Aktuelle Publikationen

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

Asylum recognition rates in advanced democracies differ not only across states but also vary within them, translating into fluctuating individual chances to obtain protection. Existing studies on the determinants of these regional inequities typically rely on aggregate data. Utilizing a German refugee survey and leveraging a quasi-natural experiment arising from state-based allocation rules tied to national dispersal policies, we test two explanations for the perplexing regional differences. Drawing on principal–agent models of administrative decision-making, we test whether asylum decision-makers consciously or unconsciously comply with regional political preferences between 2015 and 2017 in Germany, one of the major European destination countries for refugee migration. We furthermore explore whether such biased decision-making amplifies in times of organizational stress as suggested by the statistical discrimination theory. Using mixed-effects logistic regressions, our analyses confirm a lower approval probability in regions with more immigration-averse residents or governments. We cannot confirm, however, that this association is mediated by high workloads or large knowledge gaps. Our results thus suggest that regional political biases affect the individual chance of asylum-seekers to obtain protection irrespective of temporal administrative conditions.

he reality of street-level discretion can entail discrimination against people based on their identifiable characteristics. However, there has been surprisingly little systematic assessment of empirical evidence about what can be done to tackle the problem. This paper systematically reviews empirical behavioural research studies (N = 53) on the effects of interventions to reduce bureaucratic discrimination. Evidence shows that three types of interventions are reliably effective: outreach to and engagement with clients, anti-bias training, and passive representation. Inclusive practices can also reduce discrimination. These effects are however context-dependent, and causal mechanisms linking interventions with effects remain a ‘black box’.

Trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) relations between developing and developed countries can lead to ratcheting-up of labor standards. Past research, however, has relegated developing countries to a passive role in the global economy while simultaneously largely ignoring variation between developed countries’ degree of protection of labor rights. In this study, we consider FDI by developing countries into Europe and how it can lead to labor upgrading. We argue that the obligations to upgrade implied by Europe’s regulatory environment will pressure developing country firms with strategic asset-seeking FDI to upgrade their practices which can subsequently diffuse in their home countries. We tease out this specific mechanism from others through a comparative research design juxtaposing FDI into high standard social Europe and the relatively low standard United States for a panel of 122 developing countries in the period 2001–2010. Our analysis compares how FDI into each location affects both collective and individual labor rights, finding that FDI into “Social Europe" leads to the improvement of labor standards, particularly trade union rights and substantive rights relating to working conditions, while there is no such upgrading effect for FDI into the United States. These findings are robust to multiple specifications, including an innovative application of the measurement strategy in studies on trading-/investing-up effects. This research helps us to understand two underappreciated facets of this latest phase of globalization: the rise of developing countries as agents of global integration and how regulatory disparities between potential economic partners can affect labor upgrading in those same developing countries. Any weakening of the European social model should consider its external consequences.

This exploratory analysis investigates self-reported work practices that managers consider to be crucial for driving smart city transformation. We build upon the literature on institutional work and highlight different institutional work types. Using interviews, we show that smart city managers use a combination of institutional work that includes (a) creation (e.g., introducing new ideas, technologies, methods, and policies), (b) maintenance (which involves preserving certain aspects of existing institutional arrangements that are deemed valuable), and (c) disruption (such as by challenging entrenched institutional arrangements). The results provide deep insights into how smart city managers express their roles and responsibilities in smart city transformation. We discuss implications for theory and practice and conclude with avenues for future research.

This literature review investigates the effects of public opinion on political outcomes in democracies, focusing on Comparative Political Economy (CPE) research. Many CPE researchers expect that parties and governments respond to public policy preferences that are exogenous to the political process. This review first formalizes the common CPE argument and then derives an alternative theoretical perspective from political psychology and political communication research. The contrasting theory highlights the impreciseness and endogeneity of public opinion, wherein political elites actively shape public sentiment. Through a comparative analysis of these contrasting theoretical approaches, the review extracts insights that promise to enrich future CPE research. It also develops the fundamentals of a theory on the impact of public opinion on political outcomes, which suggests that public opinion can be seen as an “elastic corridor” that constrains the opportunity space of parties.

Recent years have seen an increase in governmental interference in digital communication. Most research on this topic has focused on the application level, studying how content is manipulated or removed on websites, blogs or social media. However, in order for governments to obtain and maintain control of digital data flows, they need to secure access to the network infrastructure at the level of Internet service providers. In this paper, we study how the network topology of the Internet varies across different political environments, distinguishing between control at the level of individual Internet users (access) and at a higher level in the hierarchy of network carriers (transit). Using a novel method to estimate the structure of the Internet from network measurements, we show that in autocratic countries, state-owned (rather than privately-owned) providers have a markedly higher degree of control over transit networks. We also show that state-owned Internet providers often provide Internet access abroad, with a clear focus on other autocratic countries. Together, these results suggest that in autocracies, the network infrastructure is organized in a way that is more susceptible to the monitoring and manipulation of Internet data flows by state-owned providers both domestically and abroad.

Recent trends demonstrate that states with sufficient capabilities to be granted regional power status by its peers (primarily other states within their region) can nonetheless renounce regional leadership. This article analyzes the puzzling behavior of these detached or reluctant regional powers. We argue that resorting to an approach grounded in neoclassical realism is helpful to explain why regional powers might not exercise leadership. In this article regional leadership is conceptualized as an auxiliary goal within the grand strategy of a regional power. This goal will be pursued in the absence of certain structural and domestic constraints. Great power competition determines the incentives for regional leadership at the structural level. Capacity to extract and mobilize resources for foreign policy affects the decision to pursue leadership at the domestic level. We apply the analytical framework to analyze Brazil’s detachment from South America after the Cardoso and Lula presidencies.

In the fight against climate change, the European Union has developed a new growth strategy to transform Europe into the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. To support EU member states in their transition towards greener economies, climate change mitigation policies are being implemented at the EU-level. However, such policies can be designed in different ways, and gaining citizens’ support is crucial for the political feasibility of the European green transition. Drawing on data from an original conjoint experiment conducted in Germany (N = 5,796), this article investigates how policy design shapes public support for EU climate change mitigation. To this end, the study theoretically and empirically distinguishes four policy dimensions that address the distributive politics of the European green transition: sectoral scope, social spending, financing structure and cross-country distribution. The results confirm that all four policy dimensions significantly impact public support. Specifically, the study reveals that support is greatest for EU policy packages that target financial support at the renewable energy sector, include social investment policies, are financed by increasing taxes on the rich, and distribute resources across EU member states based on population size. Furthermore, citizens’ sensitivity to the policy design varies slightly by income position, left-right ideology and climate attitudes.