Aktuelle Publikationen

This article explores individual views of the purpose of education. Most existing research focuses on attitudes and policy preferences; while these types of perceptions have so far been largely overlooked due to a lack of data. Our analysis of original survey data in eight Western European countries shows that personal socioeconomic factors and ideological predispositions shape these individual opinions. Individuals with higher levels of education and income are more likely to view education as aimed at expanding knowledge as goal by itself, and less likely to view it as a tool to promote intergenerational social mobility. Left-leaning individuals are also more likely to regard education as a goal by itself, and less likely to view it as conferring useful labour market skills for the younger generation. Finally, we investigate the relationship between these different views and individual preferences for social policies. Our results show that the perception of education as promoting intergenerational mobility is strongly associated with support for passive transfers, while the perception of education as conferring marketable skills increases support for workfare policies. Social investment policies, because they are widely supported in the population, are not linked to specific views on education.

This editorial introduces readers to the thematic issue on organized interests in the context of democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe.

Ceva and Ferretti provide rich, comprehensive, and thought-provoking answers to the question of what political corruption—understood as corruption that occurs in public institutions—is and when and why it is morally wrong. One aspect that greatly contributes to the book's originality and political relevance is its commitment to a “continuist” conception of (public) institutions (14), according to which institutions are nothing but the interrelated actions of their members—the officeholders entrusted, by virtue of their institutional role, with specific powers that they should always be able to use with a certain level of discretion. This conceptual starting point makes this book a compelling reminder that, even if designing and reforming formal institutions can be done effectively to shape the powers and incentives of institutional actors, we cannot focus only on formal institutional and procedural design to have functioning institutions. As Ceva and Ferretti argue, “no institution can be designed in such a way that makes it immune from political corruption, which may always sneak in per the officeholders’ work” (61)—namely, whenever public officeholders use their entrusted powers in a manner that is incompatible with the terms of their power mandate.

Background: Sexual violence is a public health issue among adolescents globally but remains understudied in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Objective: The present study focused on the association of cumulative exposure to different types of sexual violence with mental and physical health problems and prosocial behaviour.

Method: We conducted a survey with a regionally representative sample of both in-school and out-of-school adolescents, aged 13–17 years, living in south-western Nigeria. Self-reported exposure to sexual violence, behavioural problems, physical complaints, and prosocial behaviour were assessed.

Results: About three quarters of the participants reported the experience of sexual violence (74.6%). Multiple regression models revealed that the more types of sexual violence an individual reported, the more mental and physical health problems, and the fewer prosocial behaviours they reported when controlling for other forms of violence exposure. Latent class analysis revealed three severity classes of sexual violence. Symptoms of mental and physical health indicators were significantly higher as exposure increased by group whereas prosocial behaviours were non-significantly fewer in the opposite direction.

Conclusion: This study revealed a consistent and unique relation between sexual violence exposure and negative health outcomes among adolescents. Further research on sexual violence in Sub-Saharan Africa and its associations is needed.

While the multiple barriers women face to attain public office have been vastly documented, the operation of insider/outsider dynamics within political parties’ top decision-making bodies remains largely under-researched. This article provides new theoretical and empirical insights on how interpersonal resources create ingroups and outgroups in parties’ national executive committees—the body that manages the day-to-day functioning of the extra-parliamentary party organization. Our comparative analysis of Spanish political parties in the period 1975–2020 documents that interpersonal resources are unevenly distributed across gender. Most crucially, we show that these resources play out differently for women and men members, with embeddedness in party networks only helping the latter attain positional power and extend their tenure in party office. These heterogeneous effects suggest that top decision-making party bodies do not just reflect existing gender inequalities but reinforce them in significant ways, rendering women member outsiders on the inside.

We develop a new measure of party position based on a scaling of ideology tags supplied in infoboxes on political parties’ Wikipedia pages. Assuming a simple model of tag assignment, we estimate the locations of parties and ideologies in a common space. We find that the recovered scale can be interpreted in familiar terms of “left versus right.” Estimated party positions correlate well with ratings of parties’ positions from extant large-scale expert surveys, most strongly with ratings of general left–right ideology. Party position estimates also show high stability in a test–retest scenario. Our results demonstrate that a Wikipedia-based approach yields valid and reliable left–right scores comparable to scores obtained via conventional expert coding methods. It thus provides a measure with potentially unlimited party coverage. Our measurement strategy is also applicable beyond Wikipedia.

dc.title:

dc.contributor.author: Jochem, Sven

We examined how scientific information influences policy beliefs among organizations in climate change policy networks in Germany and Japan. Different combinations of information types, policy beliefs, and organizational roles were found to play instrumental roles. Ideational influence can occur when (1) the sender is a credible information source, (2) the receiver can understand the “message,” and (3) the receiver depends on the sender’s information. Organizational roles involved in this ideational influence are different in technical and political information exchange. The leverage of influence depends on the organizational ecology of different roles in each country.

Vastly increased transnational business activity in recent decades has been accompanied by controversy over how to cope with its social and environmental impacts. The most prominent policy response thus far consists of international guidelines. We investigate to what extent and why citizens in a high-income country are willing to restrain companies to improve environmental and social conditions in other countries. Exploiting a real-world referendum in Switzerland, we use choice and vignette experiments with a representative sample of voters ( N = 3,010) to study public demand for such regulation. Our results show that citizens prefer strict and unilateral rules (with a substantial variation of preferences by general social and environmental concern) while correctly assessing their consequences. Moreover, exposure to international norms increases demand for regulation. These findings highlight that democratic accountability can be a mechanism that motivates states to contribute to collective goods even if not in their economic interest and that awareness of relevant international norms among citizens can enhance this mechanism.

dc.title:

dc.contributor.author: Garcia, David; Galesic, Mirta; Olsson, Henrik

Background: Although the problem of obstetric violence (OV) is receiving increasing attention among academics and policy makers, the prevalence and associated factors of OV are still poorly understood. The fear of OV prevents women from giving birth in health facilities, which is crucial for the effectiveness of HIV prevention programs, such as the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) program.

Objective: The aim of this paper is to determine the prevalence of OV, the comparative burden and associated predictors between HIV positive and negative women in Ghana.

Methods: The present study is a facility-based cross-sectional study enrolling 2,142 women, of which 310 were HIV positive and 1,832 HIV negative with a birth history of 0-24 months. The women were enrolled consecutively using a two stage sampling technique from eight hospitals with antiretroviral clinics across two regions in Ghana. The primary outcome variable was the experience of OV and its various forms. Descriptive data is presented in tables and reported in frequencies. The inferential analysis has been performed by estimating the Adjusted Odds Ratios (AOR) using multivariate logistic regression.

Results: Prevalence of OV was slightly lower among HIV positive women (61.0%) compared to HIV negative women (65.1%), though this was not statistically significant (χ2=1.99; p=0.158). The most common sub-category of OV experienced by all women was non-confidential care (35.2%). HIV positive women experienced more abandoned care (32.6%) with non-consented care being the least prevalent form of OV. Experience of discrimination was higher among HIV positive women (13.5%) than HIV negative women (10.8%). The multivariate regression analysis of the predictors of OV suggests that HIV positive women are not more likely to experience OV. Instead, we find evidence that HIV positive women are less likely to be subjected to physical violence (AOR=0.512; CI: 0.369-0.710), non-consented care (AOR=0.457; CI: 0.244-0.859) and non-dignified care (AOR= 0.688; CI: 0.513-0.923).

Conclusions: The study shows high rates of OV among all women. However, we found no evidence that HIV positive women were at higher risk to experience OV than HIV negative women. Evidence based interventions are required to address OV due to its threat to facility-based childbirth and the PMTCT cascade of care.

Governments spend hundreds of millions on evaluations to assess the performance of public organizations. In this article, we scrutinize whether variation in the institutional design of evaluation systems leads to biases in evaluation findings. Biases may emerge because influence over evaluation processes could enable the bureaucracy to present its work in a more positive way. We study evaluation reports published by nine international organizations (IOs) of the United Nations system. We employ deep learning to measure the share of positive assessments at the sentence level per evaluation report as a proxy for the positivity of evaluation results. Analyzing 1082 evaluation reports, we find that reports commissioned by operative units, as compared to central evaluation units, systematically contain more positive assessments. Theoretically, this link between institutional design choices and evaluation outcomes may explain why policy-makers perceive similar tools for evidence-based policy making as functional in some organizations, and politicized in others.

Collaboration between public administration organizations and various stakeholders is often prescribed as a potential solution to the current complex problems of governance, such as climate change. According to the Advocacy Coalition Framework, shared beliefs are one of the most important drivers of collaboration. However, studies investigating the role of beliefs in collaboration show mixed results. Some argue that similarity of general normative and empirical policy beliefs elicits collaboration, while others focus on beliefs concerning policy instruments. Proposing a new divisive beliefs hypothesis, we suggest that agreeing on those beliefs over which there is substantial disagreement in the policy subsystem is what matters for collaboration. Testing our hypotheses using policy network analysis and data on climate policy subsystems in eleven countries (Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Sweden, and Taiwan), we find belief similarity to be a stronger predictor of collaboration when the focus is divisive beliefs rather than normative and empirical policy beliefs or beliefs concerning policy instruments. This knowledge can be useful for managing collaborative governance networks because it helps to identify potential competing coalitions and to broker compromises between them.

Public procurement is crucial for effective crisis responses, but is also prone to corruption. To ensure a swift provision of medical supplies in the COVID-19 pandemic, the public procurement regulations were dramatically relaxed. However, the implications for corruption require attention. This paper analyses how the regulatory responses to the crisis affected the risks and perceptions of corruption, by changing public-private interactions and the regulatory environment for public procurement. We compare the contrasting cases of Italy and Germany and triangulate legal analyses, secondary contract and survey data, and an online survey of public administrations (N = 445) and businesses (N = 175). Unexpectedly, in both countries, objective risks of corruption increased similarly. Sector-specific corruption perceptions stem from a low competitiveness of procedures, rule ambiguity, and a politicised bureaucracy. To avoid wasting resources and losing trust, regulatory responses to the crisis should include clear rules that safeguard competitive public procurement procedures and preserve bureaucratic independence.

In democracies, electoral mandates are meant to shape public policy. But how much leeway do elected representatives actually have to implement it? Influential scholars think that (horizontal and vertical) institutional hurdles, budget constraints and political pressure dilute mandate responsiveness, but empirical evidence for this important claim remains scarce. This article provides a theoretical model and an empirical account of the extent to which different types of constraints limit the capacity of governing parties to set their electoral priorities on the agenda. Using fixed-effects Poisson regression on German electoral and legislative priorities over a period of over three decades (1983–2016), we conclude that policies reflect electoral priorities to a greater extent than scholarship has acknowledged so far. We do confirm, however, the constraining effects of Europeanization, shrinking budget leeway, intra-coalition disagreement and low executive popularity. We elaborate on the implications for theories of public policy, democratic representation and comparative politics.

This article presents a progress report from the last two years of the Teaching Digital Thinking (TDT) project. This project aims to implement new concepts, didactic methods, and teaching formats for sustainable digital transformation in Austrian Universities’ curricula by introducing new digital competencies. By equipping students and teachers with 21st-century digital competencies, partner universities can contribute to solving global challenges and organizing pilot projects. In line with the overall project aims, this article presents the ongoing digital transformation activities, courses, and research in the project, which have been carried out by the five partner universities since 2020, and briefly discusses the results. This article presents a summary of the research and educational activities carried out within two parts: complementary research and pilot projects.