Aktuelle Publikationen

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.

For decades, Indigenous peoples and their movements have fought for the recognition of their rights. Since the multiculturalist turn, these demands are – at least partially – a legal reality in many countries in Latin America. Indigenous group rights can be attributed to individual group members or in a collective way to the group as such. Here, I investigate how these contrasting approaches impact on Indigenous citizens’ satisfaction with democracy. From normative theory, I derive the expectation that incorporating collective Indigenous rights increases satisfaction with democracy, because they address the historical loss of Indigenous sovereignty and open new spaces for the participation of previously marginalized groups. In contrast, the individualization of Indigenous group rights can be seen as a form of assimilation. The empirics show that collective rights increase the satisfaction with democracy among Indigenous peoples – and among the wider public. Thus, recognizing collective minority rights does not seem to stir division but sends a message that democracy is working well.

Prevalence of violence in Brazil is high, which contributes to an increasing number of trauma-related disorders, especially post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This study aims to present a case series of PTSD patients treated with narrative exposure therapy (NET) in two public health centers in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Health professionals were trained in a two-week workshop to deliver NET. Exposure to violence and other potentially traumatic events, as well as PTSD were assessed by interviewers before treatment and six months later in follow-up interviews conducted by blind assessors. Multiple traumatic events, including different types of childhood and sexual abuse, intimate partner violence and community violence were reported. Five patients were exposed to community violence, and one to domestic violence, during or after NET treatment. Treatment delivery was integrated into the routine of health centers. Eight patients completed NET and presented a substantial reduction in PTSD severity at six-month follow-up. NET is a feasible and effective treatment for PTSD patients exposed to ongoing violence, and can be integrated into established public health services.

Recent political changes in established democracies have led to a new cleavage, often described as a juxtaposition of ‘winners’ and ‘losers of globalization’. Despite a growing interest in subjective group membership and identity, previous research has not studied whether individuals actually categorize themselves as globalization winners or losers and what effect this has. Based on survey data from Germany, we report evidence of a division between self-categorized globalization winners and losers that is partially but not completely rooted in social structure and associated with attitudes towards globalization-related issues and party choices. We thereby confirm many of the assumptions from prior research – such as that (self-categorized) losers of globalization tend to hold lower levels of education and lean towards the radical right. At the same time, the self-categorizations are not merely transmission belts of socio-structural effects but seem to be politically consequential in their own right. We conclude that the categories of globalization winners and losers have the potential to form part of the identity component of the globalization cleavage and are important for understanding how political entrepreneurs appeal to voters on their side of the new divide.

Research has shown that politicians' perceptions of public opinion are subject to social projection. When estimating the opinions of voters on a broad range of issues, politicians tend to assume that their own preferences are shared by voters. This article revisits this finding and adds to the literature in three ways. First, it makes a conceptual contribution by bringing together different approaches to the analysis of projection and its consequences. Second, relying on data from surveys with politicians ( n  = 866) in four countries (Belgium, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland) conducted between March 2018 and September 2019, it shows that there is more projection in politicians' estimations of their partisan electorate than in their estimations of the general public or of their geographic district. Third, comparing the data on politician projection with data from parallel surveys with citizens, the article reveals that—at least in three out of the four countries studied here—elected politicians are not better at avoiding erroneous projection than ordinary citizens. The article discusses the implications of these findings for the workings of representative democracy.

Autocrats typically respond with coercion when citizens take to the streets demanding political reform. Sometimes, however, they tolerate mass protests and even give in to protesters’ demands. While the effect of coercion on mobilization is well-studied, we know less about the role of concession-making. We argue that accommodating demands is rarely an effective strategy in demobilizing opposition movements. Authoritarian rulers are usually neither willing nor able to fully address protesters’ dynamic demands, nor can they offer credible commitments. We conduct a quantitative analysis using multiple cross-national data sets to empirically assess the relationship between concessions by the government and subsequent mass mobilization. By analyzing protest events in temporal and spatial proximity, we estimate the effect of making concessions on protest mobilization at the subnational level in 18 autocracies from 1991 to 2012. Our results indicate that concessions are associated with a significant and substantive increase in subsequent protest activity.

Generations of research have incrementally identified the circumstances under which electoral campaigns matter. Direct interpersonal contact within local networks is commonly seen as conducive to campaign impact, but empirical evidence is scarce because of demanding data requirements. We advance the literature by studying the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S), an important challenger party in Italy, which followed the unusual practice of coordinating political activities on a public online platform. We web scraped the entire history of the movement’s more than 1,000 local branches with over 200,000 geocoded political activities, to study the effect and mechanisms of their no campaign in the 2016 constitutional referendum. Relying on regression, matching, and instrumental variable models, we demonstrate that local M5S mobilization had substantial campaign effects. Our results have important implications, as they highlight the effectiveness of locally rooted campaigns and the particular potency of place-based political mobilization.

Recent studies take increasingly refined views of how socioeconomic conditions influence political behaviour. We add to this literature by exploring how voters' prospective evaluations of long-term economic and social opportunities relate to electoral contestation versus the stabilization of the political-economic system underpinning the knowledge society. Using survey data from eight West European countries, we show that positive prospects are associated with higher support for mainstream parties (incumbents and opposition) and lower support for radical parties on all levels of material well-being. Our results support the idea that ‘aspirational voters’ with positive evaluations of opportunities (for themselves or their children) represent an important stabilizing force in advanced democratic capitalism. However, we also highlight the importance of radical party support among ‘apprehensive voters’, who are economically secure but perceive a lack of long-term opportunities. To assess the implications of these findings, we discuss the relative importance of these groups across different countries.

International organizations (IOs) of the United Nations (UN) system publish around 750 evaluation reports per year, offering insights on their performance across project, program, institutional, and thematic activities. So far, it was not feasible to extract quantitative performance measures from these text-based reports. Using deep learning, this article presents a novel text-based performance metric: We classify individual sentences as containing a negative, positive, or neutral assessment of the evaluated IO activity and then compute the share of positive sentences per report. Content validation yields that the measure adequately reflects the underlying concept of performance; convergent validation finds high correlation with human-provided performance scores by the World Bank; and construct validation shows that our measure has theoretically expected results. Based on this, we present a novel dataset with performance measures for 1,082 evaluated activities implemented by nine UN system IOs and discuss avenues for further research.

Hierarchical accountability often proves insufficient to control street-level implementation, where complex, informal accountability relations prevail and tasks must be prioritized. However, scholars lack a theoretical model of how accountability relations affect implementation behaviors that are inconsistent with policy. By extending the Accountability Regimes Framework (ARF), this paper explains how multiple competing subjective street-level accountabilities translate into policy divergence. The anti-terrorism “Prevent Duty” policy in the United Kingdom requires university lecturers to report any student they suspect may be undergoing a process of radicalization. We ask: what perceived street-level accountabilities and dilemmas does this politically contested policy imply for lecturers, and how do they affect divergence? An online survey of British lecturers (N = 809), combined with 35 qualitative follow-up interviews, reveals that accountability dilemmas trigger policy divergence. The ARF models how street-level bureaucrats become informal policymakers in the political system when rules clash with their roles as professionals, citizen-agents, or “political animals.”

Does migration pose a threat to welfare state legitimacy? We address thisprominent question with a multilevel analysis of novel survey data, the ‘Inequality Barometer’, which includes individual and local-level context data in Germany (6208 individuals, up to 401 local districts). Our results suggest that the public is more reluctant to support welfare where the proportion of migrants at the local level is larger. This effect even persists when welfare is directed at groups that are perceived as more deserving of welfare support (like children, sick or older individuals) and when we examine the levels of employed migrants (that pay into the welfare state). We also find that these effects are moderated by economic risk. Particularly, we find that individuals facing higher economic risk support welfare less than their counterparts when exposed to migration. Future research should expand the local-level approach and investigate the causal mechanisms that the welfare-migration nexus is based on in more detail.

This article advances research into mass Euroscepticism by investigating the role of distributive justice. Drawing on cross-national survey data from 23 countries, the study shows that perceived injustice of individual opportunities (i.e. educational and job opportunities) and outcomes (i.e. earnings) nourish Eurosceptic sentiments, independent of objective inequalities. However, the public response to distributive injustice varies across European Union (EU) member states, as high domestic corruption levels dampen the apparent link to EU accountability. Perceptions of injustice concerning earnings provide a potential breeding ground for Euroscepticism in member states with low levels of corruption, while EU scapegoating regarding earnings injustice does not manifest itself in member states with the highest levels of corruption. These results are supportive of a justice-based approach in understanding varieties of Euroscepticism across Europe.

Workplace loneliness is becoming increasingly prevalent in the fast-growing remote work environment. Remote work exposes employees to different demands and support not only at work but also at home—yet, the influences of demands and support from both work and home have not yet been investigated simultaneously in the workplace loneliness literature. In this study, we examine the role of job and home demands as antecedents of workplace loneliness. Based on employee wellbeing theories and social exchange theory, we predict that work/home demands will create work and home interference, with both mediators then increasing workplace loneliness. Moreover, we assume that both job and home support act as potential moderators to mitigate the negative effects of workplace loneliness. Using a two-wave survey of 232 remote-working employees during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, we found that job demands increased workplace loneliness through heightened work-to-home interference and that this relationship was buffered by job support. Home demands increased workplace loneliness through heightened home-to-work interference, but this relationship was not buffered by home support. Our findings contribute to research and practice by identifying important drivers and remedies for loneliness in the remote workplace during the pandemic and beyond.

Many protest movements have brought down dictatorships and paved the way for democracy. However, protests can also foster large-scale violence at the level of civil war. How can we explain the development from protest to armed conflict? In this paper, we use geographically fine-grained data to examine how collective mobilization leads to civil war violence at the local level. We argue that two mechanisms can explain this. First, in a protest escalation dynamic, confrontations between protesters and state security forces increase the willingness of protesters to ramp up the use of force. Second, in a protest capture mechanism, protests attract attention and resources from the state, thereby providing other local non-state actors with the opportunity to use violence. We test our theoretical expectations in a spatial analysis of protests and armed conflict in autocracies from 2003 to 2014. Our results show that protests increase the risk of local armed conflict when violently repressed. Further analysis reveals that the second mechanism, protest capture, accounts for the majority of escalations to armed conflict we see in our data.

When generally applicable rules clash with one’s cultural, religious or moral commitments, should exemptions be granted? The debate on exemptions raises the question both of what it means to treat people equally and of what it means to protect diversity adequately. The objective of this paper is to defend the no-exemption argument and to make it a more attractive position for liberals. I first argue that exemptions violate the principle of equal treatment because they rely on distinctions that cannot be neutrally justified. I then argue that diversity can be adequately accommodated if we use a more demanding interpretation of the justification of generally applicable rules. There should be no exemption to fully justified rules, but rules are only fully justified when the particular demands that they impose on individuals are justified, i.e. when they are either neutral or pass both a Necessity Test and a Sufficiency Test. When rules are not fully justified, they should be repealed or modified. Based on this focus on the demands of rules, equality can be reconciled with an adequate accommodation of diversity.

This paper addresses the question of whether Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to a turning point ( Zeitenwende ) in public opinion on foreign and defense policy in Germany. To this end, we provide a theoretical analysis of how the concept of turning point can be applied to public opinion. We identify the durability of the change in attitudes as well as its significance as necessary conditions to speak of a turning point. In the remainder of the paper, we focus on the argument that changes in different types of orientations are significant to different degrees. Change in core postures is more significant than change in policy attitudes; change in attitudes thematically distant from the Russian invasion is more significant than change in attitudes directly related to the event. Empirically, we present a panel data analysis of attitude change triggered by the Russian invasion. Analysis of data from several waves of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) panel survey collected before the invasion (2017–2021) and in two waves after (May and October 2022) shows that there were sizable shifts in policy attitudes directly related to the event. Postures remained essentially unchanged, as did thematically distant attitudes. We conclude that there has been no turning point at the level of public opinion (yet).

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