Aktuelle Publikationen

What happened to citizens’ support for democracy after the Arab Uprisings? Did the support increase, stay the same, or actually decrease after all the protests, regime changes, and reforms? Which theories of citizens’ political attitudes best explain these dynamics? Analysing two waves of the Arab Barometer surveys and employing an item-response method that offers methodological improvements compared to previous studies, this article finds that support for democracy actually decreased in countries that successfully overthrew their dictators during the Uprisings. Following the arguments that emphasize the rational evaluations of citizens, it argues that in countries that had an experience with a freer political system, such as Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen, challenges of democratization and the poor political and economic performances of the governments left citizens disappointed. Despite the hopes that people had at the onset of the Uprisings, the disappointments generated by the unmet expectations eventually led to a decline in support for democracy.

It is well established that people often express emotions that are similar to those of other group members. However, people do not always express emotions that are similar to other group members, and the factors that determine when similarity occurs are not yet clear. In the current project, we examined whether certain situations activate specific emotional motives that influence the tendency to show emotional similarity. To test this possibility, we considered emotional responses to political situations that either called for weak (Studies 1 and 3) or strong (Study 2 and 4) negative emotions. Findings revealed that the motivation to feel weak emotions led people to be more influenced by weaker emotions than their own, whereas the motivation to feel strong emotions led people to be more influenced by stronger emotions than their own. Intriguingly, these motivations led people to change their emotions even after discovering that others’ emotions were similar to their initial emotional response. These findings are observed both in a lab task (Studies 1–3) and in real-life online interactions on Twitter (Study 4). Our findings enhance our ability to understand and predict emotional influence processes in different contexts and may therefore help explain how these processes unfold in group behavior.

Gender is one of the most frequently studied variables in the literature on judicial decision-making. We add to this literature by hypothesizing that the impact of applicant gender is conditional on the gender balance in a judge’s caseload. We expect that female applicants receive more favorable decisions from judges whose caseload skews strongly male. Analyzing over 40,000 rulings by the Austrian Asylum Court between 2008 and 2013, we find support for direct gender effects for applicants and judges (yet no significant interaction between the two). We also show that gender balance in the caseload is a strong moderator of applicant gender. Judges with predominantly male caseloads are strongly biased toward female applicants, whereas judges facing a gender-balanced set of applicants display hardly any gender bias at all. These findings tackle essential questions of democratic rule of law and human rights. They indicate that applicants’ fundamental rights to a fair and equal trial may have been compromised. We discuss institutional remedies to reduce the potential for gender bias in Austrian asylum adjudication.

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dc.contributor.author: Leicht-Deobald, Ulrich

Cuatro décadas han pasado desde que el equilibrio de poder argentino-brasileño en el Cono Sur dio paso a una primacía indisputada de Brasil. La naturaleza pacífica y cooperativa de esta transición de poder regional plantea un interesante puzle para las teorías estructuralistas en boga que vaticinan crecientes tenciones entre Estados Unidos y China ¿Por qué ciertos países aceptan su declinación de forma más indulgente, como lo hizo Argentina en aquella coyuntura? En este artículo ofrezco un modelo formal y utilizo la técnica de rastreo de procesos para demostrar que el giro cooperativo clave en esta relación se produjo entre finales de los años setenta y principios de los noventa. Mis conclusiones sugieren, en contra de la narrativa prevalente, que la cooperación entre Argentina y Brasil no fue producto de la democratización. En cambio, el caso Sudamericano sugiere que las transiciones de poder pacíficas tienen lugar cuando los costos de confrontar son altos y las coaliciones de política exterior son redefinidas en el estado declinante.

The article investigates the role of social grievances, emotions and group solidarity in the spontaneous mobilization of unemployed university graduates in post-revolutionary Tunisia. Using a mixed method approach, I rely on interviews with political and civil actors conducted during fieldwork in 2018, protest event data from the Armed Conflict and Event Data Project, Facebook posts, and secondary literature including additional media reports. My findings indicate that in January 2016, unemployed citizens organized autonomously in response to perceived social grievances and increasing levels of corruption among established trade unions and unemployed organizations. In the case of Tunisia, shared feelings of relative deprivation, compared to the coastal regions, strengthened in-group solidarity among the unemployed in the interior and south and resulted in their collective mobilization.

Reconstructing ties between archaeological contexts may contribute to explain and describe a variety of past social phenomena. Several models have been formulated to infer the structure of such archaeological networks. The applicability of these models in diverse archaeological contexts is limited by the restricted set of assumptions that fully determine the mathematical formulation of the models and are often articulated on a dyadic basis. Here, we present a general framework in which we combine exponential random graph models with archaeological substantiations of mechanisms that may be responsible for network formation. This framework may be applied to infer the structure of ancient networks in a large variety of archaeological settings. We use data collected over a set of sites in the Caribbean during the period AD 100–400 to illustrate the steps to obtain a network reconstruction.

The displacement of people is an important consequence of climate change, as people may choose or be forced to migrate in response to adverse climate conditions or sudden-onset extreme climate events. Existing studies show that there is a consistently higher social acceptance of migrants fleeing political persecution or war than of economic migrants. Here we examine whether individuals in Vietnam and Kenya also extend the notion of deservingness to environmental migrants in the context of internal rural-to-urban migration, using original data from a choice-based conjoint survey experiment. We find that although residents in receiving areas view short-term climate events and long-term climate conditions as legitimate reasons to migrate, they do not see environmental migrants as more deserving than economic migrants. These findings have implications for how practitioners address population movements due to climatic changes, and how scholars study people’s attitudes towards environmental migrants.

It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g., left vs right) and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces alignment and polarization as emergent properties of opinion dynamics in a multi-dimensional space of continuous opinions. The mechanisms for the change of agents’ opinions in this multi-dimensional space are derived from cognitive dissonance theory and structural balance theory. We test assumptions from proximity voting and from directional voting regarding their ability to reproduce the expected emerging properties. We further study how the emotional involvement of agents, i.e., their individual resistance to change opinions, impacts the dynamics. We identify two regimes for the global and the individual alignment of opinions. If the affective involvement is high and shows a large variance across agents, this fosters the emergence of a dominant ideological dimension. Agents align their opinions along this dimension in opposite directions, i.e., create a state of polarization.