Aktuelle Publikationen

Economic inequality constitutes a defining challenge of our time and it remains puzzling why rising levels of inequality have not led to more redistribution. In this article a novel individual-level perspective is taken, with a focus on how much legislators and citizens agree on questions of redistribution and inequality, and what causes these mismatches. The study compares legislators’ views to a representative citizen sample in Switzerland. The results show considerable disagreement between the groups with legislators being more sceptical towards redistribution and seeing inequality as fairer outcome. The mismatch is only partially explained by legislators’ higher social status. Ideology plays a fundamental role as more polarisation according to ideological lines is found among elites and their attitudes are also more rooted in their ideology. In sum, the findings point to some underexplored angles of the puzzle of why not more redistribution has been observed and thus offer a valuable addition to the existing literature.

In this article, we analyze how European Union Politics has evolved over the last 25 years. Our analysis demonstrates that the goals the editorial team has pursued over this quarter century have only partly been reached. While the journal has helped to consolidate EU studies as a field of research in its own rights, several problems of representation persist in the journal and the social sciences in general. We identify besides the well-known gender gap that especially authors from the (European) South and East continue to be underrepresented in submitted and published articles. While less represented and successful at the submission stage, our results show that female scholars are more likely than male author teams to publish high-impact articles. Our findings indicate that studies of political behavior, broadly conceived, and articles using quantitative methods are well-represented. The article concludes with some remarks on how the journal might help to further professionalize the study of the EU in the coming years.

To what extent, and under what conditions, have workfare reforms shaped public opinion towards the unemployed? This article unpacks the punitive and enabling dimensions of the workfare turn and examines how changes to the rights and obligations of the unemployed have influenced related policy preferences. To do so, it presents a novel dataset on these reforms across a diverse set of welfare states and investigates potential feedback effects by combining our data with four waves of survey data from Europe and North America. Results suggest that while enabling measures generate more lenient attitudes towards the unemployed, punitive measures have no clear effect on public opinion – but they do accentuate the gap between the preferences of high- and low-income individuals. This leads us to conclude that the trend towards punitive and enabling measures since the 1980s has not broadly undermined solidarity with the unemployed, though it has increased income-based polarization.

Agile refers to a work management ideology with a set of productivity frameworks that support continuous and iterative progress on work tasks by reviewing one's hypotheses, working in a human‐centric way, and encouraging evidence‐based learning. In practice, public administrations have started to use agile principles and methods to plan projects, work in short sprints, iterate after receiving feedback from stakeholders, and apply a human‐centric approach to arrive at prototyped solutions. To understand the opportunities and challenges public servants perceive when they are asked to apply agile work practices, I conducted focus groups to study the social affordances of agile governance that need to be in place for public servants to adopt an agile mindset and its related practices. As a result of the exposure to agile work practices, public servants are either able to perceive its affordances and are willing to adopt agile, they falsely perceive them or they even remain hidden from them leading to a rejection of agile.

Stringent policies that significantly increase the cost of greenhouse gas emissions, such as CO₂, are increasingly necessary for mitigating climate change. Yet while richer individuals in society generate the most CO₂ emissions and thus will face the largest absolute cost burden, they also tend to be more supportive of stringent environmental policies. In this paper, we examine how information about the distribution of carbon emissions by income affects support for carbon taxation. While carbon taxation is widely advocated as the most efficient policy for mitigating climate change, it faces significant political hurdles due to its distributional costs. Using original survey data, with an embedded experiment, we find that providing information about the actual distribution of household CO₂ emissions by income significantly changes individuals' support for carbon taxation. These effects are particularly pronounced at the bottom of the household income distribution, leading to increased support for costly climate policies. However, individuals who believe that carbon taxes will reduce their income continue to hold their level of support for carbon taxation. Our findings have significant implications for understanding the public's response to the distributional consequences of the green transitions and ultimately their political feasibility.

Many workers are experiencing the downsides of being exposed to an overload of information and communication technology (ICT), highlighting the need for resources to cope with the resulting technostress. This article offers a novel cross-level perspective on technostress by examining how the context of the welfare state influences the relationship between income and technostress. Showing that individuals with higher income experience less technostress, this study argues that the welfare state represents an additional coping resource, in particular in the form of unemployment benefits. Since unemployment benefits insure income earners in the case of job loss, the negative effect of income on technostress should increase with higher levels of unemployment generosity. In line with these expectations, empirical results based on original survey data collected in collaboration with the OECD show that the impact of income on technostress varies across welfare state contexts. Implications for public health and policymakers are being discussed.

Recent polling failures highlight that election polls are prone to biases that the margin of error customarily reported with polls does not capture. However, such systematic errors are difficult to assess against the background noise of sampling variance. Shirani-Mehr et al. (2018) developed a hierarchical Bayesian model to disentangle random and systematic errors in poll estimates of two-party vote shares at the election level. The method can inform realistic assessments of poll accuracy. We adapt the model to multiparty elections and improve its temporal flexibility. We then estimate bias and variance in 5,240 German national election polls, 1994–2021. Our analysis suggests that the average absolute election-day bias per party was about 1.5 percentage points, ranging from 0.9 for the Greens to 3.2 for the Christian Democrats. The estimated variance is, on average, about twice as large as that implied by usual margins of error. We find little evidence of house or mode effects. Common biases indicate industry effects due to similar methodological problems. The Supplementary Material provides additional results for 1,751 regional election polls.

This article studies the conditions required by populist radical right actors to convincingly create a sense of crisis. The article draws on the literature on political blame games and policy feedback to argue that it is not only the salience of an event that determines its ‘populist exploitability’, but also its proximity to mass publics – or more simply, how directly and closely it affects citizens. In the study, Moffitt’s stepwise model of populist crisis performance is extended and expectations are formulated regarding how the proximity of an event influences the various steps of crisis performance. The article then tests this theoretical argument with a within-unit analysis of the crisis performance of a populist radical right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), during the refugee crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis suggests that the pandemic’s proximity to people’s daily lives narrowed and complicated the AfD’s crisis performance in important ways. The article sheds light on the determinants of the success of populist radical right parties and nuances our understanding of the broader relationship between populism and crisis.

Internet shutdowns have become a popular instrument for repressive regimes to silence dissent in a digitized world. While authorities seek to suppress opponents by imposing Internet outages, we know little about how the public reacts to such incisive measures. The regime might face anger and resentment from the public as a response to Internet deprivation. Why do regimes still use Internet shutdowns when they do not only face economic but also societal losses? In this paper, I argue that Internet shutdowns lower the public’s evaluation of the political leadership as citizens blame the government for the service outages. For the analysis, I combine fine-grained data on Internet outages with survey data from the Afrobarometer and apply an “unexpected event during survey design.” Results show that citizens do not hold the government accountable for Internet disruptions, thus making Internet shutdowns a powerful tool for autocrats to silent dissent digitally.

Contemporary research has shown that authoritarian regimes are not static. At the same time, gradual changes are often difficult to detect and the literature has not yet developed convincing tools to identify autocracy-to-autocracy transitions outside the visible ruptures of coups, power transfers, and opposition victories. Building on fieldwork in Tanzania, we show that patterns of rule shifted significantly under Magufuli. Once the model case of a party-based system in Africa, we argue that Tanzania should be reclassified as a party-personalist regime for the time of his presidency. The basis for his success lies in the increasing factional tensions within the CCM which gave him the power to act as the arbiter and to manipulate party institutions and nominations to his favour. Beyond providing a thick description of a single case, we address the theoretical and empirical challenges of correctly classifying authoritarian regimes.

In numerous countries, both international migration and regional support for far-right political parties are on the rise. This is important considering that a frequent aim of far-right political parties is to aggressively limit the inflow of immigrants. Understanding how regional far-right political support affects the immigrants working in these regions is therefore vital for executives and organizations as a whole. Integrating political science research at the macro-level with stereotype threat theory at the individual level, we argue that regional far-right political support makes negative immigrant stereotypes salient, increasing the number of work-related performance errors conducted by immigrants while reducing those by natives. Using objective field data from a professional sports context, we demonstrate how subordinates’ immigrant status interacts with the political context in which they reside to predict their frequency of performance errors.

The recent enactment of the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) has significantly strengthened the social dimension of the European Union (EU), including the social investment (SI) elements of that social dimension. What is not known, however, to what extent the priorization of SI is supported by the broader public. To address this research gap, we investigate public opinion on 15 different policy areas from the EPSR using Eurobarometer data from 2020 across all EU countries, asking whether the public rather prefers these policies to be delivered at EU or national level. A principal finding is that the public indeed supports more SI than CP policies with respect to EU-level social policy, and more CP than SI policies with respect to national-level social policy. We also investigate whether socioeconomic status (SES) and welfare state effort can explain this phenomenon. We find that higher socio-economic status and more generous welfare states are associated with more support for SI policies on both EU and national levels and vice versa. The findings emphasize the importance of what policies are provided versus who provides them but also pose a puzzle for trade-offs in multilevel governance settings. Hence, the article has important implications for future research on public opinion and Social Europe.

Socioeconomic resources are important predictors of electoral participation, yet to understand their impact, we argue it is essential to examine the interaction of income dissatisfaction (egocentric dimension) with someone’s view of societal conditions (sociotropic dimension). Drawing on pooled national election surveys, we find that deprivation indeed depresses voting, but more importantly also that there is significant variation among those who experience economic difficulties: those who disconnect their personal misfortune from broader grievances are significantly more likely to abstain (Relative Power Hypothesis), while embedding one’s situation in a context of societal disparities leads to a desire for change and participation levels nearly as high as among the better off (Conflict Hypothesis). Our findings speak to inequality and turnout research but also have direct political implications, as it seems that responsiveness to campaigns focused on distributional injustices hinges on voters’ perception of themselves in relation to society.