Aktuelle Publikationen

Agile refers to a work management ideology with a set of productivity frameworks that support continuous and iterative progress on work tasks by reviewing one's hypotheses, working in a human‐centric way, and encouraging evidence‐based learning. In practice, public administrations have started to use agile principles and methods to plan projects, work in short sprints, iterate after receiving feedback from stakeholders, and apply a human‐centric approach to arrive at prototyped solutions. To understand the opportunities and challenges public servants perceive when they are asked to apply agile work practices, I conducted focus groups to study the social affordances of agile governance that need to be in place for public servants to adopt an agile mindset and its related practices. As a result of the exposure to agile work practices, public servants are either able to perceive its affordances and are willing to adopt agile, they falsely perceive them or they even remain hidden from them leading to a rejection of agile.

Stringent policies that significantly increase the cost of greenhouse gas emissions, such as CO₂, are increasingly necessary for mitigating climate change. Yet while richer individuals in society generate the most CO₂ emissions and thus will face the largest absolute cost burden, they also tend to be more supportive of stringent environmental policies. In this paper, we examine how information about the distribution of carbon emissions by income affects support for carbon taxation. While carbon taxation is widely advocated as the most efficient policy for mitigating climate change, it faces significant political hurdles due to its distributional costs. Using original survey data, with an embedded experiment, we find that providing information about the actual distribution of household CO₂ emissions by income significantly changes individuals' support for carbon taxation. These effects are particularly pronounced at the bottom of the household income distribution, leading to increased support for costly climate policies. However, individuals who believe that carbon taxes will reduce their income continue to hold their level of support for carbon taxation. Our findings have significant implications for understanding the public's response to the distributional consequences of the green transitions and ultimately their political feasibility.

Many workers are experiencing the downsides of being exposed to an overload of information and communication technology (ICT), highlighting the need for resources to cope with the resulting technostress. This article offers a novel cross-level perspective on technostress by examining how the context of the welfare state influences the relationship between income and technostress. Showing that individuals with higher income experience less technostress, this study argues that the welfare state represents an additional coping resource, in particular in the form of unemployment benefits. Since unemployment benefits insure income earners in the case of job loss, the negative effect of income on technostress should increase with higher levels of unemployment generosity. In line with these expectations, empirical results based on original survey data collected in collaboration with the OECD show that the impact of income on technostress varies across welfare state contexts. Implications for public health and policymakers are being discussed.

Recent polling failures highlight that election polls are prone to biases that the margin of error customarily reported with polls does not capture. However, such systematic errors are difficult to assess against the background noise of sampling variance. Shirani-Mehr et al. (2018) developed a hierarchical Bayesian model to disentangle random and systematic errors in poll estimates of two-party vote shares at the election level. The method can inform realistic assessments of poll accuracy. We adapt the model to multiparty elections and improve its temporal flexibility. We then estimate bias and variance in 5,240 German national election polls, 1994–2021. Our analysis suggests that the average absolute election-day bias per party was about 1.5 percentage points, ranging from 0.9 for the Greens to 3.2 for the Christian Democrats. The estimated variance is, on average, about twice as large as that implied by usual margins of error. We find little evidence of house or mode effects. Common biases indicate industry effects due to similar methodological problems. The Supplementary Material provides additional results for 1,751 regional election polls.

This article studies the conditions required by populist radical right actors to convincingly create a sense of crisis. The article draws on the literature on political blame games and policy feedback to argue that it is not only the salience of an event that determines its ‘populist exploitability’, but also its proximity to mass publics – or more simply, how directly and closely it affects citizens. In the study, Moffitt’s stepwise model of populist crisis performance is extended and expectations are formulated regarding how the proximity of an event influences the various steps of crisis performance. The article then tests this theoretical argument with a within-unit analysis of the crisis performance of a populist radical right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), during the refugee crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis suggests that the pandemic’s proximity to people’s daily lives narrowed and complicated the AfD’s crisis performance in important ways. The article sheds light on the determinants of the success of populist radical right parties and nuances our understanding of the broader relationship between populism and crisis.

Internet shutdowns have become a popular instrument for repressive regimes to silence dissent in a digitized world. While authorities seek to suppress opponents by imposing Internet outages, we know little about how the public reacts to such incisive measures. The regime might face anger and resentment from the public as a response to Internet deprivation. Why do regimes still use Internet shutdowns when they do not only face economic but also societal losses? In this paper, I argue that Internet shutdowns lower the public’s evaluation of the political leadership as citizens blame the government for the service outages. For the analysis, I combine fine-grained data on Internet outages with survey data from the Afrobarometer and apply an “unexpected event during survey design.” Results show that citizens do not hold the government accountable for Internet disruptions, thus making Internet shutdowns a powerful tool for autocrats to silent dissent digitally.

Contemporary research has shown that authoritarian regimes are not static. At the same time, gradual changes are often difficult to detect and the literature has not yet developed convincing tools to identify autocracy-to-autocracy transitions outside the visible ruptures of coups, power transfers, and opposition victories. Building on fieldwork in Tanzania, we show that patterns of rule shifted significantly under Magufuli. Once the model case of a party-based system in Africa, we argue that Tanzania should be reclassified as a party-personalist regime for the time of his presidency. The basis for his success lies in the increasing factional tensions within the CCM which gave him the power to act as the arbiter and to manipulate party institutions and nominations to his favour. Beyond providing a thick description of a single case, we address the theoretical and empirical challenges of correctly classifying authoritarian regimes.

• How strong is public support for Ukraine in Europe? Given reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin may be ‘playing for time’ in the hopes that weary publics will demand an end to supporting Ukraine, this is an important question. • In February 2023, we conducted a survey of public attitudes in ten major European countries: France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Finland, Sweden, Italy and Spain.

• Our findings suggest that Europeans are (almost) unanimous in blaming Russia for the war and strongly in favour of standing by Ukraine in its war effort.

• Only minorities of respondents are of the opinion that Ukraine should be urged to accept territorial losses that could help end the war, or that economic sanctions against Russia should be lifted. Even in countries where support for Ukraine is lower (Hungary and Italy), or among more sceptical groups, we typically find a majority or plurality on Ukraine's side (or, at worst, we find only a small majority are pro-Russia).

• Regarding NATO, there is no widespread appetite for increasing its presence in eastern Europe (except in Poland and Estonia), and even less support for Ukraine joining the alliance. At least in the eyes of the public, fighting a war in Ukraine is perceived as a goal in itself that does not necessarily elicit broader changes to existing security alliances like NATO.

• Looking ahead, if the gap between the expectations audiences had for the Ukrainian counter-offensive and what it actually delivers is too great, we would expect public support for Ukraine in the conflict to weaken overall.

• If governments wish to keep support levels high, we recommend targeting communications to reach groups we have found to be less supportive. This could include utilizing non-traditional media platforms to reach younger audiences, or members of populist right-wing groups.

Socioeconomic resources are important predictors of electoral participation, yet to understand their impact, we argue it is essential to examine the interaction of income dissatisfaction (egocentric dimension) with someone’s view of societal conditions (sociotropic dimension). Drawing on pooled national election surveys, we find that deprivation indeed depresses voting, but more importantly also that there is significant variation among those who experience economic difficulties: those who disconnect their personal misfortune from broader grievances are significantly more likely to abstain (Relative Power Hypothesis), while embedding one’s situation in a context of societal disparities leads to a desire for change and participation levels nearly as high as among the better off (Conflict Hypothesis). Our findings speak to inequality and turnout research but also have direct political implications, as it seems that responsiveness to campaigns focused on distributional injustices hinges on voters’ perception of themselves in relation to society.

In numerous countries, both international migration and regional support for far-right political parties are on the rise. This is important considering that a frequent aim of far-right political parties is to aggressively limit the inflow of immigrants. Understanding how regional far-right political support affects the immigrants working in these regions is therefore vital for executives and organizations as a whole. Integrating political science research at the macro-level with stereotype threat theory at the individual level, we argue that regional far-right political support makes negative immigrant stereotypes salient, increasing the number of work-related performance errors conducted by immigrants while reducing those by natives. Using objective field data from a professional sports context, we demonstrate how subordinates’ immigrant status interacts with the political context in which they reside to predict their frequency of performance errors.

The recent enactment of the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) has significantly strengthened the social dimension of the European Union (EU), including the social investment (SI) elements of that social dimension. What is not known, however, to what extent the priorization of SI is supported by the broader public. To address this research gap, we investigate public opinion on 15 different policy areas from the EPSR using Eurobarometer data from 2020 across all EU countries, asking whether the public rather prefers these policies to be delivered at EU or national level. A principal finding is that the public indeed supports more SI than CP policies with respect to EU-level social policy, and more CP than SI policies with respect to national-level social policy. We also investigate whether socioeconomic status (SES) and welfare state effort can explain this phenomenon. We find that higher socio-economic status and more generous welfare states are associated with more support for SI policies on both EU and national levels and vice versa. The findings emphasize the importance of what policies are provided versus who provides them but also pose a puzzle for trade-offs in multilevel governance settings. Hence, the article has important implications for future research on public opinion and Social Europe.

This thematic issue examines two main research questions: What are the features, the determinants, and the implications of fiscal integration in a system of multilevel governance like the EU? And, what can the post-pandemic EU learn from established federations when it comes to fiscal integration? We attempt to conceptualize the patterns of EU fiscal integration. In so doing, we identify eight instruments of fiscal integration in a federal or multilevel polity, equally divided between fiscal capacity and fiscal regulation, depending on the side of the budget and the mode of integration (autonomous or dependent). For instance, as part of the fiscal capacity instrument of integration, we propose to distinguish between revenue and expenditure capacity. Revenue capacity is then further divided into tax capacity, based on EU/federal taxes, and budgetary capacity, based on non-independent sources, for instance, contributions from the member states. Expenditure capacity is divided into autonomous spending capacity, meaning direct spending by the EU, and a dependent transfer capacity, where the EU merely distributes resources (both grants and loans) to the member states.

Thanks to the recovery fund Next Generation EU, the EU considerably increased the size of its fiscal capacity by increasing its borrowing power. Yet, the post-pandemic EU has left the key issue of how to distribute fiscal sovereignty across the EU and the member states unsolved. Departing from influential concepts in the political science literature, this article argues that we still lack a thorough analytical framework to operationalise the coexistence of two fiscal sovereignties—the fiscal sovereignty of the centre (here, the EU) and the fiscal sovereignty of the units (here, the member states). By resorting to comparative federalism, the article first operationalises fiscal sovereignty as the power to collect, administer, and spend resources. A level of government (the centre or the units) is fiscally sovereign if it can decide on its revenues, the administration of its resources, and its expenditures alone or together with the other level of government (what I call “fiscal self- or co-determination”). The coexistence of fiscal sovereignties becomes impossible if one level systematically and unilaterally encroaches upon the other (“fiscal out-determination”), as is still the case with the post-pandemic EU. On the contrary, in a union of states by aggregation like the EU—namely, Switzerland—the centre (Confederation) has its own fiscal powers, while the units (cantons) retain most of their fiscal sovereignty: The coexistence of fiscal sovereignties is thus possible. The article concludes by outlining which “fiscal features” of the Swiss system could not work in the EU and which could instead potentially work.

This special issue analyses the patterns, causes and consequences of Differentiated Policy Implementation (DPI) in the European Union (EU). DPI is an umbrella term for the diversity in the presence and use of discretion during legal and practical policy implementation processes and outcomes in the EU. The emergent DPI research agenda emphasises differentiation in EU policy implementation beyond mere legal compliance, which is more widespread, and its role in the broader political and policy processes of EU multilevel governance. The contributions highlight anticipated implementation as one dimension of DPI, as well as legal and practical implementation. DPI serves as an alternative to differentiated integration (DI), accommodating heterogeneous national preferences, capacities and conditions, and feeding back into EU policy-making. The impact of DPI on the EU’s output legitimacy and effectiveness depends on scope conditions that require more scholarly attention.

Background

Although studies have demonstrated that the use of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is on the rise in the United States, it remains unclear how this trend looks across the hierarchical ladder of the American workforce. This is relevant given that LSD is increasingly being touted as a means of boosting creativity and performance, with mounting anecdotal evidence that business managers in particular are turning to it for inspiration and insight.

Methods

Using pooled cross-sectional data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2006–2014) on 168,920 adults in the United States employed full-time (weighted = 117,270,940), this study investigates how temporal trends in past year LSD use differ among business managers and non-managers.

Results

The results suggest that the prevalence of past year LSD use increased over time at a greater rate among business managers than non-managers and that this difference cannot be accounted for by changes in business managers’ perceived risk of LSD use or general substance use relative to non-managers.

Conclusions

The study’s findings indicate that temporal trends in past year LSD use depend on employees’ hierarchical rank in their organization and suggest that business managers, regardless of gender, are becomingly increasingly interested in the potential competitive advantages that LSD may offer.

Abstract Public service ecosystems are used to understand how multiple actors co‐produce public services and create public value. Especially interactions between public service providers and service users are essential. However, systematic examinations of these interactions and what roles the different actors play are rare. This study closes this gap by conducting a systematic literature review with three main findings. First, public service providers play an important role: they facilitate co‐production by micromanaging or facilitating collaboration, empowering service users, and translating the results of the process back into the organization. Second, service users contribute to co‐production by providing resources. Third, a new category of actors is proposed: the co‐production intermediary. Intermediaries are formal organizations whose primary role is to support service providers in service delivery. This study comprehensively analyzes the different actors and power constellations between them.