Aktuelle Publikationen

Do politicians perceive scandals differently when they implicate members of their own party rather than another party? We address this question using a between-subject survey experiment, whereby we randomly assign UK local councillors (N = 2133) to vignettes describing a major national-level scandal in their own party versus another party. Our results show that local politicians perceive a significantly larger impact of this national scandal on the national party image when it concerns their own party (relative to another party). When evaluating the same scandal’s impact on the local party image, no similar effect is observed. This suggests that local politicians tone down the local impact of a national scandal more when thinking about their own party. We suggest this derives from a form of motivated reasoning whereby politicians selectively focus on information allowing a more negative view of direct electoral opponents. These findings arise independent of the type of scandal under consideration.

The article analyses the strategies of Hungarian higher education interest organisations against the encroachments on academic freedom by Viktor Orbán’s governments. We contrast the 2012-2013 and 2017-2019 protest waves and find that innovations in strategy came from new organisations in both periods, whereas established ones were rather passive or opted for the status quo. However, in the second period, new actors consciously declined to pursue wider systemic goals and aimed at building up formal organisations instead of loose, movement-like networks. The focus on keeping a unified front and interest representation on the workplace level did not change the overall outcome. Just like during the first period, the government was able to reach its goals without major concessions. Nevertheless, during the second protest wave the government was unable to divide and pacify its opponents, which stripped it of its legalistic strategy and revealed its authoritarianism.

This paper focuses on the transferability of policy feedback and respon- siveness theories. These theories have enjoyed a great deal of scholarly interest in the past years and are widely applied in different country contexts. However, this the- ory transfer tends to be more focused on the empirical challenges while neglecting the fact that it also involves normative implications about representative democracy. These implications, I argue, are strongly influenced by the real-world example of the United States, where the theories were originally developed. More specifically, I contend that bringing in theoretical approaches that are more influenced by Eu- ropean experiences such as neocorporatism and party difference theory affects the depiction of the role of interest groups and party government in policy feedback and responsiveness theories. I conclude by highlighting the contours of an empirical research agenda that might further elaborate on these issues.

Agenda-setting theory has a long tradition within policy studies but took a major leap forward with the work of Baumgartner and Jones and their formulation of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET). Since then, an extensive literature has developed, both evaluating the notion of punctuated equilibria from a comparative perspective and providing ideas for a broader theoretical development on political processes. The original formulation of the theory was based on the US political system, whose institutional elements make it a likely case to observe the type of political processes that PET highlights. Subsequent comparative studies have demonstrated that the theory’s idea is of general relevance in two regards. First, factors, such as issue characteristics, operate similarly across political systems. Second, political institutions shape agenda-setting processes. This paper expands on the political institutional features that are particularly important when applying PET to a West European context. We illustrate the interplay of these institutional characteristics with the political process regarding the German debate on digitalization.

Liberalization poses significant challenges for the continued provision of collective goods within coordinated market economies (CME). Extant scholarship suggests two dominant sets of responses. Either CMEs continue to rely on employer coordination, but only for a privileged core, leading to dualization. Or, in cases where the state enjoys high capacity, the state instead compensates for liberalization but ends up crowding out employer coordination. In both cases, the result is decreasing employer coordination. We argue that in CMEs, the state may also play the role of “orchestrator” by supporting the revitalization of employer coordination. It does so through the deployment of ideational and institutional resources that mobilize employers’ associations on a voluntary basis. Applying our framework to a core area of coordinated capitalism, vocational education and training, we show that in both Germany and Switzerland, this indirect and soft form of state intervention was instrumental for turning around their crisis-stricken vocational training systems.

This article explores the relationship between trade union governance roles in unemployment benefit systems, their power resources and their capacity to counteract liberalising and dualising trends in the labour market in conservative welfare states with compulsory unemployment insurance. Against received wisdom, this article argues that in the 21st century trade unions in continental Europe have generally sought to combat the dualism to which their welfare states and labour markets are institutionally susceptible. In this context, a role in the operation of unemployment benefit systems and related forms of institutional power could help unions to attain the enhanced outsider protection they seek. But different modes of union involvement in public policy produce different levels of institutional power, and help to condition its impact on policy development over time. This article illustrates these points with a comparison of the recent development of labour market policy and regulation in Austria, France and Germany.

New technologies are a key driver of labor market change in recent decades. There are renewed concerns that technological developments in areas such as robotics and artificial intelligence will destroy jobs and create political upheaval. This article reviews the vibrant debate about the economic consequences of recent technological change and then discusses research about how digitalization may affect political participation, vote choice, and policy preferences. It is increasingly well established that routine workers have been the main losers of recent technological change and disproportionately support populist parties. However, at the same time, digitalization also creates a large group of economic winners who support the political status quo. The mechanisms connecting technology-related workplace risks to political behavior and policy demands are less well understood. Voters may fail to fully comprehend the relative importance of different causes of structural economic change and misattribute blame to other factors. We conclude with a list of pressing research questions.

The marginalization of trade unions was a notable feature of the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone periphery. However, governments have recently imposed liberalizing reforms against union protests in the Eurozone core too. We argue that organized labour loses influence across the core-periphery divide because the ‘new economic governance’ puts national governments under enhanced pressure to compete against each other on wage and labour market flexibility—a process known as competitive internal devaluation. The article illustrates this argument through comparative quantitative indicators of liberalization and qualitative process-tracing in three core countries. Whereas Germany’s outstanding competitiveness position allowed its unions to extract significant concessions, their counterparts in France and Finland faced unprecedented defeats from governments aiming to restore economic growth by closing down the competitiveness gap to Germany. Our findings highlight the class power implications of the Eurozone’s reliance on the labour market as the main economic adjustment variable.

Two contrasting perspectives can be identified in the current literature on the relationship between European integration and the welfare state. On the one hand, the race to the bottom thesis presumes that welfare spending will be reduced to the lowest common denominator. On the other hand, the upward convergence thesis suggests that European integration supports and strengthens the capacities of national welfare states. This suggests that the consequences of European integration for national social protection systems are ambiguous. The current study contributes to this debate, by investigating the relationship between European integration and the welfare state from the perspective of public opinion. Do European citizens envision a race to the bottom or an upward convergence in social protection, and why so? Analysing data from the European Social Survey in 18 EU countries, the article reveals that the material benefits brought by national and supranational institutions, jointly shape citizens' expectations about the EU–welfare nexus, although in opposite directions. Generous national welfare provision fuels expectations that European integration fosters a race to the bottom for social protection levels, while higher receipts from EU Structural Fund programs and individual trust in EU institutions raise expectations of the EU as a catalyst of upward convergence in social standards. The implications of these findings for social policymaking in multilevel governance regimes are discussed.

Representative democracy presents politicians with an information problem: How to find out what voters want? While party elites used to rely on their membership or mass surveys, social media enables them to learn about voters’ issue priorities in real time and adapt their campaign messages accordingly. Yet, we know next to nothing about how campaigns make use of these new possibilities. To narrow this gap, we use a unique data set covering every Facebook post by party leaders and party organizations in the run-up to the 2017 Austrian parliamentary election. We test the hypothesis that party actors are more likely to double down on issues that have previously generated higher levels of user engagement. We also theorize that responsiveness is conditional on major/minor party status and pre-campaign issue salience. The analysis shows that parties’ issue strategies respond to user engagement, especially major parties on low-salience issues. This represents some of the first empirical evidence on how social media can enhance parties’ issue responsiveness.

While there has been a veritable boom in literature on organized interests, their lobbying strategies, relationships with decision-makers, and their impact on policymaking, only a few studies have explored internal organizational developments and, specifically, the professionalization of interest groups. The present study focuses on the national and transnational factors driving the professionalization of interest groups in Central and Eastern Europe, a region previously neglected in much of the interest group literature. Based on a sample of more than 400 surveyed organizations operating in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovenia in the healthcare, higher education, and energy sectors, we explore three bundles of factors potentially enhancing the professionalization of interest groups – organizational funding sources, national and transnational intergroup cooperation and organizations’ standing in the domestic interest group system. Our statistical analyses show that state subsidies and tight policy coordination with the state are crucial drivers of internal organizational professionalization, suggesting rather patronistic and symbiotic relationships between the state and certain organizations. However, our data also support the notion that interorganizational collaboration, both at the national and international levels, may also be key to organizational professionalization, enabling groups that lack close ties with the state to compensate their disadvantage with intensive domestic and international networking. The study is also among the first to link increasing professionalization with organizational population density.

Previous research into public support for welfare solidarity often refers to the importance of ‘reciprocity’, which means that generous social benefits are supported if they are matched by credible commitments to contribute by those who can. The current article adds to this body of literature by providing novel empirical evidence on the roles of generosity and conditionality in support for European unemployment insurance programmes. Drawing on a conjoint survey experiment in 13 European countries, we show that Europeans may be motivated by an ethos of reciprocity, since policy proposals that are both generous and conditional are the most popular among the general population. However, conditional generosity seems to have much more traction among those who consider the unemployed as undeserving, suggesting that EU-level policies may succeed in overcoming the diffidence of welfare sceptics if reciprocity is ensured in the architecture of the policy design.

Shared leadership is not only about individual team members engaging in leadership, but also about team members adopting the complementary follower role. However, the question of what enables team members to fill in each of these roles and the corresponding influence of formal leaders have remained largely unexplored. Using a social network perspective allows us to predict both leadership and followership ties between team members based on considerations of implicit leadership and followership theories. From this social information processing perspective, we identify individual team members’ political skill and the formal leaders’ empowering leadership as important qualities that facilitate the adoption of each the leader and the follower role. Results from a social network analysis in a R&D department with 305 realized leadership ties support most of our hypotheses.

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dc.contributor.author: Wendt, Alexander; Kaiser, Heinz-Jürgen

How do political actors respond when an issue suddenly jumps to the top of the public agenda? While conventional theories of party behaviour predict that parties increase their attention to that issue, they tell us little about how they will do so. One approach is to increase attention to the focal issue while maintaining the messaging level on other issues (volume expansion). Alternatively, political actors can increase their attention to the focal issue while decreasing their emphasis on other issues (issue substitution). We theorize that the overall volume of communication determines which approach dominates: Parties with high communication volumes will tend towards issue substitution, whereas those with lower communication volumes will prefer volume expansion. We confirm this hypothesis using a data set covering all press releases issued by members of the Austrian parliament between 2013 and 2017—a period that includes the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ as an agenda shock.

Previous research has identified a variety of barriers to digital government, and regularly emphasizes the importance of individuals that navigate institutional contexts and strategically pursue digital government solutions. This exploratory analysis investigates how these individuals understand barriers to digital government and the strategies that they apply to overcome them. Using interviews with digital champions in the U.S government, we extract the tactics employed to overcome these barriers including storytelling, community building, external validation, orientation towards citizen perspectives and a reliance on external peer networks. Results highlight the interconnected nature of barriers and the non-linear quality of strategies, and allow the construction of a theoretical model for structural and cultural barriers and strategies as experienced by digital champions. This model highlights the perceived efficacy and impact of cultural strategies, and the association of these strategies with external peer networks and citizens, and a tension in how digital champions describe actors and approaches introduced from the private sector.

Does enhanced descriptive representation lead to substantive representation? Legislators who share descriptive features with disadvantaged groups do not necessarily represent their group interests. Instead, Members of Parliament (MPs) strategically choose when to engage with the policy topic of their corresponding groups. MPs represent their respective group at the beginning of their career because it confers credibility when they have no legislative track record and few opportunities to demonstrate expertise. These group-specific efforts are replaced by other legislative activities at later stages of their careers. The authors apply this theoretical expectation across four disadvantaged groups – women, migrants, low social class and the young – and thereby offer a broad perspective on descriptive representation. Their sample consists of a unique data base that combines biographical information on German MPs with topic-coded parliamentary questions for the period 1998 to 2013. The study demonstrates the diminishing value of representing the disadvantaged across different types of MPs.

Flags are important national symbols that have transcended into the digital world with inclusion in the Unicode character set. Despite their significance, there is little information about their role in online communication. This article examines the role of flag emoji in political communication online by analyzing 640,676 tweets by the most important political parties and Members of Parliament in Germany and the United States. We find that national flags are frequently used in political communication and are mostly used in-line with political ideology. As off-line, flag emoji usage in online communication is associated with external events of national importance. This association is stronger in the United States than in Germany. The results also reveal that the presence of the national flag emoji is associated with significantly higher engagement in Germany irrespective of party, whereas it is associated with slightly higher engagement for politicians of the Republican party and slightly lower engagement for Democrats in the United States. Implications of the results and future research directions are discussed.

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