Aktuelle Publikationen

Il est essentiel de bien comprendre les questions de délégation administrative pour assurer la performance des organisations publiques. Le jeu du contrôle modélise la délégation comme un conflit d’intérêts entre un inspecteur et une personne contrôlée pour agir dans l’intérêt du premier. La présente étude teste des solutions alternatives pour surmonter le fait d’être « tire-au-flanc » présente dans le jeu du contrôle. Plus précisément, nous testons l’effet des incitants externes, tel qu’il apparaît sous l’effet de la solution de la théorie des jeux, par rapport au rôle des facteurs intrinsèques, à savoir la motivation de service public et l’aversion au risque lié à l’emploi. Les résultats d’une expérience en laboratoire ( N = 208) et d’une enquête ( N = 794) montrent que ni l’approche théorique des jeux, qui a inspiré le nouveau management public, ni la motivation de service public, qui en est l’antithèse, ne parviennent à expliquer le comportement des sujets. Au contraire, l’aversion au risque lié à l’emploi renforce le potentiel de contrôle et rend moins probable la possibilité d’être « tire-au-flanc ». Cette constatation laisse entrevoir une vision plus différenciée des attitudes des fonctionnaires en matière de risques en vue d’améliorer la délégation administrative. Remarques à l’intention des praticiens La promesse du nouveau management public selon laquelle les problèmes de contrôle de la délégation administrative disparaissent avec la mise en place d’incitants extrinsèques appropriés est trop simpliste. D’autre part, la motivation de service public, qui a commencé comme une antithèse du bureaucrate intéressé, ne résout pas non plus le problème de « tire-au-flanc » dans la délégation administrative. Au contraire, l’aversion au risque lié à l’emploi semble améliorer la délégation administrative, ce qui constitue un contrepoint remarquable à l’opinion populaire en matière de gestion publique selon laquelle l’aversion au risque est problématique pour les performances des organisations publiques. Plutôt que d’éviter de sélectionner des fonctionnaires averses au risque de manière générale, il conviendrait d’accorder plus d’attention aux domaines de la prise de décision administrative dans lesquels ces traits de caractère peuvent être bénéfiques.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is not just the oldest but also the most institutionalised and powerful international parliamentary assembly. As transnational parliamentary body with the Russian Federation and Ukraine among its members, it showcases a laboratory for transnational parliamentary voting behaviour in the context of international geopolitical conflicts. We theorise how geopolitical aggression between member states change the voting pattern in the assembly. Whereas we generally assume a partisan cleavage as the main sorting mechanism, we theorise that this dimension will diminish under geopolitical threat. To test our claims, we explore voting patterns in the PACE around the Russian annexation of Crimea 2014. Using all contested votes from 2012 to 2016, we find that voting positions are structured around national interests in times of geopolitical tensions whereas a left-right cleavage emerges once the aggressor (i.e. Russia) was absent from the PACE.

This study combines the type of partners and the number of partnerships’ purposes to assess municipal partnerships’ effectiveness in bringing international aid. First, the study test whether inter-municipal cooperation (homogenous partners) is more effective than inter-governmental cooperation (heterogeneous partners) in increasing international aid at the local level. Second, the study tests whether partnerships with the sole purpose of raising international aid (single purpose) are more effective than partnerships with additional purposes (multiple purposes). Using panel data with 2,431 municipal-year observations, results confirm that inter-governmental partnerships with multiple purposes are the most effective partnership to increase international aid.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of what the UN itself understands to be its first peacekeeping operation. It is therefore an appropriate time to reflect on the track record of UN peacekeeping in its efforts to try to maintain and realize

peace and security. Moreover, this milestone invites us to ponder what lies ahead in the realm of peacekeeping. For this reason, this forum article brings together both academics and UN officials to assess the achievements and

challenges of UN peacekeeping over the past 75 years. Through a dialogue among peacekeeping scholars and practitioners, we hope to identify current trends and developments in UN peacekeeping, as well as explore priorities for

the future to improve the effectiveness of peacekeeping operations in terms of achieving their mandate objectives, such as maintaining peace, protecting civilians, promoting human rights, and facilitating reconciliation. This forum

article is structured into six thematic sections, each shedding light on various aspects of UN peacekeeping: (1) foundational principles of UN peacekeeping - namely, consent, impartiality, and the (non-)use of force; (2) protection of

civilians; (3) the primacy of politics; (4) early warning; (5) cooperation with regional organizations; and (6) the changing geopolitical landscape in which UN peacekeeping operates.

International migration has been rising across the globe for decades, making the integration of immigrants into host societies a central challenge for many countries. Although the successful labor market integration of immigrants is considered a key boon to their economic independence and broader social integration, rising political polarization in many western societies with increasing far-right political support might put integration efforts at risk. Challenging core assumptions of intergroup contact theory (Pettigrew, 1998), we propose that strong community support for far-right political parties affects how immigrants are treated by their coworkers when entering a new workplace, thus undermining the potential benefits of social contact between immigrants and natives. Specifically, we propose that immigrants perceive negative social contact with their direct colleagues that increases over time when employed by a company located in a region with high far-right political support. Being confronted with a growing perception of negative contact will then take its toll on employees’ mental health, assessed by their emotional exhaustion at a later time point. We test and find support for our theoretical model in a unique dataset matching 481 trainees in Germany (tracked from day one of their traineeships over a period of 13 weeks) with data from the 2021 German federal election.

This study offers a dynamic perspective on the experiences of organizational newcomers who hold the gender token status in their occupation. We aim to analyze, first, whether the effect of newcomers’ gender on temporal changes in negative work events depends on the gender com-position of their occupation and, second, whether these temporal changes, in turn, impact per-formance and withdrawal. Integrating role congruity theory with ego depletion theory within a tokenism framework, we propose that male and female newcomers in occupations dominat-ed by their opposite gender experience an increase in negative work events over time. Draw-ing from prospect theory, we further propose that these increases diminish task mastery and enhance turnover intentions in the long run. By applying an extensive repeated-measures de-sign on 275 individuals over three months, we show that tokenism effects are not the same for women and men, contrary to theoretical expectations. Rather, male tokens do experience an increase in negative work events over time, while female tokens do not. Moreover, we find that newcomers who experienced increased negative work events over time indeed report lower task mastery and higher intentions to leave the job. In conclusion, this study illustrates that an occupation’s gender composition plays an important role in forming employees’ day-to-day experiences at work and effectiveness-related outcomes, but in a deeply gendered way. We discuss possible explanations for the counterintuitive findings and emphasize theoretical, as well as practical implications.

Despite the recent and sharp rise in psychedelic research, few studies have investigated how classic psychedelic use relates to employees’ work-related outcomes. This is surprising given that the increased use, decriminalization, and legalization of classic psychedelics in the United States (U.S.) has the potential to impact both employees and their organizations. Addressing this gap, the current study explores how employees’ lifetime psilocybin use relates to the amount of overtime they work, thereby offering insight into what current trends in psilocybin use could mean for businesses. Using pooled, cross-sectional data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2002–2014) on 217,963 adults employed in the U.S. full-time, this study tests whether lifetime psilocybin use is associated with employees’ number of overtime hours worked in the past week. After adjusting for sociodemographics and other substance use, a significant negative association is found between employees’ lifetime psilocybin use and the amount of overtime they reported working. Specifically, the findings suggest that lifetime psilocybin use in the U.S. full-time working population is associated with an estimated 44,348,400 fewer overtime hours worked per year and may help explain recent findings linking employees’ lifetime psilocybin use to a reduction in sick leave taken.

A landmark collaboration shows that Facebook’s news feed filters partisan political news to users with the same views. But changing the feed algorithm to reduce exposure to like-minded content does not reduce political polarization.

On digital media, algorithms that process data and recommend content have become ubiquitous. Their fast and barely regulated adoption has raised concerns about their role in well-being both at the individual and collective levels. Algorithmic mechanisms on digital media are powered by social drivers, creating a feedback loop that complicates research to disentangle the role of algorithms and already existing social phenomena. Our brief overview of the current evidence on how algorithms affect well-being, misinformation, and polarization suggests that the role of algorithms in these phenomena is far from straightforward and that substantial further empirical research is needed. Existing evidence suggests that algorithms mostly reinforce existing social drivers, a finding that stresses the importance of reflecting on algorithms in the larger societal context that encompasses individualism, populist politics, and climate change. We present concrete ideas and research questions to improve algorithms on digital platforms and to investigate their role in current problems and potential solutions. Finally, we discuss how the current shift from social media to more algorithmically curated media brings both risks and opportunities if algorithms are designed for individual and societal flourishing rather than short-term profit.

The memorialization of mass atrocities such as war crimes and genocides facilitates the remembrance of past suffering, honors those who resisted the perpetrators, and helps prevent the distortion of historical facts. Digital technologies have transformed memorialization practices by enabling less top-down and more creative approaches to remember mass atrocities. At the same time, they may also facilitate the spread of denialism and distortion, attempt to justify past crimes and attack the dignity of victims. The emergence of generative forms of artificial intelligence (AI), which produce textual and visual content, has the potential to revolutionize the field of memorialization even further. AI can identify patterns in training data to create new narratives for representing and interpreting mass atrocities—and do so in a fraction of the time it takes for humans. The use of generative AI in this context raises numerous questions: For example, can the paucity of training data on mass atrocities distort how AI interprets some atrocity-related inquiries? How important is the ability to differentiate between human- and AI-made content concerning mass atrocities? Can AI-made content be used to promote false information concerning atrocities? This article addresses these and other questions by examining the opportunities and risks associated with using generative AIs for memorializing mass atrocities. It also discusses recommendations for AIs integration in memorialization practices to steer the use of these technologies toward a more ethical and sustainable direction.

Party unity is an important feature in contemporary democracies. Ideologicalloyalty, disciplinary measures implemented by party leaders and homogeneityof preferences among elected representatives lead them to act in unison. Thisstudy focuses on the last mechanism and assesses under which conditionsparty representatives agree on policy positions. It argues that the personalitytrait of conscientiousness is linked to how a representative agrees with herparty’s position and that this relationship is moderated by her knowledge ofdissent between party voters and representatives. This study use data from acomparative survey conducted among 866 representatives in Belgium,Canada, Germany and Switzerland, and among the party constituencies in thefour countries. Results show that conscientious representatives are more likelyto differ significantly from the position of their party peers if they spend moretime on constituency work and if their voters’preferences are not congruentwith those of their fellow representatives.

As Europe’s parties realign around a new, transnational cleavage, this article turns back to a historical case in which national identity conflicts also coincided with profound economic transformation: multinational and industrializing Imperial Austria. While Austria is an important case for Lipset and Rokkan’s classic cleavage theory, they overlooked the long evolution of its party system pre-WWI. This paper introduces the Habsburg Manifesto Dataset (HMD), demonstrating its usefulness by tracking the formation of Imperial Austrian party system cleavages under universal manhood suffrage. Based on the qualitative content analysis of historical electoral manifestos, HMD measures the policy offers and group appeals made by Imperial Austria’s German and Czech parties. This allows testing Lipset and Rokkan’s claims by applying contemporary methodologies to a case that was effectively excluded from their original analysis. Doing so reveals a surprising degree of structure: parties consistently combined issue and group claims around center-periphery, class, and state-church cleavages.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced as one of the most prominent technological innovations to push the conversation about the digital transformation of the public sector forward. This special issue focuses on actual implementation approaches or challenges that public managers are facing while they fulfil new policy that asks for the implementation of AI in public administrations. In addition to assessing the contributions of papers in this issue, we also provide a research agenda on how future research can fill some of the methodological, theoretical, and application gaps in the public management literature.

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The article explores how macro-level political factors in conjunction with micro- and meso-level factors affect interest-group access to policymakers. The analysis is conducted based on two original data sets: a population ecology database of Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovenian national-level energy policy, healthcare and higher education organizations, and an online survey of these populations. Combining the two data sets allows us to investigate both polity-, population- and organizational-level factors. As the sampled countries have recently experienced democratic backsliding, we also test the effect of closing deliberative structures. The analysis reveals that the political process influences access: legislative fractionalization affects access positively, while the closure of deliberative structures has a negative effect. Nevertheless, the political contextual factors are mediated through variables at both the population (e.g. the size of latent constituency) and organizational (e.g. expertise provision) levels, as well as the meso-level of interorganizational cooperation.

This article investigates how traditionally anti-European Union (EU) right-wing parties and leaders in four EU member states reinterpreted their relation with the EU in the post-Brexit period (2016–2022). Either for the political opportunity structure's constraints or for the costs triggered by Brexit, right-wing European nationalists had to redefine their role in remaining in the EU. We conceptualize as ‘sovereignism’ their attempt to endogenize nationalism in the EU. Relying on discourse analysis, this article shows that right-wing sovereignism criticized the supranational character and the centralized policy system that developed within the EU. However, right-wing sovereignism differed in the rationale of its criticism, based more on an economic discourse in Western Europe and more on a cultural discourse in Eastern Europe, as well as on the policies to repatriate. The sovereignist approach of nationalist right-wing parties and leaders would lead to the nationally differentiated disintegration of the EU.

This article explores how democratic backsliding affects the value of expertise provision for interest groups in influencing policymaking. The analysis is conducted on an original survey of Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Slovenian energy, healthcare, and higher education interest groups active at the national level. All four countries experienced varying degrees and forms of populism and democratic backsliding in the past decade. Yet effective governance in all three policy fields still requires expert knowledge. We find that de-democratization affects expertise provision negatively, indeed, but not uniformly: the stronger the backsliding, the more a close relationship with governing parties matters for sharing expertise. Yet even in the context of de-democratization, participation in parliamentary hearings/committees is of pivotal importance for expertise provision. Moreover, intergroup cooperation is an important signal for expertise exchange: organizations with EU umbrella membership and active domestic networking activities attribute significantly higher importance to expertise in influencing policy than groups lacking these assets.

Disasters are extraordinary shocks that disrupt every aspect of the community life. Lives are lost, infrastructure is destroyed, the social fabric is torn apart, and people are left with physical and psychological trauma. In the aftermath of a disaster, communities begin the collective process of healing, grieving losses, repairing damage, and adapting to a new reality. Previous work has suggested the existence of a series of prototypical stages through which such community responses evolve. As social media have become more widely used, affected communities have increasingly adopted them to express, navigate, and build their response due to the greater visibility and speed of interaction that these platforms afford. In this study, we ask if the behavior of disaster-struck communities on social media follows prototypical patterns and what relationship, if any, these patterns may have with those established for offline behavior in previous work. Building on theoretical models of disaster response, we investigate whether, in the short term, community responses on social media in the aftermath of disasters follow a prototypical trajectory. We conduct our analysis using computational methods to model over 200 disaster-stricken U.S. communities. Community responses are measured in a range of domains, including psychological, social, and sense-making, and as multidimensional time series derived from the linguistic markers in tweets from those communities. We find that community responses on Twitter demonstrate similar response patterns across numerous social, aspirational, and physical dynamics. Additionally, through cluster analysis, we demonstrate that a minority of communities are characterized by more intense and enduring emotional coping strategies and sense-making. In this investigation of the relationship between community response and intrinsic properties of disasters, we reveal that the severity of the impact makes the deviant trajectory more likely, while the type and duration of a disaster are not associated with it.