Aktuelle Publikationen

This study investigates the emergence and the performance effects of an age-diversity climate at the organizational level of analysis. Building upon Kopelman and colleagues’ (Kopelman, Brief, & Guzzo, 1990) climate model of firm productivity as well as Cox's (1994)  interactional model of cultural diversity, we hypothesize a positive influence of age-inclusive HR practices on the development of an organization-wide age-diversity climate, which in turn should be directly related to collective perceptions of social exchange and indirectly to firm performance and employees’ collective turnover intentions. The assumed relationships are tested in a sample of 93 German small and medium-sized companies with 14,260 employees participating. To circumvent common source problems, information for the various constructs was gathered from 6 different sources. To test our assumed relationships, we applied structural equation modeling and executed bootstrapping procedures to test the significance of the indirect effects. We received support for all assumed relationships. The paper concludes with practical recommendations on how to establish and make use of a positive age-diversity climate.

Trust is typically portrayed as beneficial to all concerned; something which is inherently good. In this article we focus on interpersonal trust and argue that, while there are undoubted benefits, trust can also be problematic; there are circumstances in which it can become a ‘poisoned chalice’ for one or other of the parties involved. We question whether the potential for negative experiences in relation to trust has been fully explored and argue that its true dark side lies within the dynamics of the trust relationship. From this stance we use the social exchange and gift giving literatures to re-appraise trust in a way that highlights the importance of expectation and intent and demonstrates the circumstances in which trust may not be beneficial for one of the parties involved. We conclude with a research agenda which we believe will further develop our understanding of this complex human interaction.

Background


Newly established high-technology areas such as eHealth require regulations regarding the interoperability of health information infrastructures and data protection. It is argued that government capacities as well as the extent to which public and private organizations participate in policy-making determine the level of eHealth legislation. Both explanatory factors are influenced by international organizations that provide knowledge transfer and encourage private actor participation.




Methods


Data analysis is based on the Global Observatory for eHealth - ATLAS eHealth country profiles which summarizes eHealth policies in 114 countries. Data analysis was carried out using two-component hurdle models with a truncated Poisson model for positive counts and a hurdle component model with a binomial distribution for zero or greater counts.




Results


The analysis reveals that the participation of private organizations such as donors has negative effects on the level of eHealth legislation. The impact of public-private partnerships (PPPs) depends on the degree of government capacities already available and on democratic regimes. Democracies are more responsive to these new regulatory demands than autocracies. Democracies find it easier to transfer knowledge out of PPPs than autocracies. Government capacities increase the knowledge transfer effect of PPPs, thus leading to more eHealth legislation.




Conclusions


All international regimes – the WHO, the EU, and the OECD – promote PPPs in order to ensure the construction of a national eHealth infrastructure. This paper shows that the development of government capacities in the eHealth domain has to be given a higher priority than the establishment of PPPs, since the existence of some (initial) capacities is the sine qua non of further capacity building.

An abundance of large data sets and improved estimation methods have enabled
conflict researchers to estimate the risk of war or terrorist incidents quite precisely. However, as in the case of the prediction of particularly violent earthquakes, forecasting extremely bloody events in continuing conflicts has been difficult until now. This article reports how power laws can be used to predict extreme massacres ex post and ex ante. The power-law distribution that we use is based on the observation that standard probability distributions like the normal distribution typically underestimate the risk of such escalations. Using fatality data until the end of February 2013, we calculate the probability of at least one single event with 250 or more dead civilians at 80% (59%–94%) and between March and May 2013 of up to 48%. We discuss the ethical and practical implications of these findings and argue that the forecasts could provide a transparent risk assessment tool to decision makers.

Political discourse is the verbal interaction between political actors in a policy domain. This article explains the formation of polarized advocacy or discourse coalitions in this complex phenomenon by presenting a dynamic, stochastic, and discrete agent-based model based on graph theory and local optimization. In a series of thought experiments, actors compute their utility of contributing a specific statement to the discourse by following ideological criteria, preferential attachment, agenda-setting strategies, governmental coherence, or other mechanisms. The evolving macro-level discourse is represented as a dynamic network and evaluated against arguments from the literature on the policy process. A simple combination of four theoretical mechanisms is already able to produce artificial policy debates with theoretically plausible properties. Any sufficiently realistic configuration must entail innovative and path-dependent elements as well as a blend of exogenous preferences and endogenous opinion formation mechanisms.

Seeking to explain the difficult cases of delayed democratic transition in theWestern Balkans, recent literature argues that ‘national identity’ significantly limits the effectiveness of external actors’ political conditionality. This argument is tested in this article by investigating Serbia’s co-operation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which was demanded by the United States and the European Union (EU). The findings show that incidents of Serbian co-operation with the ICTY were not preceded by widespread national identity change; rather, co-operation occurred when Serbia was faced with consistent external pressure and the immediate
prospect of small-scale rewards. Conditionality thus remained effective. These findings challenge theoretical arguments that issues of national identity may impede external actors’ projection of power, independently of domestic actors’cost-benefit calculations. Moreover, they suggest that, in the future, external actors such as the EU may continue to rely upon political conditionality for their democratization agenda, even concerning domestically sensitive issue-areas.

This article analyses addictive behaviour policy regimes - focusing on illegal drugs and gambling - in 19 countries over a period of 50 years. It compares how these countries have combined rules on the consumption and possession of cannabis and on the participation in sports betting with sanctions for violations of these rules. While theories of policy convergence can explain dominant trends in the way the combination of these policy instruments have changed, they cannot account for all of the empirical variation observed. Turning to Portugal, a case which deviates in both illegal drug and gambling policy from the expected trend, we show that explanations of policy change improve substantially when taking the concept of policy coherence into account. Specifically, we argue that changes of the policy status quo are facilitated when policy entrepreneurs succeed in shaping a perception of policy incoherence. In turn, when relevant actors are able to maintain a perception of policy coherence, the policy status quo is stabilized.

Protection against social risks is generally popular among voters and should enjoy the benefits of institutional inertia. Yet retrenchment occurs rather frequently in advanced welfare states without this systematically leading to electoral punishment. We solve this paradox by, first, arguing that governments can avoid the blame of retrenchment by pursuing a strategy of ‘expansionary dismantling’ where new policies and instruments are used to compensate reform losers and to obfuscate cutbacks. Second, we test our argument with a huge new dataset consisting of changes in unemployment legislation and replacement rates in 18 OECD countries from 1976 to 2000. The statistical tests provide robust support for our argument, suggesting that the introduction of new policies and instruments leads to cutbacks in replacement rates. We also find that left-leaning governments are least likely to engage in expansionary dismantling.

In this paper, we address two empirical puzzles: Why are cross-country differences in the division of labour between public and private education funding so large and why are they politically sustainable in the long term? We argue that electoral institutions play a crucial role in shaping politico-economic distributive coalitions that affected the original division of labour in education financing. In proportional representation systems, the lower and middle classes formed a coalition supporting the establishment of a system with a large share of public funding. In majoritarian systems, in contrast, the middle class voters aligned with the upper income class and supported private education spending instead. Once established, institutional arrangements create feedback effects on the micro-level of attitudes, reinforcing political support even among upper middle classes in public systems. These hypotheses are tested empirically both on the micro level of preferences as well as on the macro level with aggregate data and survey data from the ISSP for 20 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.

Der Beitrag behandelt das Thema „Honoraraerzte“ nicht, wie bisher ueblich, aus aerztlicher Sicht, sondern erstmals in der Perspektive von Beschaeftigungsbeziehungen, insbesondere atypischer Beschaeftigungsverhaeltnisse (vor allem Befristung, Leiharbeit und Solo-Selbststaendigkeit). Nach der Einleitung und Problemstellung werden die wesentlichen Merkmale dieser neuen Beschaeftigungsform, die in den vergangenen Jahren deutlich zugenommen hat, in Abgrenzung zum Normalarbeitsverhaeltnis skizziert. Anschliessend erfolgt die Behandlung der soziodemographischen Merkmale. Darauf aufbauend wird die Frage diskutiert, ob Honoraraerzte als atypisch Beschaeftigte zugleich den haeufig mit diesen Beschaeftigungsverhaeltnissen verbundenen Prekaritaetsrisiken (in Bezug auf Einkommen, Beschaeftigungsstabilitaet und -faehigkeit, Integration in soziale Sicherungssysteme) ausgesetzt sind. Abschliessend geht der Beitrag auf die Vertretung kollektiver Interessen ein.

How does segregation shape intergroup violence in contested urban spaces? Should nominal rivals be kept separate or instead more closely integrated? We develop an empirically grounded agent-based model to understand the sources and patterns of violence in urban areas, employing Jerusalem as a demonstration case and seeding our model with microlevel, geocoded data on settlement patterns. An optimal set of parameters is selected to best fit the observed spatial distribution of violence in the city, with the calibrated model used to assess how different levels of segregation, reflecting various proposed “virtual futures” for Jerusalem, would shape violence. Our results suggest that besides spatial proximity, social distance is key to explaining conflict over urban areas: arrangements conducive to reducing the extent of intergroup interactions—including localized segregation, limits on mobility and migration, partition, and differentiation of political authority—can be expected to dampen violence, although their effect depends decisively on social distance.

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In liberal political theory, it is often assumed that justifications of political decisions should not make use of non-political values, especially religious ones, but only of political values. Deep moral questions, notably concerning bioethics, have however failed to meet this standard. In this paper, I argue that the distinctions between political and non-political values and between religious and secular values are blurrier than is usually acknowledged. I illustrate this claim with an analysis of arguments used in France and in the United States in debates about stem cell research.