Aktuelle Publikationen

Analysing disaster recovery, understood as a complex process that spans multiple disaster risk reduction (DRR) activities [1], is an ambitious undertaking, that requires a broad set of instruments to capture all relevant dimensions [2]. This paper proposes that a critical juncture approach, as used in institutional analysis [3, 4], can be a useful addition to existing approaches to analyse the process of disaster recovery. In contrast to concepts like focusing events [5], the concept of critical junctures allows to gauge the impact of institutional legacies through longer timespans [4] and is, thereby, especially useful in the effort to better understand long-term trajectories of recovery policies. To assess this claim, a cursory literature review was conducted to examine the approaches used thus far by social scientists to research disaster recovery and the new critical juncture approach. Subsequently, a short illustrative case study was used to demonstrate some first applications of the critical juncture approach. This process-tracing analysis confirms that examining critical junctures helps to identify long-term trends in disaster recovery policies and how they relate to the institutional dimension of the process.

This study contributes to the emerging literature on age diversity effects at the organizational level of analysis by comparing the role of chronological‐age diversity versus subjective‐age diversity. We hypothesize a multilevel model in which organizational‐level subjective‐age diversity is negatively related to bonding social capital within organizations, which, in turn, contributes to heightened employee engagement and lowered turnover intentions. The assumed relationships are tested in a multilevel sample of 96 German small and medium‐sized companies with 16,274 employees participating. We gathered data from four different sources to circumvent common source problems and received support for most of the proposed relationships. Given the potentially detrimental effects of high subjective‐age diversity in the workplace, the paper concludes with practical recommendations on how to manage subjective‐age diversity in companies pro‐actively.

In this article, the authors analyze citizens’ reactions to Brexit on social media after the referendum results by performing a content analysis of 5877 posts collected from the social media platform Flickr, written in English, German, French, Spanish or Italian. Their research aims to answer the three following questions: What multimodal practices are adopted by citizens when they react to societal events like Brexit? To what extent do these practices illustrate types of citizenship that are specific to social networks? Can we observe different reactions to Brexit according to the languages used by the citizens? The authors focus on the types of visual content the citizens used to react to Brexit, as well as on what types of social relations this content can particularly create between their authors and the other members of the Flick community. Their article also highlights to what extent these posts shared on Flickr show content that is in favour of, or against, Brexit.

This article theorises how behavioural public administration can help improve our understanding of frontline policy implementation. The human factors that characterise policy implementation remain undertheorised: individual variation in policy implementation is dismissed as mere “noise” that hinders predictability in policy implementation. This article aims to fill this gap. We provide a model for street level decision-making which outlines the role of heuristics and biases in frontline workers’ allocation of resources and sanctions. Based on an analysis of the behavioural and street-level bureaucracy literature, we present 11 testable propositions that point to predictable patterns in the ways that bounded rationality influences policy implementation and outcomes. Heuristics can help hard-pressed frontline public service workers to make decisions but may also produce social inequity or inefficient or ineffective service. Therefore, we need to improve understanding of biases that are common among frontline workers in order to inform the development of appropriate mitigation strategies, such as de-biasing or even ‘re-biasing’ (nudging).

Existing research on the revolving door examines why employers hire former politicians. I complement this demand-side approach by demonstrating the importance of the supply-side. In particular, I argue that one important institutional factor that shapes politicians' willingness to leave office for a private sector job is campaign finance legislation. Less restrictive rules increase campaign spending for incumbents, which makes revolving door employment less attractive. Empirically, I use novel data from the US states and a difference-in-differences design to show that the exogenous removal of campaign finance legislation through Citizens United reduced the probability that incumbents left office to work as lobbyists. The supply-side approach provides insights into comparative differences in the prevalence of the revolving door.

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dc.contributor.author: Jochem, Sven

The article proposes one of the first quantitative operationalizations of the Multiple Streams Framework’s (MSF) concept of policy community integration, which determines the gestation process of policy ideas in the policy stream. It argues that operationalization by the Gini coefficient of nodal degree and by Freeman’s segregation score enables us to indicate better the type of a policy community (less integrated, or more integrated), and thus, to assume the trajectory of the gestation process. The findings suggest that Policy Network Analysis offers a more progressive operationalization of the integration concept and helps to compare policy communities

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dc.contributor.author: Rathgeb, Philip; Gruber-Risak, Martin

Objective:
The suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, two major American icons, in a span of days in June 2018 represent a unique and tragic natural experiment to characterize associations with actual suicides in the aftermath of celebrity suicides. The aim of this study was to identify changes in suicide counts after their deaths.

Methods:
Suicide data were obtained from the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public-use mortality file. A time-series analysis was performed, examining monthly suicide data by age group (⩽19, 20–44, 45–64 and ⩾65 years), for both men and women, for all suicide methods and for hanging versus non-hanging methods, from January 1999 to December 2018. Seasonal autoregressive integrated moving-average models were fitted to the pre-June 2018 period, estimating suicides in subsequent months and identifying deviations from expected values. The volume of Twitter posts about Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain was used as a proxy of societal attention.

Results:
Tweets about the celebrities were mainly concentrated in June 2018 and faded quickly in July. Total suicides exceeded the 95% confidence interval for June and approximated the upper limit of the 95% confidence interval in July. Over this 2-month span, there were 418 (95% confidence interval = [184, 652]) more suicides than expected, including 275 (95% confidence interval = [79, 471]) excess suicides in men and 182 (95% confidence interval = [93, 271]) in women. These equate to 4.8%, 4.1% and 9.1% increases above expected counts. There were 392 (95% confidence interval = [271, 514]) excess suicides by hanging, a 14.5% increase, with no significant increase in all other methods combined.

Conclusion and Relevance:
These findings demonstrate that mortality following celebrity suicides can occur at a similar magnitude to that observed for other public health emergencies. They underscore the urgency for interventions to mitigate imitation effects after celebrity suicide reporting.