Aktuelle Publikationen

We sometimes dismiss Agile methods too easily, demeaning them as nothing but colorful post-its and hype. How can we help public managers understand how Agile concepts can—and should—be part of their standard toolbox of teams and managers working at all levels of government? Two points are critical: First, Agile fits well with the core values of modern government. Second, practical applications can help project teams become Agile.

Im Rahmen der Regionalpolitik kann der Bund Steuererleichterungen für industrielle Unternehmen gewähren, die Arbeitsplätze in strukturschwachen Gebieten schaffen oder neu ausrichten. Die Wirksamkeit des Instruments war bisher umstritten. In einer neuen Studie im Auftrag des Staatssekretariats für Wirtschaft (Seco) wurde ein spezielles statistisches Verfahren angewendet, um die Wirksamkeit der Steuererleichterungen zu untersuchen. Die Analyse mit dem sogenannten Regressions-Diskontinuitäts- Design (RDD) zeigt, dass die Einführung des Instruments zwar bescheidene, aber doch signifikant positive Effekte auf die regionale Arbeitsmarktentwicklung in den untersuchten Gebieten hat. Generell gingen die Arbeitsplätze im Industriesektor in den wirtschaftlich benachteiligten Gebieten zwischen 2008 und 2016 zwar zurück. Der allgemeine Rückgang konnte innerhalb der anspruchsberechtigten Regionen aber leicht abgeschwächt werden.

Recent years have witnessed a host of innovations for conducting research with qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Concurrently, important issues surrounding its uses have been highlighted. In this article, we seek to help users design QCA studies. We argue that establishing inference with QCA involves three intertwined design components: first, clarifying the question of external validity; second, ensuring internal validity; and third, explicitly adopting a specific mode of reasoning. We identify several emerging approaches to QCA rather than just one. Some approaches emphasize case knowledge, while others are condition oriented. Approaches emphasize either substantively interpretable or redundancy-free explanations, and some designs apply an inductive/explorative mode of reasoning, while others integrate deductive elements. Based on extant literature, we discuss issues surrounding inference with QCA and the tools available under different approaches to address these issues. We specify trade-offs and the importance of doing justice to the nature and goals of QCA in a specific research context.

Deutschland gehört zu den zehn Staaten, die sich in den letzten 25 Jahren am häufigsten im UN-Sicherheitsrat mit Redebeiträgen zu Wort meldeten - und zwar nicht nur dann, wenn die Bundesrepublik Mitglied war. Anhand neuer Methoden der Textanalyse lässt sich zeigen, welche thematischen Schwerpunkte Deutschland setzt und mit welchen Koalitionen.

In the course of the so called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015/16, the German administrative system for the implementation of migration and integration policy met its limits, but also showed a remarkable resilience in adapting to the crisis challenges. Starting from there, the authors of the book “Bessere Verwaltung in der Integrations- und Migrationspolitik“ analyse what worked well and which aspects of the system still require innovation. The analysis is explicitly interdisciplinary, combining both a legal and a political analytical perspective. The well-structured book helps to understand the German administrative system of migration and integration policy which is highly complex due to the interrelatedness of different federal levels and policy areas. Recommendations for changes and reforms are discussed thoroughly and it becomes clear what kind of reforms are not only reasonable, but also feasible.

The 2015 Better Regulation Reform is recognized as one of the key changes of Juncker’s European Commission, but its political implications remain understudied. Despite its appearance as a seemingly technical evaluation system, we present the reform as a political instrument that enhances the strategic actorness of the Commission, both internally and vis-à-vis the member states. Drawing on primary documents and 16 expert interviews with senior Commission officials, we demonstrate that the Better Regulation Reform enhances the Commission’s ability to act as a unified actor (internal coherence) and contributes to its ability to justify its actions vis-à-vis the member states (external robustness). The article contributes to the literature on international public administration in general and the EU in particular, as it demonstrates how institutional policies may enhance bureaucratic influence. We reveal how an international public administration can conform to member statesʼ demands for more accountability and transparency yet design the overall evaluation system in a way that contributes to its strategic actorness.

A number of studies recently have investigated party position-taking in multilevel polities. Given the attempts of federally organized parties to tailor their messages to their audiences, we investigate the voter side of the equation: Are voters sufficiently politically sophisticated to pick up on highly differentiated policy signals? Following common conceptions of political preferences, we argue that citizens have a heuristic view of party competition that is shaped by ideological and valence factors, where the latter are much less challenging to process than the former. Accordingly, citizens are able to differentiate only between the national and the regional party on the valence dimension. We argue that a valence delta between different party branches is most likely to be perceived in contexts of high media exposure, particularly when parties are in government. Results from an analysis of survey data covering 21 German state-level elections support those expectations.

A large share of civilian staff working in international peace operations are nationals of the host state. Academic research has not yet investigated the effect of these locally recruited bureaucrats on peacebuilding. Theoretically, it is argued that to accomplish their missions in complex environments, peace operations require crucial knowledge about local perceptions, politics, and customs. Local staff can have a positive performance impact by soliciting such knowledge. But information advantages create new principal-agent problems. Peace operations have a hard time scrutinizing their employees’ allegiances, and they risk sabotage from within. Empirically, it is shown that peace operations conducted by the United Nations (UN), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the European Union (EU) differ significantly in how they navigate the ensuing tension by enabling or restricting the influence of their local staff. A new data set on the staffing of 52 peace operations as well as analysis of internal staff policies yields significant variance in the potential of local staff to influence peacebuilding policy implementation, which is most extensive in the OSCE, followed by the UN and the EU. This finding warrants more attention on the role of local staff as information gatekeepers who could be at the center of potential frictions between international and local norms and knowledge.

Media bias, i.e., slanted news coverage, can strongly impact the public perception of the reported topics. In the social sciences, research over the past decades has developed comprehensive models to describe media bias and effective, yet often manual and thus cumbersome, methods for analysis. In contrast, in computer science fast, automated, and scalable methods are available, but few approaches systematically analyze media bias. The models used to analyze media bias in computer science tend to be simpler compared to models established in the social sciences, and do not necessarily address the most pressing substantial questions, despite technically superior approaches. Computer science research on media bias thus stands to profit from a closer integration of models for the study of media bias developed in the social sciences with automated methods from computer science. This article first establishes a shared conceptual understanding by mapping the state of the art from the social sciences to a framework, which can be targeted by approaches from computer science. Next, we investigate different forms of media bias and review how each form is analyzed in the social sciences. For each form, we then discuss methods from computer science suitable to (semi-)automate the corresponding analysis. Our review suggests that suitable, automated methods from computer science, primarily in the realm of natural language processing, are already available for each of the discussed forms of media bias, opening multiple directions for promising further research in computer science in this area.

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With Brexit imminent, the debate on the need for differentiated integration (DI) by means of opting-out has gained new momentum. At the same time, non-member states decide to adopt European Union (EU) rules as exemplified by the European Neighbourhood Policy. In light of these opposing observations, we examine the EU’s disposition to supply DI. We outline the strategic interactions of the EU member states or non-members in the context of two forms of DI: opting-out and inducing-in. In the case of opting-out, EU member states can refrain from adopting EU rules; inducing-in refers to providing non-member states with incentives to adopt EU rules. We show that the information asymmetries inherent to the strategic interactions result in a situation in which the EU is likely to supply opportunities to opt-out for member states to a much greater extent than necessary. Furthermore, the EU is likely to offer more compensation to non-member states in exchange for adopting EU rules than it would actually need to.

Several studies suggest that the extractive industry has negative consequences for gender equality despite the often positive growth impact of natural resources. We re-examine this claim at the sub-state level in sub-Saharan Africa and argue that we need to differentiate between ownership arrangements in the extractive industry. To test our argument on the gender dimension of the resource curse, this article employs unique data on the control rights of minerals within sub-Saharan countries as well as data from Afrobarometer and Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). Our quantitative analyses explore how international vs. domestic ownership of copper, diamond and gold mines affects the labor market integration of females and intimate partner violence. The regression results suggest in line with our theoretical expectations that gender-specific structural labor market shifts within extractive industries are contingent on mineral control rights. Our models show that within mining areas, only domestic ownership reduces male unemployment. While domestic mining seems to reinforce the traditional male breadwinner model, internationally owned mineral extraction induces structural labor market changes: women abandon subsistence farming activities and migrate to the service sector. Our results further indicate that this shift of traditional gender roles within rural mining areas is associated with less intimate partner violence.

While the Bayesian parameter estimation has gained a wider acknowledgement among political scientists, they seem to have less discussed the Bayesian version of hypothesis testing. This paper introduces two Bayesian approaches to hypothesis testing: one based on estimated posterior distributions and the other based on Bayes factors. By using an example based on a linear regression model, I demonstrate similarities and differences not only between the null‐hypothesis significance tests and Bayesian hypothesis tests, but also those among two different Bayesian approaches, which are also critically discussed.

Researchers have become increasingly interested in age-related constructs other than chronological age, which has been found to explain only small amounts of variance in many important work outcomes. In this editorial that accompanies our special issue of Work, Aging and Retirement on “the multitude of age constructs,” we seek to attain three related goals: First, we provide an overview of our editorial process. Second, we offer brief summaries of the five papers that are included in this special issue. Third, and perhaps representing our most substantive contribution here, we present answers to six “big picture” questions about subjective age to inform future scholarly work. We conclude that, although many important questions about alternative age constructs remain to be answered, the papers in this special issue represent excellent examples of novel work in this arena and suggest several opportunities for how future research could more rigorously and critically apply these constructs to the study of work, aging and retirement.

International organizations (IOs) and their bureaucracies frequently face calls for reform. To express discontent and exert reform pressure, member states can withhold their budgetary contributions to IOs. In extreme cases, these cuts result in organizational crises during which reform efforts become unavoidable, as happened in UNESCO after 2011. Traditional IR research sees member states as being in the driver’s seat when it comes to achieving – or failing to achieve – reform under such conditions, whereas scholars of international public administration underline bureaucratic action or pathology as driving, or preventing, reform. By tracing UNESCO’s reform dynamics from 2011 to 2013, this paper demonstrates how a budget crisis can trigger major reform efforts by IO bureaucracies and by IO member states, but how the lack of joint and synchronized action by both actors still results in failed or limited reform. This contributes to key debates on international public administration, IO reform, and the role of budgetary crisis. The article suggests a dynamic and actor-centred theory of IO reform that highlights the need for synchronized crisis cognition and for substantively and temporally coordinated efforts of both states and bureaucracies as key elements for reform success – and their absence as explanation for failed reform.

Economic self-interest has been central to explaining individual trade preferences. Depending on the theoretical trade model different variables influence individuals’ attitude towards globalization and existing research has come to different conclusions as to whether individuals’ preferences are dependent on skill level, income or the sector of employment. Other studies depart from economic self-interest by arguing that it is not self-interest that motivates individuals to form their preference, but country-level economic factors (sociotropic considerations) instead. We argue that one needs to approach trade preference formation from an information-based perspective and we test experimentally how people react if they are aware that they personally or nationally will gain or lose from trade and which of the two aspects are more important. By using survey experiments embedded in a representative national survey in the U.S. we are able to differentiate whether a person was triggered by ego- or sociotropic benefits/costs of free trade.