for the international relations of 144 national parliaments. Our explorative empirical study is the first to jointly analyse bi- and multilateral transnational parliamentary relations and shows that international parliamentary cooperation varies over legislatures and regions, generating genuine clusters of institutionalised communities. Our findings help to embed the existing research on international parliamentary institutions and diplomacy in a larger context of international relations. Furthermore, our global relational account of national parliaments speaks to research on diverse topics of domestic outcomes, such as democratisation, norm and legal diffusion, and governmental control.

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.

The European Union, the United Nations, and the United States frequently use economic sanctions. This article introduces the EUSANCT Dataset—which amends, merges, and updates some of the most widely used sanctions databases—to trace the evolution of sanctions after the Cold War. The dataset contains case-level and dyadic information on 326 threatened and imposed sanctions by the EU, the UN, and the US. We show that the usage and overall success of sanctions have not grown from 1989 to 2015 and that while the US is the most active sanctioner, the EU and the UN appear more successful.

Researchers on inequalities in representation debate about whether governments represent the preferences of the rich better than those of less affluent citizens. We argue that problems of high‐ and low‐status citizens are treated differently already at the agenda‐setting stage. If affluent and less affluent citizens have different priorities about which issues should be tackled by government, then these divergent group priorities explain why government favors high‐ over low‐status citizens. Due to different levels of visibility, resources and social ties, governments pay more attention to what high‐status citizens consider important in their legislative agenda and pay less attention to the issues of low‐status citizens. We combined three types of data for our research design. First, we extracted the policy priorities (most important issues) for all status groups from Eurobarometer data between 2002 and 2016 for 10 European countries and match this information with data on policy outcomes from the Comparative Agendas Project. We then strengthen our results using a focused comparison of three single country studies over longer time series. We show that a priority gap exists and has representational consequences. Our analysis has important implications for the understanding of the unequal representation of status groups as it sheds light on an important, yet so far unexplored, aspect of the political process. Since the misrepresentation of political agendas occurs at the very beginning of the policy‐making process, the consequences are potentially even more severe than for the unequal treatment of preferences.