Aktuelle Publikationen

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We draw attention to a simple yet underappreciated way of forecasting the outcomes of elections involving two rounds of voting: surveying the voters’ candidate evaluations in first round exit polls, poststratifying the sample proportions of reported votes to official first round election returns, and redistributing the votes for eliminated competitors according to their supporters’ lower-order preferences among the viable alternatives in round two. We argue that the approach is likely to outperform standard pre-election surveys, due to its better coverage and reduced measurement error, and the possibility of correcting for sample selection. We set out the practical details of the method and demonstrate its usefulness by employing a recent German mayoral election as an empirical case. Thirteen candidates were competing in the first round, while there were six candidates in the decisive second round. The runoff result was forecast two weeks in advance with an average absolute error of less than one percentage point.

Conflict managers around the world cling to the hope that power-sharing decreases the risk of civil war in post-conflict societies. Distinguishing between territorial and governmental conflicts, we analyse the origin and effectiveness of power-sharing institutions (PSI) and power-sharing arrangements (PSA). Our examination reveals that power-sharing is largely a consequence of the institutional legacy and of the war outcome. While PSI such as proportional representation or federalism cannot prevent a war from recurring, PSA in the form of grand coalitions reduces this risk marginally. However, granting autonomy to a rebellious region increases the danger that the relationship with the government turns violent again. Our results suggest that constitution makers should advocate power-sharing with caution.

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Leadership research has focused on the positive effects of transformational and charismatic leadership but has neglected the negative side effects. Addressing this gap, we analyzed followers' dependency on the leader as a relevant negative side effect in the relationship between transformational leadership and followers' creativity and developed an integrative framework on parallel positive and negative effects of transformational leadership. As expected, results from a study with 416 R&D employees showed that transformational leadership promotes followers' creativity but at the same time increases followers' dependency which in turn reduces their creativity. This negative indirect effect attenuated the positive influence of transformational leadership on followers' creativity.

The literature on institutional determinants of intra-state violence commonly asserts that the presence of multiple political parties reduces the conflict potential within countries. By co-opting oppositional groups into an institutionalized political arena, dissidents would prefer parliamentary means over violent rebellion in order to pursue their goals. The present article shows that this proposition does not necessarily hold true for resource-abundant states. In the presence of vast natural resources such as oil, countries exhibiting numerous non-competitive parties are actually more susceptible to internal conflict. Logit models that employ different estimation techniques and alternative operationalizations are shown to corroborate the proposed claim.

Why does lobbying success in the European Union (EU) vary across interest groups? Even though this question is central to the study of EU policy-making, only few have dealt with it. The small number of existing studies is moreover characterized by a multitude of hypotheses and contradictory findings. This article aims to overcome these shortcomings by presenting a theoretical exchange model that identifies information supply, citizen support and economic power of entire lobbying camps as the major determinants of lobbying success. The hypotheses are empirically evaluated based on a large new dataset. By combining a quantitative text analysis of interest group submissions to Commission consultations with an online survey among interest groups, the theoretical expectations are tested across a large number of policy issues and interest groups while controlling for individual interest group and issue characteristics. The empirical analysis confirms the theoretical expectations indicating that lobbying is a collective enterprise.

Event datasets on political violence, which are comprised of coded collected news reports, have enjoyed a renaissance within the academic community. The inclusion of civilian fatalities within these datasets is a promising and welcomed advancement regarding the availability of data on one-sided violence. However, these datasets are often criticised due to their heavy reliance on media records, which may be tainted by biases. So far, little attention has been paid to the specific problems that arise in the coding procedure with respect to one-sided violence. This article addresses such difficulties by discussing particular challenges presented by media biases and by providing empirical evidence from coding one-sided violence. Furthermore, solutions and strategies are offered to the issues that could affect the coding process, including increased transparency, definition-adaptation, and the use of appropriate statistical models.

Haben die Digital Natives andere Wertvorstellungen und Präferenzen als die übrigen generationalen Gruppen in der Arbeitswelt? Eine Befragung von Mitarbeitenden eines Automobilzulieferers liefert erste Antworten. Der Beitrag leitet daraus Empfehlungen für die Gestaltung von Führungs- und Anreizsystemen sowie die Führungsbeziehungen unterschiedlicher generationaler Gruppen am Arbeitsplatz ab.

Measuring culture and its dynamics through surveys has important limitations, but the emerging field of computational social science allows us to overcome them by analyzing large-scale datasets. In this article, we study cultural dynamics through the votes in the Eurovision song contest, which are decided by a crowd-based scheme in which viewers vote through mobile phone messages. Taking into account asymmetries and imperfect perception of culture, we measure cultural relations among European countries in terms of cultural affinity. We propose the Friend-or-Foe coefficient, a metric to measure voting biases among participants of a Eurovision contest. We validate how this metric represents cultural affinity through its relation with known cultural distances, and through numerical analysis of biased Eurovision contests. We apply this metric to the historical set of Eurovision contests from 1975 to 2012, finding new patterns of stronger modularity than using votes alone. Furthermore, we define a measure of polarization that, when applied to empirical data, shows a sharp increase within EU countries during 2010 and 2011. We empirically validate the relation between this polarization and economic indicators in the EU, showing how political decisions influence both the economy and the way citizens relate to the culture of other EU members.

The literature on the partisan foundations of education policies leads to ambiguous expectations with regard to the predominant cleavage structures in party competition on this topic. There is disagreement as to whether leftist or rightist parties are responsible for increasing spending on education, while others claim that educational expansion has become a consensual topic. This paper analyses the cleavage structure of party competition over the topic of educational expansion, relying on data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. It identifies political parties as ‘issue-owners’ and ‘issue-ignorers’, respectively, and finds considerable variation with regard to cleavage structures of party competition between countries and across time. One tentative conclusion from the analysis is that policy legacies play an important role in shaping cleavage structures.