Aktuelle Publikationen

Living labs have gained increased attention in research and practice as both a practical and theoretical innovation phenomenon that emphasizes co-creation, real-life settings, and user/customer involvement. More recently, living labs have also emerged as a specific approach to open innovation processes in the context of publics across the EU. Nevertheless, it is still not clear how the understanding of living labs can be translated and organized into new sectorial settings, what type of public sector innovation challenges it addresses, and what role citizens and users have. The aim of this article is therefore to explore and analyze how living labs are applied as processes for public sector innovation. Based on a mixed method approach of 21 European living lab cases, the analysis reveals a pattern of three different processes for living lab organizational and actor roles: living labs organized as cross-sectorial collaboration, living labs emerging within the public sector as main initiator and beneficiary, and living labs developed by civil society actors. The findings are presented as three scenarios for implementing living labs, which also acts as a background for the article's final discussion about the potentials and pitfalls of living labs in public sector contexts.

Research on rebel behavior during conflicts has traditionally focused on the use of violent tactics. However, evidence from several intrastate wars suggests that armed groups also occasionally employ general strikes—a method of civil resistance that has typically been associated with nonviolent groups. But when do rebels resort to general strikes? I argue that these tactics have a particular function which can offset potential risks for rebels after they have suffered losses in previous battles: Through general strikes, rebels signal sustained authority to the local population. The argument is tested for districts in Eastern India using newly compiled, disaggregated data on contentious action during the Maoist conflict. The paper contributes to a burgeoning literature on wartime civilian activism in two ways: First, it shows that armed groups themselves rely situationally on civilian mobilization. Second, it investigates the effect of conditions endogenous to the conflict on these tactical choices.

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Recent research has shown that inequality between ethnic groups is strongly driven by politics, where powerful groups and elites channel the state's resources toward their constituencies. Most of the existing literature assumes that these politically induced inequalities are static and rarely change over time. We challenge this claim and argue that economic globalization and domestic institutions interact in shaping inequality between groups. In weakly institutionalized states, gains from trade primarily accrue to political insiders and their co-ethnics. By contrast, politically excluded groups gain ground where a capable and meritocratic state apparatus governs trade liberalization. Using nighttime luminosity data from 1992 to 2012 and a global sample of ethnic groups, we show that the gap between politically marginalized groups and their included counterparts has narrowed over time while economic globalization progressed at a steady pace. Our quantitative analysis and four qualitative case narratives show, however, that increasing trade openness is associated with economic gains accruing to excluded groups in only institutionally strong states, as predicted by our theoretical argument. In contrast, the economic gap between ethnopolitical insiders and outsiders remains constant or even widens in weakly institutionalized countries.

While a large body of research has highlighted the conflict-inducing effects of climate change, we still know very little about the mechanisms linking environmental conditions to violent conflict. This article investigates the plausibility of a prominent channel according to which scarcity of natural resources can foster violent conflict through deteriorating intergroup relations. In addition to assessing the direct effects of adverse environmental conditions on intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic trust, we suggest a conditional argument on the role of horizontal inequality of hazard exposure. Environmental hazards are ‘unequal’ if they systematically affect ethnic groups differently. While inequality may reinforce intra-ethnic ties and out-group suspicion, equal hazard exposure may create a sense of unity among diverse victims in their collective struggle to cope with harsh environmental conditions. We test these arguments in the context of the severe drought periods that affected most East African countries in the years 2004 and 2005. The empirical analysis combines gridded information on drought severity with geo-located survey data across six countries in the region (Afrobarometer survey 2005/2006). Our main analyses find that exposure to drought hazards correlates positively with self-reported trust within and across ethnic groups. The latter association, however, depends on the degree of intergroup equality of hazard exposure and wanes as inequality increases. Taken together, these findings indicate that if droughts increase the risk of violent conflict, they seem to do so through mechanisms other than intergroup polarization and despite their positive association with ethnic trust. This is most likely the case in contexts where there is pronounced horizontal inequality of drought hazards.

We investigated the turnover intentions of employees who perceive that they are being treated with more or less abusive supervision than their coworkers. We call this incongruent abusive supervision. Our findings support our theory that employees associate incongruent abusive supervision with the anticipation of social exclusion from their coworkers. Furthermore, this appraisal of social exclusion threat is associated with feelings of shame, which, in turn, increase turnover intentions. Two experimental vignettes provide support for our theoretical model. These findings demonstrate the effect that incongruent abusive supervision has on employees’ reactions to abusive supervision and introduces shame as an emotional mechanism important for understanding employee responses to supervisor abuse both when they are singled out for abuse and when they are spared abuse while their coworkers are not.

Does EU funding improve local state capacity? We focus on two specific types of state capacity, namely (a) the ability to provide information to third parties and (b) to discriminate between different kinds of inquiries. Because the EU’s structural funds are distributed through a competitive mechanism and incentivize expansions in administrative personnel, our theory predicts that high levels of EU funding bring about a higher bureaucratic capacity equilibrium. Empirically, we analyze the effect of structural funds on local government capacity in the largest recipient country: post-communist Poland. Through a randomized survey with more than 2400 municipal administrations, we find that administrations that have benefited more from EU funding, have developed higher levels of discrimination capacity. Yet we find no evidence for higher information provision capacity.

Theories of causation in philosophy ask what makes causal claims true and establish the so-called truth conditions allowing one to separate causal from noncausal relationships. We argue that social scientists should be aware of truth conditions of causal claims because they imply which method of causal inference can establish whether a specific claim holds true. A survey of social scientists shows that this is worth emphasizing because many respondents have unclear concepts of causation and link methods to philosophical criteria in an incoherent way. We link five major theories of causation to major small and large-n methods of causal inference to provide clear guidelines to researchers and improve dialogue across methods. While most theories can be linked to more than one method, we argue that structural counterfactual theories are most useful for the social sciences since they require neither social and natural laws nor physical processes to assess causal claims.

Research on the influence of social networks on political behavior has led to findings showing an apparent trade-off between positive attitudes toward the outparty and political engagement. The prevalent sentiments have been that partisan bonding or ties with fellow partisans hurts evaluations of the outparty but helps political engagement. Partisan bridging or ties with opposite partisans, on the other hand, improves evaluations of the outparty but hurts engagement. I argue that this trade-off is essentially an illusion driven by a mistaken assumption that bonding and bridging are two opposite ends of the same continuum. Analyzing two original national surveys of the American public, I show that bonding and bridging are independent constructs with different consequences. Consistent with previous studies, I find that bonding hurts and bridging helps outparty attitudes. Both bonding and bridging, however, are positively related to political engagement. I also show that network disagreement partially mediates the effects of partisan bonding, but not the effects of partisan bridging. This suggests that the efforts to encourage voters to build relationships with politically different others can be done without having to worry that they will lead to decreased engagement.

Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? The authors address this question by examining the consequences of the deadliest pandemic of the last millennium: the Black Death (1347–1351). They claim that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if the loss of life is high enough to increase the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor-repressive regimes, such as serfdom, become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. The authors test their theory by tracing the consequences of the Black Death in German-speaking Central Europe. They find that areas hit hardest by that pandemic were more likely to adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns, to exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics, and to have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler’s National Socialist Party in the Weimar Republic’s fateful 1930 and July 1932 elections.

Environmental policy is touching on ever more aspects of corporate and individual behavior, and there is much debate over what combinations of top-down (government-imposed) and bottom-up (voluntary private sector) measures to use. In democratic societies, citizens’ preferences over such combinations are crucial because they shape the political mandates based on which policymakers act. We argue that policy designs that involve private-public co-regulation receive more citizen support if they are based on inclusive decision-making, use strong transparency and monitoring mechanisms, and include a trigger for government intervention in case of ineffectiveness. Survey experiments in Switzerland (N = 1941) provide strong support for these arguments. Our research demonstrates that differences in co-regulation design have major implications for public support. Another key finding is that there seems to be a contradiction between inclusiveness and democratic accountability for policy outcomes. The findings are surprisingly consistent across two very different green economy issues we focus on empirically (decarbonization of finance, pesticides). This suggests that our study design offers a useful template for research that explores public opinion on green economy policy designs for other issues and in other countries.

This article investigates how unemployment risk within households affects voting for the radical right. The authors contribute to recent advances in the literature that have highlighted the role of economic threat for understanding the support of radical-right parties. In contrast to existing work, the authors do not treat voters as atomistic individuals; they instead investigate households as a crucial site of preference formation. Combining largescale labor market data with comparative survey data, they confirm the expectations of their theoretical framework by demonstrating that the effect of occupational unemployment risk on radical-right support is strongly conditioned by household-risk constellations. Voting for the radical right is a function not only of a voter’s own risk, but also of his or her partner’s risk. The article provides additional evidence on the extent to which these effects are gendered and on the mechanisms that link household risk and party choice. The results imply that much of the existing literature on individual risk exposure potentially underestimates its effect on political behavior due to the neglect of multiplier effects within households.