Aktuelle Publikationen

Do ethnic riots affect prosocial behavior? A common view among scholars of ethnic violence is that riots increase cooperation within the warring groups, while cooperation across groups is reduced. We revisit this hypothesis by studying the aftermath of the 2010 Osh riot in Kyrgyzstan, which saw Kyrgyz from outside the city kill over 400 Uzbeks. We implement a representative survey, which includes unobtrusive experimental measures of prosocial behavior. Our causal identification strategy exploits variation in the distance of neighborhoods to armored military vehicles, which were instrumental in orchestrating the riot. We find that victimized neighborhoods show substantially lower levels of prosocial behavior. Importantly, we demonstrate that the reduction is similarly stark both within and across groups. Using qualitative interviews, we parse out two mechanisms that help explain the surprising reduction in ingroup prosociality: Victimized Uzbeks felt abandoned by their coethnics, and variation in victimization created a feeling of suspicion.

We examine whether there is a basic space in a parliament which grew out of a revolution and had no prior history of parliamentarism: the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848/49. We scale all 299 roll call votes to determine the dimensionality of voting as well as the positions of deputies and their party groups. We find two dimensions of disagreement and show that they can be interpreted in line with historical scholarship as conflict over who should govern (the people or the monarch) and conflict over state borders (inclusion or exclusion of Austria). We find that the party groups line up on the first dimension in ways consistent with historical scholarship on their political inclinations, but we also find wide variation in deputies’ positions within and across parties. Moreover, deputies’ positions turn out to be polarized on the territorial dimension but not on the government dimension. We conclude that ideological constraint was the primary structuring force in parliamentary voting. Our results underscore the pervasiveness of low dimensionality in parliamentary voting even in the absence of strong parties and agenda control.

Recent terrorist attacks have increased the need to examine the public's response to such threats. This study focuses on the content of Twitter messages related to the 2016 terrorist attack on the Berlin Christmas market. We complement the collective sense-making perspective with the terror management theory (TMT) perspective to understand why people used Twitter in the aftermath of the attack. We use structural topic modeling to analyze our dataset of 51,000 tweets. Our results indicate that people used Twitter to make sense of the events and as part of typical reactions in TMT, that is, to validate their own worldviews and maintain their self-esteem. In accordance with TMT, we found that people used Twitter to search for meaning and value, show sympathy for victims and their families, or call for tolerance, but also to express nationalistic sentiment and greater hostility toward values and views other than their own. We further show that topics varied over the course of the attack and in the days that followed. Whereas in the first two days there were many emotion-related tweets and operational updates, subsequent days saw more opinion-related tweets. Our findings contribute to the literature on collective behavior in the aftermath of terrorist attacks.

As political parties expand opportunities for intraparty participation, understanding the effects of participatory events on party actors becomes ever more important. In this study, we investigate the consequences of an intraparty referendum in a state branch of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union on beliefs and attitudes of party members. We use longitudinal survey data bracketing a nonbinding issue referendum on the party’s stance on same-sex marriage. Our analysis shows that the referendum had secondary effects that went beyond the referendum’s primary goal of delivering an informal opinion poll to the party leadership. The experience of having a say in an important policy decision fostered members’ sense of party-specific efficacy. Furthermore, the referendum provided party members with information on elite positions and stimulated leadership evaluation based on issue congruency. Altogether, involvement in intraparty decision-making promotes beliefs and behaviors among the rank and file that are relevant to uphold a vivid and empowering party life.

In the last decade, Europe has been affected by several crises, which had and still have detrimental consequences for the life of many people, suffering from unemployment, poverty and social exclusion. The special issue seeks to explore how these crises have challenged and promoted solidarities within and between European countries. In the introductory paper, first a typology of different types of solidarity – social, political and welfare – is developed to account for the varied meanings and uses of the term. Second, the origins and scopes of the different types of solidarity and their link to crises are discussed. After introducing the special issue papers, five contributions to the understanding of crises and solidarities are highlighted, namely: the meanings of solidarity are varied and discursively contested; different types of solidarity merge and interact; crises are a necessary, but not sufficient condition for solidarity to emerge; crises alter the scope of solidarity; economic shocks can have long-term effects on solidarity. Thus, crises have led to a reconfiguration of solidarities in Europe.

The lack of effective vertical policy coordination between the policy makers at the “top” and the implementers at the “bottom” is an important source of deficits in both policy design and policy implementation. Yet while the link between policy production and implementation seems vital to explain and prevent policy failure, so far the conceptual tools to assess and compare systematically the barriers to effective vertical coordination are lacking. This paper attempts to address this gap by adopting a “transaction cost perspective” and proposing a novel concept to assess and compare the difficulty of vertical policy coordination between different policy sectors and countries.

Significant parts of the EU’s legislative process remain shrouded in secrecy. In informal trilogues, representatives of the three main institutions negotiate compromises behind closed doors which are subsequently rubber-stamped in public meetings. While most research on (EU) transparency focuses on the availability of documents, this article investigates how much information on trilogue proceedings is shared with the general public through European Parliament (EP) committee meetings as the only forum to which public account must be rendered during the negotiation process. This article analyses the degree to which trilogues are reported back on, and the quality of feedback provided. Although the EP requires its trilogue negotiators to report back to its committees after each trilogue, the majority of trilogues is not reported back on at all, or not in time. Where feedback is given, its quality is often only poor. The EP thus does not deliver on its promises, which seriously undermines the legitimacy of the EU’s legislative process.

The Treaty of Lisbon strengthened the role of national parliaments in the European Union. It introduced an ‘early warning system’, granting parliamentary chambers the right to reject legislative proposals by the European Commission. Previous studies assumed independence between the decisions of parliaments to reject a legislative proposal. We apply recent advances in inferential network analysis and argue that parliamentary vetoes are better explained by conceptualizing parliaments’ veto actions as a temporal network. Network effects can be observed along the dimension of party families. Based on a new permutation approach, we find that parliaments with similar party majorities influence each other over the course of the decision period (‘social influence’), rather than basing their decisions independently on joint prior partisanship (‘selection’).

This article revisits prominent frameworks for understanding traditional political institutions which make pessimistic assessments about their compatibility with democracy. Traditional political institutions are often assumed to be unaccountable because they are led by undemocratic leaders who are not subject to electoral sanctioning. However, drawing on new information from the TradGov Group dataset, an expert survey on the contemporary practices of more than 1,400 ethnic groups that currently have traditional political institutions, we show that these institutions contain their own distinct mechanisms of accountability. In a majority of cases, decision-making is consensual and leaders must account for their actions in various ways. We challenge the electoral accountability framework for understanding the quality of traditional leaders’ performance, instead arguing that traditional political institutions can be compatible with democracy and even accountable to their citizens insofar as they adopt inclusive decision-making processes and their leaders have strong nonelectoral connections to the communities they represent.

Norway was the first of ten countries to legislate gender quotas for boards of publicly traded firms. There is considerable debate and mixed evidence concerning the implications of female board representation. In this paper, we explain the main sources of biases in the existing literature on the effects of women directors on firm performance and review methods to account for these biases. We address the endogeneity problem by using a difference-in-differences approach to study the effects of women directors on firm performance with specific consideration of the common trend assumption, and we explicitly distinguish between accounting-based (i.e., operating income divided by assets, return on assets) and market-based (i.e., market-to-book ratio and Tobin's Q) performance measures in the Norwegian setting. The control group are firms from Finland, Sweden, and Denmark. We further extend the analysis of causal effects of women directors to firm risk. Our results imply a negative effect of mandated female representation on firm performance and on firm risk.

National governments are setting up digital service teams (DST) – IT units outside the centralized CIO's office – to respond to complex governmental and societal challenges in a responsive and agile manner. DSTs emerge as a third space between centralized and decentralized IT departments that are triggered by large-scale IT failures and the need to abandon black swan IT projects - tasks that traditional CIO offices were not able to handle so far. DSTs design principles have been replicated from the initial idea of the UK's Government Digital Service team and implemented in other countries, such as the U.S., Canada, Italy, or Finland. For this article, a qualitative interpretative approach was chosen to understand external and internal context factors that contribute to the emergence of these digital service teams. The article brings initial clarity of the composition and tasks of DSTs and extends the existing theory of context by providing insights about this third space between centralized and decentralized IT departments to organize IT Governance in public sector organizations.

Why are some societies more unequal than others? The French revolutionaries believed unequal inheritances among siblings to be responsible for the strict hierarchies of the ancien régime. To achieve equality, the revolutionaries therefore enforced equal inheritance rights. Their goal was to empower women and to disenfranchise the noble class. But do equal inheritances succeed in leveling the societal playing field? We study Germany—a country with pronounced local‐level variation in inheritance customs—and find that municipalities that historically equally apportioned wealth, to this day, elect more women into political councils and have fewer aristocrats in the social elite. Using historic data, we point to two mechanisms: wealth equality and pro‐egalitarian preferences. In a final step, we also show that, counterintuitively, equitable inheritance customs positively predict income inequality. We interpret this finding to mean that equitable inheritances level the playing field by rewarding talent, not status.

Digital transformation approaches outside the public sector are changing citizens' expectations of governments' ability to deliver high-value, real-time digital services. In response to the changing expectations and triggered by supranational agreements, governments are changing their mode of operation to improve public service delivery, be more efficient and effective in their designs, and achieve objectives such as increased transparency, interoperability, or citizen satisfaction. However, beyond the availability of consultancy reports, there is little systematic insight into the way that public administrators themselves are currently defining digital transformation in their own day-to-day practices, how they are approaching digital transformation projects, and what their expected outcomes are. We provide an empirically-based definition of digital transformation derived from expert interviews and develop a conceptual framework with reasons for, processes to, and expected outcomes of digital transformation in the public sector.

In a classical typology, Polanyi distinguishes three basic modes of economic integration: competitive market exchange, redistribution and reciprocity. While markets are dominant in modern capitalism, redistribution and reciprocity are—to varying extent—also part of its institutional architecture. Asking whether such institutional differences are mirrored in distinct ‘moral economies’, we investigate ordinary citizens’ support for market competition, redistribution and reciprocity across 14 capitalist economies. Combining data from three comparative surveys, we analyze, first, the extent to which these principles are supported by citizens and whether they cluster into distinct ‘moral economies’; second, whether these norms are anchored in formal institutional settings; and finally, how privileged and disadvantaged groups differ in their support. While support for market competition is strong across countries, it is to varying degrees complemented by support for redistribution and reciprocity. We identify a competition-dominated, an embedded and a strongly embedded moral economy. The interplay of formal institutions and people’s social–structural position partly explains differences in popular support.

Many constitutions of the world contain special provisions for indigenous communities, granting them particular rights and regulating their traditional political institutions and customary law. Building on rational theories of constitution-making, we employ a demand and supply framework to explain the constitutionalization of such provisions. To test our hypotheses, we code the presence of indigenous provisions in the current constitutions of 193 United Nations member states. We find full democracy and previous conflict to stimulate the inclusion of indigenous group rights but not of customary law and traditional institutions. Customary law and traditional institutions are more likely constitutionalized in countries with high ethnic fractionalization. Low levels of modernity affect particularly the constitutionalization of traditional political institutions, while low levels of development correlate with provisions on customary law. Former British colonies are more likely to constitutionalize customary law.

Contemporary media systems are in transition. The constellation of organizations, groups, and individuals contributing information to national and international news flows has changed as a result of the digital transformation. The “hybrid media system” has proven to be one of the most instructive concepts addressing this change. Its focus on the mutually dependent interconnections between various types of media organizations, actors, and publics has inspired prolific research. Yet the concept can tempt researchers to sidestep systematic analyses of information flows and actors’ differing degrees of influence by treating media systems as a black box. To enable large-scale, empirical comparative studies aimed at identifying interdependencies and power relationships in contemporary media systems, we propose the concept of discursive power. This describes the ability of contributors to communication spaces to introduce, amplify, and maintain topics, frames, and speakers, thus shaping public discourses and controversies that unfold in interconnected communication spaces. We also provide a theoretical framework of how structural features of organizations and media systems contribute to the emergence of discursive power for different types of actors in various contexts. This adds to the theoretical toolkit available to researchers interested in the empirical analysis of contemporary media systems.

There has been a recent surge of political actors and groups challenging the legitimacy of established political institutions and mass media. We argue that this wave is no accident; rather, it is driven by digital media. Digital media allow outside challengers to route around social institutions that structure political discourse, such as parties and legacy media, which have previously held a monopoly on political coordination and information distribution. Digital media have weakened the power of these institutions, allowing outsiders to maintain extreme positions that formerly would have been filtered out or suppressed by institutions structuring political discourse. In this article, we explicate mechanisms linking digital media to the rise of outsiders by discussing the successes of a diverse set of challengers fighting for attention and representation in the different political contexts of the United States, Germany, and China. We thus provide a novel explanation that systematically accounts for the political consequences of digital media.

Public policy decisions are often attributed to narrative strategies that impact policy-oriented learning within and across advocacy coalitions. Public policy research recognizes the role of influential individuals and their narrative strategies in this context. Yet frameworks that have been developed through this research lack sufficient guidance to distinguish individual learners. By combining theories of dual learning and public policy processes, this paper presents new strategies to better operationalize the concept of an individual learner, measure micro-level learning and thus the impact of narrative strategies. In particular four lessons are deduced from this literature and applied to empirical research into the rise of the sustainable mobility narrative in British road policy: First, policy learners interpret the world through the lens of their beliefs, and learn by combining heuristics and analytical processing. Second, they learn in different ways according to their education and experiences. Third, learning occurs in a political environment that is shaped to different extents by entrepreneurial and brokerage strategies promoting specific narratives. Fourth, exogenous factors impact these strategies, as does policy-oriented learning.

The European Commission's 2017 White Paper on the Future of Europe maps out several scenarios related to differentiated (dis)integration. But although our understanding of the causes of differentiated (dis)integration has substantively improved over recent years, our knowledge about its consequences still remains limited. This shortcoming may entail difficulties when it comes to formulating policy recommendations. Accordingly, we propose a stronger attention to the effects‐of‐causes of differentiated (dis)integration, linked to a more careful implementation of insights on causal inference. After briefly reviewing the foci and methods of existing literature on differentiated (dis)integration, we introduce the potential outcome model of causal inference. We provide an exemplary application of the synthetic control method, as one method related to this framework. Our analysis highlights that the UK has economically benefitted from not joining the Eurozone, but our argument more generally is about the practical implications of methodological choices in the study of differentiated (dis)integration.

Research on urban climate governance has grown rapidly over the last years. A number of local and regional projects and events show that cities play an important role in climate change protection activities. Successful urban climate change governance requires the collaboration of actors from various societal sectors as no single sector is able to unilaterally and successfully implement policies or programs that would affect almost all other socio-economic activities. This paper therefore seeks to examine the collaboration of diverse urban climate change actors. We analyze the connections between these individuals and climate protection-related organizations, projects and events. We also look at how diverse the different types of organizations are. Our empirical data consists of the organizational memberships of individual actors in a medium-sized German city, the attributes of these actors and their participation in organizations, projects or events related to climate protection. The data was collected through an online network survey. Our findings reveal the diversity of organizations and suggest a typology of climate change activists as well as a typology of climate change projects and organizations. The results of the study can be used to better coordinate and support the cooperation of different urban climate change protection actors.