Aktuelle Publikationen

Flexibility in administrative crisis management is a frequently reported determinant for a successful crisis response. But there is little agreement about how to conceptualize, measure and explain flexibility. We use a three-dimensional measure of administrative flexibility, capturing employees’ decision leeway, staff mobility, and organizational innovation in a crisis response. We then develop and test an explanation of variation in flexibility, focusing on the refugee crisis of 2015/16 in Germany and analyzing survey and socio-economic data from 235 districts using linear regression analysis. The main finding is that differences in flexibility cannot be explained by the scope of the crisis in a district, but by organizational factors: Agencies with politically unconstrained leadership, with higher financial resources and more crisis-related experience, respond more flexible. These findings contribute to theorizing and explaining administrative flexibility in and beyond crisis management and have practical implications for crisis learning and preparation.

Aktuelle Forschung verbindet populistische Einstellungen von BürgerInnen mit ökonomischen Sorgen, Gefühlen fehlender Anerkennung oder politischer Unzufriedenheit. Dieser Artikel untersucht, welche konkreten wirtschafts- und sozialpolitischen Einstellungen BürgerInnen mit Populismus verknüpfen. Argumentiert wird, dass die Bewertung konflikthafter vertikaler gesellschaftlicher Relationen die Zusammenhänge strukturiert: Als ökonomische Oben-Unten-Relationen werden das Verhältnis von Staat zu WirtschaftsakteurInnen und von ressourcenreich zu ressourcenarm begriffen. Populismus definiert sich über die politische Oben-Unten-Relation zwischen Elite und Volk. Wird das „Oben“ jeweils als Problem bewertet, kann diese vertikale Konfliktachse beide Einstellungsdimensionen verbinden. Regressionsanalysen auf Basis der ALLBUS 2018 zeigen, wie erwartet, dass die Ablehnung staatlicher Eingriffe in die Wirtschaft, aber auch die Befürwortung von Umverteilung und eine Skepsis im Bereich Außenwirtschaft mit populistischen Einstellungen verbunden sind. Wahrnehmungen ökonomischer Missstände beeinflussen die Stärke der Zusammenhänge kaum statistisch signifikant. Parteipräferenzen schwächen nur die Assoziationen bezüglich der Außenwirtschaft ab. Mit der Bewertung konflikthafter Oben-Unten-Relationen bietet der Artikel eine Erklärung für die ideologisch inkonsistenten Zusammenhänge an. Um deren Mobilisierung nicht rechtspopulistischen Parteien zu überlassen, sollten auch andere Parteien die vertikalen Konflikte adressieren, ohne dabei Grundpfeiler der westlichen Demokratie zu gefährden.

Over the last 25 years, the BRICs asserted themselves as drivers of globalization. But what does their new-found prominence mean for working conditions at home? Using a novel sub-national database covering outward investment linkages and working conditions in Brazilian municipalities, this study tests whether a direct investment in Europe leads to the introduction of decent working conditions in Brazil. The empirical results provide strong support for the investing-up effect using a mixture of panel data analysis and text analysis. The results suggest that economic integration with high-standard developed countries can act as a powerful mechanism for labor standard improvements in developing countries.

Could imperial rule affect state institutions at the national, regional, and local level differently? No systematic theory to answer this question exists, which is surprising given the importance that is attributed to foreign rule for political-administrative organization around the world. The effectiveness of imperial rule may differ along the administrative hierarchy because empires are often subject to financial constraints, limits on organizational capabilities, and informational asymmetries. Therefore, a commonly used approach—aggregation at the national level—may yield erroneous findings about colonial legacies by ignoring vital nuances. To address this gap, I develop a novel theory of imperial pervasiveness and test it through a number of statistical analyses. Leveraging an original dataset of citizen perceptions of state institutions in Romania, this study reveals vastly different long-term effects of historical Habsburg rule at the regional and local levels. The results indicate that we need to rethink the study of colonial origins.

Policy scholars have increasingly focused on collaborative and competitive relationships between stakeholder coalitions. The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) in particular has directed scholarly attention toward such relationships. The ACF defines advocacy coalitions as groups of actors who share beliefs and coordinate their action. However, previous research has been inconsistent in defining and measuring coalitions, which has hampered comparative research and theory building. We present a method called the Advocacy Coalition Index, which measures belief similarity and the coordination of action in a manner that makes it possible to assess the extent to which advocacy coalitions are found in policy subsystems, whether subgroups resemble coalitions, and how individual actors contribute to coalition formation. The index provides a standardized method for identifying coalitions that can be applied to comparative research. To illustrate the effectiveness of the index, we analyze two climate change policy subsystems, namely Finland and Sweden, which have been shown to differ in terms of the association of belief similarity with coordination. We demonstrate that the index performs well in identifying the different types of subsystems, coalitions, and actors that contribute the most to coalition formation, as well as those involved in cross-coalition brokerage.

While individuals’ trust in search engine results is well-supported, little is known about their preferences when selecting news. We use web-tracked behavioral data across a 2-month period (280 participants) and we analyze three competing factors, two algorithmic (ranking and representativeness) and one psychological (familiarity), that could influence the selection of search results. We use news engagement as a proxy for familiarity and investigate news articles presented on Google search pages (n = 1221). We find a significant effect of algorithmic factors but not of familiarity. We find that ranking plays a lesser role for news compared to non-news, suggesting a more careful decision-making process. We confirm that Google Search drives individuals to unfamiliar sources, and find that it increases the diversity of the political audience of news sources. We tackle the challenge of measuring social science theories in contexts shaped by algorithms, demonstrating their leverage over the behaviors of individuals.

The current public backlash against several trade agreements has triggered a vivid discourse about the impact of top-down communication of such initiatives on public opinion. Findings from previous work on the impact of issue frames provide distinct expectations about the influence of different types of messages on people’s opinion. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying the impact of message cues on opinion formation. In this article, we shed light on one potential mechanism that mediates issue framing effects: individuals’ emotional reaction. By means of a survey-embedded experiment conducted in the United States and Germany, we expose respondents to different frames about the benefits and risks of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement. The results show that frames have a significant effect on public opinion, but frames that emphasize losses seem more persuasive than frames promoting the gains from the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Complementing our empirical investigation, with a causal mediation analysis we find that framing effects are indeed mediated by people’s emotional responses to the frames.

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.

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.

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.

Policy signals are often conceived of as positions on an ideological scale. However, apart from the position – considered here as the policy objective – the policy instrument and the concreteness of the instrument must also be taken into consideration. In the article, a new conceptualisation of policy signals is developed, which integrates policy objectives, policy instruments and how concrete these are. Drawing on issue competition research, a set of expectations is advanced about the importance of actors’ control over outcomes for positional concreteness. Then, policy signals are looked at in the unmediated context of Danish parties’ Facebook posts ahead of the 2019 national election. Based on all textual and audio-visual posts in the year before the election, it is found that the levels of positional concreteness are generally high. Yet – in line with expectations – positional concreteness depends on parties’ incumbency status and the policy field.