Aktuelle Publikationen

The paper concentrates on the ways the interplay of parental economic, educational, and cultural resources in the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment has changed due to the marketization of post-socialist societies and educational systems. We combine two different approaches: a variable-based regression analysis and a case-based qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). The analysis is based on the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 2011 and concentrates on Estonia. The results indicate that parental educational and cultural resources, manifested in a large home library, enhance children’s attainment of higher education. It does so not only in post-socialist Estonia but also during the socialist period despite the Soviet educational system being designed explicitly to eliminate social privilege. Comparison of cohorts who attained higher education during the mid-socialist, late-socialist, and post-socialist periods shows that for all of them common combination with high level of all considered parental resources is highly effective in securing attainment of higher education. In addition to that common effective combination of parental resources, each cohort has its own particular combination of parental resources that effectively enabled attainment of higher education. The influence of the resources that the family deploys tends to accumulate instead of being a compensation channel that conveys parental influence on education. Regression analysis and QCA are complementary: The former allows assessment of the net impact of each individual parental resource on attainment of higher education. The latter reveals the differential impact of individual resources depending of their configurations.

We investigated how people react emotionally to working with robots in three scenario-based role-playing survey experiments collected in 2019 and 2020 from the United States (Study 1: N = 1003; Study 2: N = 969, Study 3: N = 1059). Participants were randomly assigned to groups and asked to write a short post about a scenario in which we manipulated the number of robot teammates or the size of the social group (work team vs. organization). Emotional content of the corpora was measured using six sentiment analysis tools, and socio-demographic and other factors were assessed through survey questions and LIWC lexicons and further analyzed in Study 4. The results showed that people are less enthusiastic about working with robots than with humans. Our findings suggest these more negative reactions stem from feelings of oddity in an unusual situation and the lack of social interaction.

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dc.contributor.author: Heisig, Jan Paul; Schaeffer, Merlin

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The evolving concept of “agile” has fundamentally changed core aspects of software design, project management, and business operations. The agile approach could also reshape government, public management, and governance in general. In this Viewpoint essay, the authors introduce the modern agile movement, reflect on how it can benefit public administrators, and describe several challenges that managers will face when they are expected to make their organizations more flexible and responsive.

This paper examines the transnational dimensions of low-level conflict and state repression. In this regard, special emphasis is placed on the role of political regimes. Drawing on a simple model, we argue that democracy has opposing effects on conflict intensity. On one hand, democracy satisfies demand for political participation and thus reduces conflict potential, while, on the other hand, we highlight that domestic democracy may spur dissatisfaction and conflict abroad, which, in turn, may induce conflict spillovers. As a result, the net effect of democracy on low-level conflict and state repression is ambiguous and depends on the level of democracy in the neighborhood: We predict that democracy is more pacifying in democratic environments and may spur conflict in autocratic environments. By the symmetry of the model, we also predict that democratic environments are more pacifying for democratic countries and may spur conflict in autocracies. Empirical evidence using panel data on different types of low-level conflict and state repression for 160 countries in the period from 1950 to 2011 supports these hypotheses. Additionally, two case studies illustrate the mechanisms of our model.

Why do authoritarian governments exclude ethnic groups if this jeopardizes their regime survival? We generalize existing arguments that attribute exclusion dynamics to ethnic coalition formation. We argue that a mutual commitment problem, between the ethnic ruling group and potential coalition members, leads to power-balanced ethnic coalitions. However, authoritarian regimes with institutions that mitigate credible commitment problems facilitate the formation of coalitions that are less balanced in power. We test our arguments with a k-adic conditional logit approach, using data on ethnic groups and their power status. We demonstrate that in autocracies, the ruling ethnic group is more likely to form and maintain coalitions that balance population sizes among all coalition members. Furthermore, we provide evidence that the extent to which balancing occurs is conditional on authoritarian regime type.

Diese Replik setzt sich mit dem ZAR-Aufsatz von Ursula Gräfin Praschma auseinander, in dem die Vizepräsidentin des Bundesamts für Migration und Flüchtlinge (BAMF) wissenschaftlichen Studien zu regional divergierenden Entscheidungspraktiken im deutschen Asylsystem ihre Gültigkeit abgesprochen hat. Der Artikel zeigt, dass weiterhin beachtliche Ungleichheiten im Asylvollzug bestehen. Der Verfasser argumentiert, dass die Darlegungen der BAMF-Vizepräsidentin nicht unabhängig validierbar sind und so nicht die wissenschaftlichen Gütekriterien erfüllen, denen auch publizierte Auswertungen des BAMF genügen müssen. Der Autor plädiert für eine evidenzbasierte Asylpolitik, zu welcher der institutionalisierte Zugang zu Asylstatistiken, die öffentliche Darlegung zentraler Verteilungs- und Entscheidungspraktiken wie auch die transparente Darstellung BAMF-interner Analysen zu Schutzquotenabweichungen gehören.

Negative leadership may have drastic consequences for organizations and society. However, leaders do not operate independently but supervise followers who potentially perpetuate their negative . Currently, we lack an integrated understanding of those followers who are more likely to model negative leader . There are two perspectives on why people model negative leaders: (a) because they are endowed with role-model powers through their authority and legitimacy; (b) because they are prototypical of the group. We propose that both perspectives are limited and introduce an integrative model which proposes that: To be modelled, negative leaders need to be prototypical of their groups and demonstrate the negative behaviours others can model. We test this model in four studies across various research designs, samples, and behavioural outcomes. We find consistent evidence that followers will model only prototypical ingroup leaders, but not outgroup leaders, who demonstrate negative behaviours and tie them with desirable outcomes. This model represents a significant step towards understanding the intricate relationships between negative leaders and their followers. We encourage future research to develop and test alternative models of negative behaviour modelling.

In this paper, I argue that the historical change in the organizational logic of the Fair Trade movement, embodied by Fair Trade labeling, has had an important effect on the emergence of ethical consumption in Europe. By establishing Fair Trade labels, the initial movement logic of political influence through education was supplemented and partly abandoned in favor of a market logic. Fair Trade movements in Western Europe differ in the way they organize and market fair traded goods. Drawing on organizational institutionalism and social movement theories of economic opportunity structures, it is elaborated how the emergence of a new organizational form and its underlying logic shape consumption patterns. Hypotheses are empirically tested using a quantitative multilevel design. Organizational data on national Fair Trade movements compiled from an organizational survey of the European Fair Trade Association are combined with individual-level survey data of the 1997 Eurobarometer for 12 European countries. Logistic hierarchical regression models reveal the crucial importance of the Fair Trade labels once diffused into consumer markets, controlling for organizational communication efforts as well as the number of distribution channels for individual Fair Trade consumption. Thus, adopting a market logic has been a powerful force in rendering Fair Trade successful.

Rapporteurs in the European Parliament are influential figures, drafting reports, preparing and collecting amendments and negotiating files on behalf of Parliament as a whole. Previous studies have shown a persistent under‐representation of MEPs from the post‐2004 accession states among rapporteurs. In this study, we demonstrate the evolution of this disparity. Although it no longer exists at the surface, MEPs from accession states are still very much under‐represented in the allocation of files that are negotiated with the Council using trilogues – leaving them mostly with prime responsibility for short and relatively uncomplicated files. This shows that unequal representation has taken on a more subtle guise than before, with ‘west‐European’ MEPs still firmly in the driving seat.

The study of policy feedback on public attitudes and policy preferences has become a growing area of research in recent years. Scholars in the tradition of Pierson usually argue that positive, self-reinforcing feedback effects dominate (that is, attitudes are commensurate with existing institutions), whereas the public thermostat model developed by Wlezien and Soroka expects negative, self-undermining feedback. Moving beyond the blunt distinction between positive and negative feedback, this article develops and proposes a more fine-grained typology of feedback effects that distinguishes between accelerating, self-reinforcing and self-undermining, specific and general, as well as long- and short-term dynamic feedback. The authors apply this typology in an analysis of public opinion on government spending in different areas of the welfare state for twenty-one OECD countries, employing a pseudo-panel approach. The empirical analysis confirms the usefulness of this typology since it shows that different types of feedback effects can be observed empirically.