Aktuelle Publikationen

Were European public reactions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in line with the external threat hypothesis? Accordingly, the invasion should have increased the perception of threat from Russia’s territorial ambitions and support for collective defence. We review survey data from a diverse sample of ten European countries, collected before and after the event, showing that this was indeed the case. Threat perceptions and attitudes toward various aspects of collective defence – the general principle, readiness to defend other European nations, and NATO – increased fairly consistently across countries, and the association between perceptions and attitudes also increased. Findings regarding (changes in) attitudes towards defence efforts of the European Union were more ambiguous. We discuss the implications of these findings for the future of collective defence in Europe and the resilience of European societies more broadly.

The Internet has become central to economic exchange and political communication, placing regulatory initiatives high on European policy agendas. What cleavages shape the political conflicts surrounding Internet policy? I argue that proposals to regulate the Internet frequently affect not only economic interests but also the civil liberties of citizens in the online environment. Political parties must therefore balance their stance on market regulation and their socio-cultural preferences on the ‘liberal-authoritarian’ dimension of political contestation. To explore party competition on Internet policy in the European Union, I analyse all Internet policy roll-call votes in the European Parliament from 1999 to 2014. Ideal point estimation shows that political competition in this policy field is best explained by the ‘liberal-authoritarian’ dimension. Reinforcing this finding, two case studies illustrate how civil liberty concerns motivate left-wing parties and the liberal party group to form voting coalitions despite diverging economic preferences.

Despite fierce politicization in arms‐exporting democracies, we lack systematic research on mass public preferences on arms transfers. We propose that citizens either apply a deontologist (rejecting transfers categorically) or consequentialist (trading‐off economic, strategic and normative aspects) calculus of preference formation. Conducting population‐representative survey experiments () in Germany and France, two global top‐five major arms exporters, we find that 10–15 per cent of respondents follow deontologist considerations, a preference structure potentially relevant for all foreign policies involving the use of military force. Still, a majority shows differentiated preferences, giving largest weight to normative considerations, with assessments affected by moderating features (e.g., scenarios of just war). Principled rejection of arms trade and a large consequentialist weight for normative factors are more pronounced in Germany compared to France, indicating that public opinion might pose a stronger constraint for government policy in this country. Respondents' preferences match opinion polls on post‐Russian invasion Ukraine armament, indicating high external validity of our experiments.

Much research in political science relies on datasets produced by human coders. Many variables included in these datasets are not based on observable facts but rather require a considerable level of human judgment. This project studies the extent to which this judgment is affected by availability bias and how it influences the retrospective coding of historic cases. The analysis uses coder-level data from the V-Dem project, one of the few datasets collecting and releasing codings tagged with timestamps when they were produced. The results show that recent dramatic events in a country just prior to the coding have a small, but visible impact on coder ratings, but primarily for those variables that are directly related to the observed events. The magnitude of this effect, however, is small. This alleviates concerns that prominent events in world politics around the time of coding significantly affect the reliability of cross-national indicators.

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.

When member states of the European Union face serious international threats, does this serve as a catalyst or obstacle for European integration in the security and defence domain? To gain purchase on this question, this paper examines public opinion from a common instrument fielded in 24 EU member states (and the United Kingdom) with a total sample size of more than 40,000 respondents. We argue that theoretical accounts of perceived threat produce rival hypotheses. Threats might have either uniform or differential effects on different groups of citizens and could lead to either convergence or divergence of public opinion. We show that perceptions of foreign threats are associated with more favourable views on integration in the security and defence domain. Importantly, this association is as strong among Eurosceptics as among Europhiles. The findings presented here are consistent with the view that functional pressures may temporarily convince Eurosceptics to accept integration in the foreign and security domain.

How do politicians attribute responsibility for good and poor policy outcomes across multiple stakeholders in a policy field where they themselves can affect service provision? Such ‘diffusion’ decisions are crucial to understand the political calculations underlying the allocation of blame and credit by office-holders. We study this issue using a between-subjects survey experiment fielded among local politicians in Norway (N = 1073). We find that local politicians attribute responsibility for outcomes in primary education predominantly to school personnel (regardless of whether performance is good or bad) and do not engage in local party-political blame games. However, we show that local politicians are keen to attribute responsibility for poor outcomes to higher levels of government, especially when these are unaligned with the party of the respondent. These findings suggest that vertical partisan blame-shifting prevails over horizontal partisan blame games in settings with a political consensus culture.

The Sámi people stand out as the only Indigenous minority in an egalitarian European context, namely the Nordic Countries. Therefore, inequalities that they may face are worth closer inspection. Drawing on the distinction between inequalities among individuals (vertical) and between groups (horizontal), we investigate how different types of inequalities affect the Sámi today. We formulate a series of hypotheses on how social, economic, cultural, and political inequalities are linked with discrimination experience, and test these with original data from a population survey conducted in northern Norway and northern Sweden simultaneously in 2021. The findings show that Sámi ethnic background increases the probability of experiencing discrimination. While individual-level economic inequality is also pertinent, this does not directly materialise as between-group inequality. Instead, minority language use is a strong predictor of discrimination experience, revealing the socio-cultural nature of ethnic inequalities. Cross-country differences are only reflected in the effect of minority language use.

Differentiated integration is often considered a solution to gridlock in the European Union. However, questions remain concerning its perceived legitimacy among the public. While research shows that most citizens are not, in principle, opposed to differentiated integration – although support varies across different differentiated integration models and different country contexts – we still know little about the role institutional design plays in citizens’ evaluations of differentiated integration. This article inspects how citizens evaluate different hypothetical differentiated integration arrangements, with varying decision-making procedures, using a conjoint experiment. We ask whether institutional arrangements can overcome citizens’ preference heterogeneity over differentiated integration, and thereby foster the legitimacy of a differentiated European Union. We find that while a majority of citizens care about the inclusiveness of differentiated integration arrangements, they also support limiting the number of veto points. Our analysis also reveals noteworthy differences across citizens with pro- and anti-European Union attitudes in the perceived fairness of differentiated integration arrangements.

This study introduces a bounded rationality approach to welfare preference formation under exposure to labor market risks. It argues that risk exposure only increases welfare demand when it is reasonable to assume that workers are aware of their risk exposure and when future-related concerns are currently salient. Empirical analyses of longitudinal data from Switzerland and 28 European countries support the theory. Swiss workers only optimize their welfare preferences in a forward-looking manner when they become unemployed, and only the national unemployment rate is found to increase welfare demand in European countries. In contrast, a variety of risks on the occupational and individual level drawn from previous research are found to be unrelated with welfare preferences. The implication is that the risk exposure of employed workers may matter less for their welfare preferences and downstream political phenomena such as voting behavior than commonly expected.

Algorithm audits have increased in recent years due to a growing need to independently assess the performance of automatically curated services that process, filter and rank the large and dynamic amount of information available on the Internet. Among several methodologies to perform such audits, virtual agents stand out because they offer the ability to perform systematic experiments, simulating human behaviour without the associated costs of recruiting participants. Motivated by the importance of research transparency and replicability of results, this article focuses on the challenges of such an approach. It provides methodological details, recommendations, lessons learned and limitations based on our experience of setting up experiments for eight search engines (including main, news, image and video sections) with hundreds of virtual agents placed in different regions. We demonstrate the successful performance of our research infrastructure across multiple data collections, with diverse experimental designs, and point to different changes and strategies that improve the quality of the method. We conclude that virtual agents are a promising venue for monitoring the performance of algorithms across long periods of time, and we hope that this article can serve as a basis for further research in this area.

How do economic shocks affect pressure by the mass public for pro-environmental political action? If democratic systems are to develop and sustain ambitious environmental policy over several decades, this question is important to answer. Theoretically, we argue to look beyond changes in attitudes such as environmental concern, and trace whether and how citizen's policy preferences, and the political importance they attach to environment-related issues change when experiencing a deterioration of their personal economic situation. Empirically, we draw on high-quality population-representative panel survey data for an affluent country, Switzerland, combining tailored survey measures for quasi-random Corona-related employment and income losses, nuanced measures of environmental attitudes and policy preferences, and recently developed measures for issue importance. We neither find a decline of environmental policy support among economically affected individuals compared to the rest of the population (a population wide drop, however), nor lower importance given to environment related relative to economic issues in voting decisions. While this suggests that politicians need not fear electoral losses when pursuing environmental policies in times of economic crisis, we note that the severe extent of the Covid-induced recession, coupled with a rapid recovery, is peculiar to this economic crisis and warrants further research regarding the generalizability of our findings to economic shocks of longer duration.

Researchers, politicians, and pundits commonly expect that voters retrospectively punish and reward government parties for tax policies, but there is surprisingly little cross-country evidence that backs this claim. This study provides comprehensive evidence from 30 OECD countries, 1970–2020. It analyzes the electoral fates of government parties that increased or cut taxes on personal incomes and consumption. Our findings confirm the prevalence of electoral consequences, but these depend on the type and direction of tax change. Government parties lose votes when they increase personal income taxes while there is only marginal evidence suggesting electoral reward for income tax increases and electoral consequences after value-added tax changes. The findings also indicate the distributive effects of reforms to matter. The most pronounced consequences arise when governments raise income taxes on the poor. The moderating role of conditional factors such as government partisanship and fiscal pressure are explored, but no consensus emerges from the findings.

This article analyses whether and how fairness considerations affect citizens’ support of European Union (EU) policies and integration. While past literature has revealed that perceptions of procedural and substantive fairness impact on public opinion at the level of the nation state, we know less about the fairness‐support nexus when it comes to international cooperation. We here make use of the case of differentiated integration (DI) to experimentally dissect normative and utility‐oriented considerations in the evaluation of EU policies. DI as an instrument to overcome heterogeneity‐induced gridlock has been linked to both autonomy and dominance, and it can generate winners and losers in the EU. Our experiments reveal that citizens largely support DI. However, they are opposed to forms of DI which impose negative externalities on a subgroup of EU member states. This holds irrespective of the affectedness of citizens’ own member states. We take these findings as a first experimental confirmation that citizens, indeed, care about the fairness of the EU and its policies.

In surveys, Europeans routinely express high levels of support for a common security and defence policy of the European Union. Do these responses reflect real demands or superficial support that would crumble if the issue was politicised? This article provides new answers to this question. We conducted pre-registered survey experiments with more than 40,000 respondents from 25 European countries in which we randomly varied whether respondents received information about potential costs of two hypothetical cooperative activities: military operations and defence procurement. Support for these activities was systematically lower when costs were mentioned. We conclude that, in the event of politicisation, there is considerable potential for shifts in opinion and that caution is required in deriving a mandate for specific activities from high approval rates for cooperation in general.

Most states publicly support the recognition of Indigenous rights. Nevertheless, their domestic policies to address Indigenous rights issues vary considerably across countries. So far, research has not committed itself to investigating the consequences of different Indigenous policies on the peoples concerned and their social status. Do policy contexts that accommodate Indigenous rights firmly contribute to status equality between Indigenous people and the ethnic majority? I study this question in the case of Norway and Sweden. These countries host one Indigenous people – the Sámi – but pursue diverging Indigenous policies. Using new survey data, I show that, despite the absence of material inequalities, there is a clear gap in the social status perceptions between Indigenous and majority respondents in Sweden. In Norway, I do not find that Sámi’s perception of their social position is lower than the majority's. The results suggest that the Swedish policies governing the recognition of Sámi rights are less effective in resolving unequal status perceptions.

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dc.contributor.author: Heinisch, Reinhard