Aktuelle Publikationen

The mock website paradigm has been established as a methodological standard for experimental selective exposure research. To date, despite the amount of empirical research utilizing mock website experiments, no openly accessible practical implementations tailored to the needs of communication scholars exist. In this paper, we first review extant implementations of mock website experiments in selective exposure research and outline the methodological shortcomings. We then outline a procedure to conduct mock website experiments that addresses these shortcomings using only freely available software and that does not restrict participants to specific devices nor require additional software to be installed. Additionally, it can be employed and easily adapted without further programming knowledge as all scripts are published open-source on GitHub. We also demonstrate an application of the procedure by outlining a study on selective exposure to search engine content (N = 1,187). Further applications and limitations of the procedure are discussed.

Automated decision making and predictive analytics through artificial intelligence, in combination with rapid progress in technologies such as sensor technology and robotics are likely to change the way individuals, communities, governments and private actors perceive and respond to climate and ecological change. Methods based on various forms of artificial intelligence are already today being applied in a number of research fields related to climate change and environmental monitoring. Investments into applications of these technologies in agriculture, forestry and the extraction of marine resources also seem to be increasing rapidly. Despite a growing interest in, and deployment of AI-technologies in domains critical for sustainability, few have explored possible systemic risks in depth. This article offers a global overview of the progress of such technologies in sectors with high impact potential for sustainability like farming, forestry and the extraction of marine resources. We also identify possible systemic risks in these domains including a) algorithmic bias and allocative harms; b) unequal access and benefits; c) cascading failures and external disruptions, and d) trade-offs between efficiency and resilience. We explore these emerging risks, identify critical questions, and discuss the limitations of current governance mechanisms in addressing AI sustainability risks in these sectors.

In open-list proportional representation systems, choosing candidates based on issue proximity can improve policy congruence. However, in practice, voters may not know enough about individual candidates to do so. Hence, we examine whether voters infer individual positions from cues provided on ballots, namely age and residence. Studying the Swiss parliamentary elections of 2019, we focus on environmental policy, both a very salient issue and featuring considerable intra-party heterogeneity of positions. We combine comprehensive candidate data with a representative voter survey and conduct a survey-embedded experiment (N = 10,758). We find that citizens have indeed little knowledge of candidate positions. However, ballot cues predict policy differences among candidates within parties only to a limited extent, and the experiment does not suggest that voters use ballot information to predict positions directly. Instead, as suggested by additional analyses, citizens may perceive candidates who resemble their own sociodemographic profile as having positions closer to their own.

This Themed Issue features theoretical, methodological, and empirical advancements of the state-of-the-art in behavioural public policy and administration. In this introduction, we develop a behaviourally-informed, integrated conceptual model of the policy process that embeds individual attitudes and behaviour into context at the meso and macro level. We argue that behavioural approaches can be situated within a broader tradition of methodological individualism. Despite focusing on the micro level of policy processes, the contributions in this issue demonstrate that the behavioural study of public policy and administration can go beyond the individual level and give important insights into policy and societal outcomes. Our model enables us to draw more substantial lessons from behavioural research by moving beyond the verification of individual behaviour change. If based on a broad conceptual design and methodological pluralism, behavioural policies bear the potential to better understand, investigate and shape social outcomes.

En este artículo revisamos distintos modelos que usan herramientas de las ciencias de la complejidad para explicar fenómenos sociopolíticos y sugerimos que estos modelos deben ser interpretados como ‘modelos mínimos’ (Weisberg 2007; Batterman y Rice 2014). Concluimos que estos modelos altamente idealizados pueden no solo ayudarnos a distinguir los factores causales relevantes que dan origen a ciertos fenómenos sociopolíticos, sino que además en algunos casos pueden ayudarnos a visualizar políticas de intervención.

Regional organisations (ROs) increasingly act as promoters of democracy by applying sanctions against members who do not comply with collectively agreed norms. Despite the absence of an official sanctions policy, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) does interfere in certain ways into member states’ internal issues in some cases of norm violations. This study empirically explores how and why ASEAN decides to interfere or not in such situations. The findings derived from case studies on Cambodia and Myanmar, drawing on evidence from documents, media, and interview data reveal novel insights on ASEAN regionalism in the context of non-compliant member behaviour. I argue that the informal approach to regionalism provides ASEAN with a lot of room for discretion in responding to members’ norm violations. The article identifies geopolitical preferences, extra-regional interference, and legitimation as explanatory factors for the RO’s varying punitive actions.

This article analyses the socio‐economic determinants of public preferences towards public spending and parental fees for childcare and how they are conditioned by institutional contexts. Previous studies of childcare policy preferences have focused on attitudes regarding the provision of care. However, when it comes to questions of financing, we know astonishingly little about how supportive individuals actually are of expanding pre‐school early childhood education and care, and how support varies across different socio‐economic groups in society. This is an important research gap because childcare provision and how it is financed have redistributive implications, which vary depending on the institutional design of childcare policy. Using novel and unique survey data on childcare preferences from eight European countries, we argue and show that preferences towards expanding childcare are more contested than it is often assumed. The institutional structure of childcare shapes how income matters for preferences towards how much should be spent and how provision should be financed. Where access to childcare is socially stratified, the poor and the rich develop different preferences towards either increasing public spending or reducing parental fees in order to improve their access to childcare. The findings in this article suggest that expanding childcare in systems characterised by unequal access can be politically contested due to diverging policy priorities of individuals from different social backgrounds.

Regional and Federal Studies’30th anniversary offers an opportunity to takestock of the state of the discipline and of the journal. We make four claims.First, the multi-level nature of the political world has intensified in the last 30years. Second, the approaches to studying this changing world have evolvedthrough a quantitative and comparative turn.Regional and Federal Studieshas embraced these developments whilst remaining faithful to its tradition ofrich conceptual and case-study work. Third, the journal has contributed tothe‘territorialization’of mainstream political science as manyfields of studyhave gradually recognized the limitations of national- or single-level analyses.Finally, the journal itself has diversified in terms of approaches, methods,geographical coverage, and gender balance of author profiles, although werecognize there is more to do. We view further comparative research on theGlobal South as a particularly important research avenue.

After the Fukushima accident, Japan experienced a drastic decline in nuclear energy use because of resistance from civil society. This civil society activity can be explained by the strong social capital forged in Japanese communities. By contrast, the classical (and some recent) literature has argued that Japan’s dense network of associations and groups functions to disseminate conservative ideology and thus control civil society. The classical school of thought has described networks of conservative organizations as vertical in contrast to horizontal networks. This article explores the empirical evidence in this discussion by analyzing the effect of affiliation of each type of group on the members’ attitude and advocacy toward nuclear energy policy based on our survey (n = 77,084) conducted in late 2017. Detailed analysis of group effects of relevant group features led us to reconceptualize the aforementioned dichotomy. Vertical networks are often associated with groups’ conservatism but vary in the degree of postmaterialism and activism. Each dimension of group features has different effects on members’ opinions of nuclear energy, sentiment toward antinuclear movements, and antinuclear advocacy. Neither social capital theory nor vertical network theory is fully confirmed by this study. Both effects can be observed in different segments of respondents.