Aktuelle Publikationen

An indicator of globalization is the growing number of humans crossing national borders. In contrast to explanations for flows of goods and capital, migration research has concentrated on unilateral movements to rich democracies. This focus ignores the bilateral determinants of migration and stymies empirical and theoretical inquiry. The theoretical insights proposed here show how the regime type of both sending and receiving countries influences human migration. Specifically, democratic regimes accommodate fewer immigrants than autocracies and democracies enable emigration while autocracies prevent exit. The mechanisms for this divergence are a function of both micro-level motivations of migrants and institutional constraints on political leaders. Global bilateral migration data and a statistical method that captures the higher-order dependencies in network data are employed in this article.

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This article examines the conditions that influence citizens' satisfaction with democracy in Africa. In the analysis, individual, ethnic group, and national context determinants are combined in a multilevel model allowing a comparative analysis over time, countries, ethnic groups, and individuals. Using Afrobarometer survey data along with ethnic group-level and national-level data, I show that factors shaping citizens' satisfaction can be found on each contextual level. To a large extent, perceived economic and political inequalities between ethnic groups explain variations in citizens' satisfaction.

Often admired by international observers, the German dual training system has come under pressure in recent years because of a persistent lack in training slots for young people. The article addresses the question of how policy makers have reacted to the problems in the training market. Particular attention is paid to the formation of politico-economic coalitions between state actors, business representatives and unions. On the basis of three case studies of recent reforms (or reform attempts), we identify two types of cross-class coalitions: a conservative coalition that aims at maintaining the status quo of the firm-based training regime and a segmentalist coalition promoting the gradual transformation of the system towards a less collective and more firm-centred variety. In both kinds of politico-economic coalitions, business actors play a pivotal role. The reason for the privileged position of business in the politics of training reform is, I argue, a politically constructed dependency of the state and unions on the continued co-operation of business in the provision of training slots. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of my findings for the debate on the dualization of co-ordinated market economies.

In this article, we pursue the objective of empirically testing the extent to which changes in environmental policy outputs can explain changes in environmental impacts. Previously, systematic testing of this relationship was hampered by the lack of a compelling measurement of changes in regulatory policy outputs. To remedy this, we present a novel approach to the measurement of events of regulatory output change. We illustrate our concept by employing data on changes in clean air regulations in 24 advanced democracies from 1976 to 2003. In a next step, we explore the extent to which changes in clean air regulations can account for changes in air pollutant emissions. The empirical analysis suggests that changes in clean air regulations cannot be unconditionally associated with changing intensities of air pollutant emission. We deem these results to have far-reaching implications for the study of regulatory policy change.

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Integrating the literature on the varieties of capitalism with sociological studies of educational stratification, this paper argues that macro-level institutions significantly shape the relationship between educational background and preferences for different kinds of education on the micro level. In particular, we find that the institutional set-up of the education system and the degree of coordination prevailing in a given economy both have a distinct impact on micro-level associations. Segregated education systems dominated by vocational training at the secondary level increase the strength of the association between educational background and preferences, whereas higher levels of coordination weaken this relationship. Our claims are supported by an empirical analysis of Eurobarometer survey data, using multilevel regression statistics. Our findings have important consequences for our understanding of the relationship between skill formation processes, labour market institutions and social equality.