Aktuelle Publikationen

Contrary to the overall tendency to increase student participation in the financing of higher education, Estonia abolished student tuition fees in 2013. We study the effects of this reform on the students’ access to and progress in higher education, concentrating mostly on the changes in probabilities of rural and remote students being admitted (extensive margin) and graduating within a nominal time (intensive margin). We distinguish between four different outcomes: admission in general, admission to vocational education, admission to high-rank curricula, and graduation within nominal time. We confirm the tendency that a high socioeconomic status increases the probability of being admitted to high-rank curricula and reduces the probability of choosing an applied curriculum, and the 2013 reform did not change that. While the reform weakly improved rural students’ tendency to graduate on time, it diminished the probability that they were admitted to high-rank curricula. So, paradoxically and contrary to the intention of the reform, higher state involvement in higher education financing has not improved the equity in university admission in Estonia in terms of either socioeconomic background or regional disparities. We claim that part of the explanation of that paradox lies in the conditionality of this reform and the combination of a scarce needs-based and a competitive merit-based student support system in Estonia. We see our broader contribution in emphasising the important role of support systems in the future analysis of the potential to improve students’ access.

Purpose:

This study investigates perceptions of the use of online tracking, a passive data collection method relying on the automated recording of participant actions on desktop and mobile devices, for studying information behavior. It scrutinizes folk theories of tracking, the concerns tracking raises among the potential participants and design mechanisms that can be used to alleviate these concerns.

Design/methodology/approach:

This study uses focus groups composed of university students ( n  = 13) to conduct an in-depth investigation of tracking perceptions in the context of information behavior research. Each focus group addresses three thematic blocks: (1) views on online tracking as a research technique, (2) concerns that influence participants' willingness to be tracked and (3) design mechanisms via which tracking-related concerns can be alleviated. To facilitate the discussion, each focus group combines open questions with card-sorting tasks. The results are analyzed using a combination of deductive content analysis and constant comparison analysis, with the main coding categories corresponding to the thematic blocks listed above.

Findings:

The study finds that perceptions of tracking are influenced by recent data-related scandals (e.g. Cambridge Analytica), which have amplified negative attitudes toward tracking, which is viewed as a surveillance tool used by corporations and governments. This study also confirms the contextual nature of tracking-related concerns, which vary depending on the activities and content that are tracked. In terms of mechanisms used to address these concerns, this study highlights the importance of transparency-based mechanisms, particularly explanations dealing with the aims and methods of data collection, followed by privacy- and control-based mechanisms.

Originality/value:

The study conducts a detailed examination of tracking perceptions and discusses how this research method can be used to increase engagement and empower participants involved in information behavior research.

Higher education interest groups remain somewhat understudied from a comparative theory-driven perspective. This is surprising because political decisions regarding higher education must increasingly be legitimized to students, taxpayers, the academic community and society. This article aims to advance our understanding of higher education stakeholders in post-communist Europe. In our view, the region deserves more attention, not least because students and academics were very instrumental in bringing down communism and institutionalizing democracy. First, we draw on Klemenčič’s (EJHE 2(1): 2–19, 2012; SHE 39(3):396–411, 2014) distinction between corporatist and pluralist as well as formalized and informal systems of representation in higher education. Looking at survey data from four countries—Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia—we examine to what extent post-communist democracies have established corporatist institutions to facilitate the formal participation of various crucial stakeholder organizations, e.g. students’ unions, academic unions, rectors’ conferences, etc. Then we address whether higher education organizations enjoy privileged access to policy-makers compared to those from other policy areas, while engaging with the argument that higher education is a particular case of “stakeholder democracy” in a region otherwise characterized by weak civic participation and corporatism. To wrap up, we discuss different “mutations of higher education corporatism” in each country.

This study investigates civic and citizenship education in a unique post-Communist context–in the bilingual education system of Estonia. Estonia continues to have a bilingual school system where there are Estonian and Russian language schools in parallel. While Estonian language school students are ranked very high in international comparisons, there is a significant difference between the achievement of Estonian and Russian language school students. We claim that this minority achievement gap in the performance of civic and citizenship knowledge is in addition to family background characteristics explained by behavioral and attitudinal factors that are moderated by the school language. Behavioral and attitudinal independent variables that we consider relevant in our analysis are classroom climate, trust in various media channels, and students’ beliefs in the influence of religion. We rely on hierarchical modeling to capture the embedded data and aim to explain how the different layers (school- and student level) interact and impact civic knowledge. We show that an open classroom is beneficial to students and part of the gap can be explained by Russian school students’ lower involvement in such practices. The strength of the belief in the influence of religion, on the contrary, is hurting students, despite that the negative effect is smaller for minority students there is a higher aggregate negative effect of it and therefore it also contributes to the minority achievement gap. Media trust indicators explain the gap marginally while the high trust of social media hurts students’ civic knowledge scores–still more Russian school students trust social media more than Estonian school students.

The manuscript explores whether and how the strategic context of elections and candidate attributes affect campaign sentiment. Studying five decades of French presidential elections, it provides the first longitudinal test of campaign tone outside the USA. Thereby, the paper examines concerns of an increase in negativity due to changes in electoral competition. It takes leverage from the electoral system, to study whether the strategic environment of elections (first vs. second rounds of elections) or candidate characteristics (ideology and outsider status) determine the use of positive and negative tone. To this end, the paper applies sentiment analysis to personal manifestos (professions de foi) issued by all candidates running in presidential elections (1965–2017) and validates the French Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary for longitudinal studies of campaign tone. Results reject worries about an increase in negativity in French elections over time. Moreover, while context matters to some extent, candidate attributes are by far more important for explaining campaign sentiment in presidential races. The findings contribute to research on the role of sentiment in electoral competition and tackle broader issues related to the impact of positive and negative political communication for elections and democracies.

The article tests the energy–stability–area (ESA) model of interest group population density on a sample of different 2018 Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovenian energy, higher education and health care interest organisation populations. The unique context of recent simultaneous political, economic and in the cases of Czechia and Slovenia, national transitions present a hard test for population ecology theory. Besides the area (constituency size) and energy (resources, issue certainty) terms, the article brings the stability term back into the center of analysis. The stability term, that is, the effect of a profound change or shock to the polity is operationalised as Communist-era population densities. As all three policy domains are heavily state controlled and tightly regulated, the effect of neocorporatist interest intermediation is also tested. The article finds strong support for the energy and neocorporatism hypotheses and provides evidence for the effect of communist-era organisational population density on post-transition densities: The size of 2018 organisational populations is found to be dependent on pre-transition densities. The relationship is, however, not linear but curvilinear. Nevertheless, the analysis indicates that the effect of pre-transition population size is moderated by other environmental level factors.

In the natural sciences, the concept of “(natural) tipping points” has become a hot topic in climate change research. To better understand and evaluate the possibilities for and the barriers to the fundamental societal transformations necessary for climate change mitigation, we suggest a social tipping dynamics framework. We contrast this framework with previous accounts of stability and change and show that integrating these approaches under the umbrella of a social tipping dynamics framework provides us with a more encompassing and therefore more realistic account for theorizing and empirically analyzing the different (technological, behavioral, and political) paths and related interdependencies to fundamental societal change. Moreover, by emphasizing the agency aspect, we highlight that the type of fundamental change required in effective climate change mitigation is more strongly actor-driven than previous approaches have suggested. In a second step, we apply our framework to the phase-out of chlorofluorocarbons and thereby illustrate its merits. To conclude, we summarize the value of the concept of social tipping dynamics, including its limitations and potential for improving political analysis.

Built on the administrative system of the League of Nations, since the Second World War, the United Nations has grown into a sizeable, complex and multilevel system of several dozen international bureaucracies. Outside of a brief period in the 1980s, and despite growing scholarship on international public administrations over the past two decades, there have been few publications in the International Review of Administrative Sciences on the evolution of the United Nations system and its many public administrations. The special issue ‘International Bureaucracy and the United Nations System’ aims to encourage renewed scholarly focus on this global level of public administration. This introduction makes the case for why studying the United Nations’ bureaucracies matters from a public administration perspective, takes stock of key literature and discusses how the seven articles contribute to key substantive and methodological advancements in studying the administrations of the United Nations system.

This paper contributes to our understanding of interest intermediation structures in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and, specifically, whether, which, how and to what extent organized interests are incorporated into policy-making processes. Unlike previous studies primarily focusing on patterns of economic coordination (Jahn 2016), we focus on energy policy-making in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. We address the extent to which these energy interest intermediation systems are gravitating towards a more corporatist policy-making paradigm and whether corporatist arrangements have been dismantled in view of the new wave of national conservatism in CEE. We offer a complex operationalization of corporatism based on concrete indicators and present the results of a survey of energy interest groups operating in the region. It covers questions regarding interest intermediation between the organized interests and the government, regulatory authorities as well as the degree of policy coordination and political exchange with the state and between rivalling organizations, enabling us to derive a “corporatism score” for each national institutional setting and discuss them in the light of Jahn’s (2016) corporatism rankings for the region. We show that—despite striking differences—at least rudimentary corporatist interest intermediation structures have emerged with some variations of pluralism and statism in all four countries.

Studies have documented more negative attitudes and a higher level of social hostilities toward religious minorities in Muslim than in non-Muslim countries. I seek to explain what contributes to these poor interfaith relations. Diverging from the mainstream approaches that focus on cultural, institutional, or psychological explanations, I argue that the poorer interfaith relations in Muslim countries are driven by high levels of religious bonding or religiously homogeneous friendships among Muslims in these countries. Analyzing a global survey of more than 17,000 Muslims and a report documenting how religious groups in a country restrict or discriminate against each other, I show that religious bonding is related to more negative attitudes toward religious minorities, that a country's level of religious bonding is positively related to its level of social hostilities, and that religious bonding is indeed higher among Muslims in Muslim countries than among Catholics in Catholic-majority Latin American countries.

Economic inequality at the local level has been shown to be an important predictor of people’s political perceptions and preferences. However, research on these questions is hampered by the fact that local inequality is difficult to measure and systematic data collections are rare, in particular in countries of the Global South. We propose a new measure of local inequality derived from nighttime light (NTL) emissions data. Our measure corresponds to the local inequality in per capita nighttime light emissions, using VIIRS-derived nighttime light emissions data and spatial population data from WorldPop. We validate our estimates using local inequality estimates from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for a sample of African countries. Our results show that nightlight-based inequality estimates correspond well to those derived from survey data, and that the relationship is not due to structural factors such as differences between urban and rural regions. We also present predictive results, where we approximate the (survey-based) level of local inequality with our nighttime light indicator. This illustrates how our approach can be used for new cases where no other data are available.

Democratic election campaigns require informed citizens. Yet, while the Internet allows for broader information through greater media choices, algorithmic filters, such as search engines, threaten to unobtrusively shape individual information repertoires. The purpose of this article is to analyze what search results people encounter when they employ various information orientations, and how these results reflect people’s attributions of issue ownership. A multimethod approach was applied during the 2017 German Federal Election campaign. First, human search behavior depicting various information orientations was simulated using agent-based testing to derive real search results from Google Search, which were then manually coded to identify information sources and ascribe issue ownerships. Second, a survey asked participants about which issues they attribute to which party. We find that search results originated mainly from established news outlets and reflected existing power relations between political parties. However, issue-ownership attributions of the survey participants were reflected poorly in the search results. In total, the results indicate that the fear of algorithmic constraints in the context of online search might be overrated. Instead, our findings (1) suggest that political actors still fail to claim their core issues among political search results, (2) highlight that news media (and thus existing media biases) feature heavily among search results, and (3) call for more media literacy among search engine users.

Binary outcome models are frequently used in the social sciences and economics. However, such models are difficult to estimate with interdependent data structures, including spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal autocorrelation because jointly determined error terms in the reduced-form specification are generally analytically intractable. To deal with this problem, simulation-based approaches have been proposed. However, these approaches (i) are computationally intensive and impractical for sizable datasets commonly used in contemporary research, and (ii) rarely address temporal interdependence. As a way forward, we demonstrate how to reduce the computational burden significantly by (i) introducing analytically-tractable pseudo maximum likelihood estimators for latent binary choice models that exhibit interdependence across space and time and by (ii) proposing an implementation strategy that increases computational efficiency considerably. Monte Carlo experiments show that our estimators recover the parameter values as good as commonly used estimation alternatives and require only a fraction of the computational cost.

Empirical studies show that many governments gear the provision of goods and services towards their ethnic peers. This article investigates governments’ strategies to provide ethnic favors in Africa. Recent studies of ethnic favoritism find that presidents' ethnic peers and home regions enjoy advantages, yet cannot disentangle whether goods are provided to entire regions or co-ethnic individuals. This article argues that local ethnic demography determines whether governments provide non-excludable public goods or more narrowly targeted handouts. Where government co-ethnics are in the majority, public goods benefit all locals regardless of their ethnic identity. Outside of these strongholds, incumbents pursue discriminatory strategies and only their co-ethnics gain from favoritism. Using fine-grained geographic data on ethnic demographics, the study finds support for the argument's implications in the local incidence of infant mortality. These findings have important implications for theories of distributive politics and conflict in multi-ethnic societies.

Multivariate networks comprising several compositional and structural variables can be represented as multigraphs by various forms of aggregations based on vertex attributes. We propose a framework to perform exploratory and confirmatory multiplexity analysis of aggregated multigraphs in order to find relevant associations between vertex and edge attributes. The exploration is performed by comparing frequencies of the different edges within and between aggregated vertex categories, while the confirmatory analysis is performed using derived complexity or multiplexity statistics under different random multigraph models. These statistics are defined by the distribution of edge multiplicities and provide information on the covariation and dependencies of different edges given vertex attributes. The presented approach highlights the need to further analyse and model structural dependencies with respect to edge entrainment. We illustrate the approach by applying it on a well known multivariate network dataset which has previously been analysed in the context of multiplexity.

The consumption of news increasingly takes place in the context of social media, where users can personalize their repertoire of news through personal news curation practices such as following a journalistic outlet on Twitter or blocking news content from a Facebook friend. This article examines the prevalence and predictors of curation practices that have the potential to boost or limit social media news exposure. Results from a representative online survey distributed across thirty-six countries demonstrate that more than half of all news users on social media engage in such practices. Significant predictors of news-boosting curation are news interest and the willingness to engage in other news-related activities on social media. News-limiting practices on social media are linked to general news avoidance and, in the case of the US, political extremism, which might decrease the chances of incidental news exposure. News-boosting and news-limiting curation practices relate to a wider and more diverse repertoire of news sources online. Personal news curation practices can be conceptualized as forms of news engagement that have the potential to complement or counteract algorithmic news selection or partisan selective exposure, yet, these practices can also solidify existing divides in news use related to interest and avoidance.

Objective:
The present study sought to 1) characterize insertion forces resulting from a flexible straight electrode array (EA) inserted at slow and ultra-slow insertion velocities, and 2) evaluate if ultra-slow velocities decrease insertion forces independent of other variables.

Background:
Low insertion forces are desirable in cochlear implant (CI) surgery to reduce trauma and preserve hearing. Recently, ultra-slow insertion velocities (lower than manually feasible) have been shown to produce significantly lower insertion forces using other EAs.

Methods:
Five flexible straight EAs were used to record insertion forces into an inelastic artificial scala tympani model. Eleven trial recordings were performed for each EA at five predetermined automated, continuous insertion velocities ranging from 0.03 to 1.6 mm/s.

Results:
An ultra-slow insertion velocity of 0.03 mm/s resulted in a median insertion force of 0.010 N at 20 mm of insertion depth, and 0.026 N at 24.3 mm—the final insertion depth. These forces represent only 24 to 29% of those measured using 1.6 mm/s. After controlling for insertion depth of the EA into the artificial scala tympani model and trial insertion number, decreasing the insertion velocity from 0.4 to 0.03 mm/s resulted in a 50% decrease in the insertion forces.

Conclusion:
Using the tested EA ultra-slow velocities can decrease insertion forces, independent of variables like insertion depth. Our results suggest ultra-slow velocities can reduce insertion forces at least 60%, compared with humanly feasible continuous velocities (≥0.9 mm/s).

Living Labs—innovation units established to introduce new methods and approaches into public sector organizations—have received a lot of attention as methods for experimentation and open innovation practices in public sector organizations. However, little is known so far about how they co-create public value and which conditions influence these co-creation practices. Therefore, the research questions are: which organizational factors influence the process of public value co-creation and which outcomes and values are produced as a result? The research questions were answered by employing a qualitative research approach conducting semi-structured interviews with employees and participants of three living labs in Germany and Austria. The results show top-level support and lab leadership as the most important context factors. Living labs produce tangible and intangible outcomes. The tangible outcomes are the products developed within the lab, and the intangible outcomes are created by the interaction between the lab’s participants. The main contributions are twofold: first, context factors are identified that lead to the success of co-creation processes within living labs. Second, the study contributes to the literature on public value because it is shown that participation in living labs itself leads to added value in addition to the tangible and intangible outcomes.