Aktuelle Publikationen

The livelihoods of rural populations in Africa are closely tied to small-scale farming. In recent years, private investors as well as governments have shown a growing interest in large-scale acquisition of arable land across the continent. While researchers have started to analyze the local economic and environmental impacts of such investments, their socio-political as well as psychological consequences remain poorly understood. This paper investigates how changes in land ownership patterns caused by large-scale land acquisitions affect the level of interpersonal trust among rural communities. We maintain that the transition from community and individual-smallholder land ownership into large-scale investor property has a negative impact on local levels of trust. Furthermore, we assume that the deterioration of trust caused by large-scale land investments is stronger among women than men. To test our claims, we connect circa 71,000 respondents from Afrobarometer surveys to georeferenced information on the location of land deals from 33 African countries. Relying on a difference-in-differences type of empirical strategy as well as an instrumental variable approach, we show that large-scale land investments indeed disrupt local social fabrics by reducing interpersonal trust. Our results suggest that trust in relatives is particularly affected by large-scale land acquisitions. In addition, we find that land deals reduce personalized trust among women but not necessarily among men.

This special issue addresses questions of causality and validity of different solution types in configurational comparative methods (CCMs). First, what main parameters characterize the debate about correct causal interpretation of solution types? Second, to what extent has this debate been linked to a theory of causation? The special issue contribution by Mahoney and Acosta bases qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) within a regularity theory of causation integrating type-level inferences and counterfactual cases. Swiatczak clarifies how the different algorithms underlying QCA and Coincidence Analysis (CNA) produce non-identical models. Baumgartner defines and benchmarks QCA solution types against the search target of minimal robust sufficiency. Alamos-Concha et al. identify the conservative solution as most appropriate for a multimethod design combining a counterfactual causal understanding at the cross-case level with an in-depth mechanistic explanation at the within-case level. Finally, Mahoney and Owen develop a general set-theoretic framework for the study of necessity and sufficiency in quantitative research using a counterfactual understanding of causality. Our introduction reviews the state of the art, identifies current limitations and open questions regarding the theoretical basis for causal interpretation of QCA solutions.

Background and aims
Although large-scale population studies have linked the use of classic psychedelics (lysergic acid diethylamide, psilocybin, or mescaline) to reduced odds of physical health problems, mental health problems, and criminal behavior, the roughly 35 million adults in the United States who have used classic psychedelics are nonetheless stigmatized in the American job market. Various federal organizations in the United States automatically reject applicants on the sole basis of prior psychedelic use, thereby practicing an open form of legal discrimination against these applicants. The present study investigates whether this discrimination can be justified based on associations between lifetime classic psychedelic use and motivationally-based workplace absenteeism.

Methods
Using pooled cross-sectional data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2013–2019) on 193,320 employed adults in the United States, this study tests whether lifetime classic psychedelic use predicts the number of workdays employees skipped in the last month (i.e., motivationally-based workplace absenteeism).

Results
After adjusting for sociodemographics, physical health indicators, and other substance use, no significant association between lifetime classic psychedelic use and motivationally-based workplace absenteeism is found.

Conclusion
This study builds on classic psychedelic research that is just beginning to take work-specific outcomes into account and offers empirical justification for the elimination of arbitrary drug-based recruitment policies in the workplace.

The existing literature postulates that individual-level attitudes toward immigration are partly determined via the effect of immigration on the labor market. In particular, the labor market competition hypothesis states that natives should oppose immigrants with similar qualifications because they threaten their jobs. Empirical findings, however, partly contradict this expectation. In this paper, we argue that one needs to evaluate immigration attitudes in a broader context since the impact of immigration should be mediated by actual job market competition. In industrialized countries, the arrival of high-skilled immigrants happens against a background in which economic globalization positively affects the demand for high-skilled labor. Thus, the influx of high-skilled immigrants should rarely increase job market competition. The opposite occurs for low-skilled workers, for which labor market insecurity is enhanced by both economic globalization and immigration. We find some support for our argument using micro-level data from 19 European countries.

Although successful sustainability transitions depend on public support, we still know little about citizens' opinions on climate solutions. Existing research often focuses on the problem perception of climate change rather than analyzing attitudes toward specific climate solutions. Studies also largely use closed questions to assess public opinion, posing a problem of ecological validity. Here, we address these gaps by leveraging data from a large-scale public consultation process, the "Grand Débat National", launched by the French government in response to the Yellow Vest movement in 2019. Combining structural topic modelling, dictionary-based text analysis and qualitative coding, we map the salience and directionality of public opinion on climate solutions. We find that consultation participants perceive climate change as the most salient environmental problem. Transforming the transport and energy sectors is the most supported solution for addressing climate change. For these two sectors, substitution-based climate solutions - as opposed to sufficiency- or efficiency-based measures - are most salient. For instance, participants stress the need to expand public transport infrastructure and switch to renewable energy technologies for power generation. Our findings demonstrate a strong public consensus on most substitution-based climate solutions, except for the role of cars and nuclear energy. While most participants do not link climate solutions to specific policy instruments, we find preferences for authority-based instruments in the context of phasing out polluting technologies, and treasury-based instruments for supporting innovation and phasing in low carbon technologies.

This article explores how parental resources work together to secure higher education for their offspring. It does so by, first, mapping the linkages between cumulative advantages and disadvantages of respondents’ parental resources and educational attainment across countries and cohorts. Second, investigating under which institutional setup of education systems these linkages between parental background and educational attainment are the weakest. At both levels, the set-analytic approach is applied. We show that disadvantages tend to cumulate to a much greater extent than advantages and their role in hindering higher educational attainment is much stronger than advantages to enable it. The only configuration of educational system that is sufficient to mitigate linkages between cumulative background and educational attainment in both directions, that is, advantageous background to enable and disadvantageous background to hinder higher educational attainment, combines high levels of standardization and decommodification.

Misinformation on social media has become a critical problem, particularly during a public health pandemic. Most social platforms today rely on users' voluntary reports to determine which news stories to fact-check first. Despite the importance, no prior work has explored the potential biases in such a reporting process. This work proposes a novel methodology to assess how users perceive truth or misinformation in online news stories. By conducting a large-scale survey (N = 15,000), we identify the possible biases in news perceptions and explore how partisan leanings influence the news selection algorithm for fact checking. Our survey reveals several perception biases or inaccuracies in estimating the truth level of stories. The first kind, called the total perception bias (TPB), is the aggregate difference in the ground truth and perceived truth level. The next two are the false-positive bias (FPB) and false-negative bias (FNB), which measures users' gullibility and cynicality of a given claim. We also propose ideological mean perception bias (IMPB), which quantifies a news story's ideological disputability. Collectively, these biases indicate that user perceptions are not correlated with the ground truth of new stories; users believe some stories to be more false and vice versa. This calls for the need to fact-check news stories that exhibit the most considerable perception biases first, which the current voluntary reporting does not offer. Based on these observations, we propose a new framework that can best leverage users' truth perceptions to remove false stories, correct misperceptions of users, or decrease ideological disagreements. We discuss how this new prioritizing scheme can aid platforms to significantly reduce the impact of fake news on user beliefs.

There are two main political economy explanations of the Eurocrisis. The labor market view regards cross-country differences in wage bargaining institutions as the root cause of the crisis. The finance view, instead, emphasizes cross-border financial flows and downplays labor market institutions. For the first time, we attempt to assess these two explanations jointly. We find that financial flows are better predictors of nominal wage growth than labor market institutions. At the same time, we show that wage moderation matters for bilateral export performance in the important case of Germany, but not for other countries. These results suggest that imposing wage moderation and labor market reforms onto the countries of the European periphery was unlikely to improve their plight. In contrast, stimulating wage growth in Germany might have contributed to rebalancing the Eurozone.

For centuries, European history was characterized by a fundamental asymmetry. While interpolity relations on the continent were often relatively balanced — without any dominant power being able to permanently establish a hierarchical relationship to the other major powers — the relations between European states and polities in other world regions were generally hierarchical and exploitative, as manifested in colonialism and imperialism. How can we explain this difference? I argue that the symmetrical character of relationships among major European powers, particularly in the form of sustained and intense military and economic competition, was partly constitutive of the hierarchical relationships between those same powers and other parts of the world. Specifically, three mechanisms connect sustained rivalries to imperialism: (1) political elites' desire to improve their relative status/prestige through territorial gains, (2) pressure from public budget deficits that incentivized colonial exploitation, and (3) the creation of powerful interest groups in the form of navies and armies that favored imperialism. Moreover, when territorial conflict over colonies escalated, imperial expansion could ultimately feed back into interpolity competition in Europe. I demonstrate these dynamics through systematic analyses of the rivalries between England and France (1689–1815) and between Imperial Germany and Great Britain (1871/1897–1918).

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We combine the recent literature on issue competition with work on intra-party heterogeneity to advance a novel theoretical argument. Starting from the premise that party leaders and non-leaders have different motivations and incentives, we conjecture that issue strategies should vary across the party hierarchy. We, therefore, expect systematic intra-party differences in the use of riding the wave and issue ownership strategies. We test this claim by linking public opinion data to manually coded information on over 3600 press releases issued by over 500 party actors across five election campaigns in Austria between 2006 and 2019. We account for self-selection into leadership roles by exploiting transitions into and out of leadership status over time. The results show that party leaders are more likely than non-leaders to respond to the public's issue priorities, but not more or less likely to pursue issue-ownership strategies.

We examine how six search engines filter and rank information in relation to the queries on the U.S. 2020 presidential primary elections under the default—that is nonpersonalized—conditions. For that, we utilize an algorithmic auditing methodology that uses virtual agents to conduct large-scale analysis of algorithmic information curation in a controlled environment. Specifically, we look at the text search results for “us elections,” “donald trump,” “joe biden,” “bernie sanders” queries on Google, Baidu, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Yandex, during the 2020 primaries. Our findings indicate substantial differences in the search results between search engines and multiple discrepancies within the results generated for different agents using the same search engine. It highlights that whether users see certain information is decided by chance due to the inherent randomization of search results. We also find that some search engines prioritize different categories of information sources with respect to specific candidates. These observations demonstrate that algorithmic curation of political information can create information inequalities between the search engine users even under nonpersonalized conditions. Such inequalities are particularly troubling considering that search results are highly trusted by the public and can shift the opinions of undecided voters as demonstrated by previous research.