Aktuelle Publikationen

The displacement of people due to climatic changes (environmental migration) presents major societal and governance challenges. This article examines whether and how climate-induced rural-to-urban migration contributes to social-movement participation. We argue that the mainly forceful nature of relocation makes environmental migrants more likely to join and participate in social movements that promote migrant rights in urban areas. Using original survey data from Kenya, we find that individuals who had experienced several different types of severe climatic events at their previous location are more likely to join and participate in social movements. This finding has important policy implications. National and local authorities should not only provide immediate assistance and basic social services to environmental migrants in urban settings, but also facilitate permanent solutions by fostering their socio-economic and political integration in order to prevent urban conflict.

Do France and Germany lead the euro zone? We argue that the governments of these two countries jointly and successfully used institutional as well as ideational leadership – both at the domestic as well as at the European levels – when creating the Economic and Monetary Union in the 1980s and 1990s. During the euro zone crisis, however, the two respective governments mainly relied on institutional leadership, but neglected the ideational component of leadership. In consequence, member states only agreed upon lowest common denominator solutions, leaving the institutional setup of the Economic and Monetary Union incomplete. More ideational engagement by the French and German governments and the investment of political capital, in our view, are necessary for the adoption of more far-ranging substantial reforms. This would make the euro zone – and more generally the European integration project – more resilient in the years to come.

The number of immigrants worldwide has grown rapidly in recent years, and their integration poses challenges, such as cultural and language barriers, for organizations and societies. Securing and maintaining employment is a key challenge for immigrants, yet management research has devoted little attention to migration. We aim to contribute to the emerging literature on this topic by utilizing a multistudy approach with objective and time-lagged field data from 14,327 mail carriers nested in 737 units of a large Swiss logistics firm and an experimental audio vignette study with 262 participants from the United Kingdom. We investigate whether (in)congruence in terms of immigration background between employees and customers is linked to customer complaints. Controlling for service quality, we find that both congruence scenarios (both or neither migrants) are associated with fewer complaints, the latter suggesting that migrants identify with each other despite national and cultural differences. Results from the two incongruence scenarios show increased complaints. In Study 1, we find that units that receive more complaints experience higher rates of voluntary employee withdrawal behaviors (short-term absenteeism and voluntary turnover), highlighting how unfair customer complaints can hurt organizations twice, by increasing the risk of loss in both customers and employees. In Study 2, we replicate the immigrant identity effect at the individual level and find that social attraction mediates the (in)congruence–complaints link.

Background
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic presents an unprecedented crisis with potential negative mental health impacts.

Methods
This study used data collected via Youper, a mental health app, from February through July 2020. Youper users (N = 157,213) in the United States self-reported positive and negative emotions and anxiety and depression symptoms during the pandemic. We examined emotions and symptoms before (pre), during (acute), and after (sustained) COVID-related stay-at-home orders.

Results
For changes in frequency of reported acute emotions, from the pre to acute periods, anxiety increased while tiredness, calmness, happiness, and optimism decreased. From the acute to sustained periods, sadness, depression, and gratitude increased. Anxiety, stress, and tiredness decreased. Between the pre and sustained periods, sadness and depression increased, as did happiness and calmness. Anxiety and stress decreased. Among symptom measures, anxiety increased initially, from the pre to the acute periods, but later returned to baseline.

Limitations
The study sample was primarily comprised of young people and women. The app does not collect racial or ethnicity data. These factors may limit generalizability. Sample size was also not consistent for all data collected.

Conclusions
The present study suggests that although there were initial negative impacts on emotions and mental health symptoms in the first few weeks, many Americans demonstrated resilience over the following months. The impact of the pandemic on mental health may not be as severe as predicted, although future work is necessary to understand longitudinal effects as the pandemic continues.

Debates about the electoral malaise of the Left, punishment for cutbacks, and left parties as credible protectors of the welfare state have neglected the long-term consequences of retrenchment. To find out how reforms affect parties’ popularity beyond individual government periods, we track the electoral performance of government parties over five elections and assess the interplay of unpopular reforms, partisanship, and the economic legacy. Based on well-known asymmetries in the conditionality of welfare support among parties’ core groups, we hypothesize that right parties reap the economic fruits of their reform labour, whereas left parties struggle to claim credit even if the promised positive economic legacy materializes. Our analyses of the consequences of retrenchment for 196 cabinets in 18 countries confirm that losses of left parties after reforms – in contrast to losses of right parties – are permanent and independent of the economic legacy; creating a tragedy of social-democratic responsibility.

Objective:
The suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, two major American icons, in a span of days in June 2018 represent a unique and tragic natural experiment to characterize associations with actual suicides in the aftermath of celebrity suicides. The aim of this study was to identify changes in suicide counts after their deaths.

Methods:
Suicide data were obtained from the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s public-use mortality file. A time-series analysis was performed, examining monthly suicide data by age group (⩽19, 20–44, 45–64 and ⩾65 years), for both men and women, for all suicide methods and for hanging versus non-hanging methods, from January 1999 to December 2018. Seasonal autoregressive integrated moving-average models were fitted to the pre-June 2018 period, estimating suicides in subsequent months and identifying deviations from expected values. The volume of Twitter posts about Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain was used as a proxy of societal attention.

Results:
Tweets about the celebrities were mainly concentrated in June 2018 and faded quickly in July. Total suicides exceeded the 95% confidence interval for June and approximated the upper limit of the 95% confidence interval in July. Over this 2-month span, there were 418 (95% confidence interval = [184, 652]) more suicides than expected, including 275 (95% confidence interval = [79, 471]) excess suicides in men and 182 (95% confidence interval = [93, 271]) in women. These equate to 4.8%, 4.1% and 9.1% increases above expected counts. There were 392 (95% confidence interval = [271, 514]) excess suicides by hanging, a 14.5% increase, with no significant increase in all other methods combined.

Conclusion and Relevance:
These findings demonstrate that mortality following celebrity suicides can occur at a similar magnitude to that observed for other public health emergencies. They underscore the urgency for interventions to mitigate imitation effects after celebrity suicide reporting.

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Whereas Western European governments have devolved political authority to minority regions, governments in Eastern Europe have shied away from using decentralisation to accommodate national minorities. This article assesses how these differences affect the secessionism of minority parties. The theoretical section argues that both programmatic accommodation (i.e. when governments adopt positions in favour of decentralisation) and institutional accommodation (i.e. when governments create regions that correspond to the settlement areas of minority groups and transfer authority to the regional level) increase the likelihood that minority parties will adopt secessionist positions. Regression analyses of 83 European minority parties show that a higher level of programmatic and institutional accommodation is indeed associated with a higher likelihood of secessionism. However, increases in programmatic accommodation between 2011 and 2017 in fact decrease the likelihood that minority parties turn secessionist when using the method of first differences. Future research should therefore collect panel data on minority parties’ positions.

Quantitative comparative social scientists have long worried about the performance of multilevel models when the number of upper-level units is small. Adding to these concerns, an influential Monte Carlo study by Stegmueller (2013) suggests that standard maximum-likelihood (ML) methods yield biased point estimates and severely anti-conservative inference with few upper-level units. In this article, the authors seek to rectify this negative assessment. First, they show that ML estimators of coefficients are unbiased in linear multilevel models. The apparent bias in coefficient estimates found by Stegmueller can be attributed to Monte Carlo Error and a flaw in the design of his simulation study. Secondly, they demonstrate how inferential problems can be overcome by using restricted ML estimators for variance parameters and a t-distribution with appropriate degrees of freedom for statistical inference. Thus, accurate multilevel analysis is possible within the framework that most practitioners are familiar with, even if there are only a few upper-level units.

Qu’est-ce qui explique la représentation géographique dans le personnel professionnel des organisations intergouvernementales (OI) ? Nous abordons cette question d’un point de vue organisationnel en considérant les processus de recrutement des OI. Dans le système des Nations unies (ONU), les processus de recrutement sont conçus pour garantir le mérite bureaucratique, l’expérience et la formation étant les critères de mérite pertinents. Nous développons et testons une théorie de l’offre, en postulant que les différences dans l’offre de candidats qualifiés et très expérimentés dans les pays peuvent expliquer la représentation géographique. En nous appuyant sur les données relatives au personnel de 34 OI et sur les données relatives à l’offre de 174 États membres, et en tenant compte de l’endogénéité et des autres explications, nous n’avons observé aucune relation de ce type pour la formation. Cependant, les pays qui disposent d’un grand nombre de candidats ayant une expérience professionnelle et régionale pertinente présentent des valeurs significativement plus élevées en termes de représentation. Ces résultats offrent une explication complémentaire sur les raisons pour lesquelles certains pays sont plus fortement représentés dans le personnel professionnel international que d’autres. Ils révèlent également la nature du mérite bureaucratique au sein de l’ONU, qui semble privilégier les connaissances locales et l’expérience professionnelle par rapport à l’éducation formelle (occidentale).

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