Aktuelle Publikationen

Digital contact tracing apps have been introduced globally as an instrument to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, privacy by design impedes both the evaluation of these tools and the deployment of evidence-based interventions to stimulate uptake. We combine an online panel survey with mobile tracking data to measure the actual usage of Germany's official contact tracing app and reveal higher uptake rates among respondents with an increased risk of severe illness, but lower rates among those with a heightened risk of exposure to COVID-19. Using a randomized intervention, we show that informative and motivational video messages have very limited effect on uptake. However, findings from a second intervention suggest that even small monetary incentives can strongly increase uptake and help make digital contact tracing a more effective tool.

Existing research demonstrates why farmers demand subsidies, but remains ambiguous as to why consumers/taxpayers support or rather do not oppose such subsidies. We approach this puzzle from two angles: how sensitive are citizens to cost implications of agricultural subsidies, and what is their “value function” with respect to agricultural policy? We argue that farm subsidies, besides benefiting farmers, promise to generate an array of non-market goods that serve various interests in society and thus receive strong support overall. To test our argument, we conducted conjoint survey experiments in two countries: Switzerland and the United States. Our results show that while cost implications only marginally reduce support for subsidies, support is positively affected by the allocation of subsidies to various policy goals, such as guaranteeing food security and enhancing animal welfare. These findings suggest that individual-level support for agricultural subsidies does not result from a lack of information, but reflect genuine appreciation of the perceived multi-functionality of agricultural subsidies.

In this article we study the emergence of local solidarity in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis in Germany. The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown measures have had far-reaching and quite diverse consequences for different social groups, and have increased the need for practical help, childcare, financial aid, but also emotional support to cope with the psychological consequences of social isolation. Hence, even individuals who are not traditionally receivers of informal help have suddenly become dependent on it. Existing research on volunteering, caregiving and donations has shown that the provision of help and volunteer work has a social gradient, and that social inequalities therein can partly be explained by reference to individuals’ attitudes and social networks. Against this backdrop, we ask: (1) Has the COVID-19 pandemic sparked the emergence of a new local solidarity? (2) What types of help are provided, and to whom? (3) How does socio-economic position affect the provision of different forms of help during the COVID-19 crisis? (4) Which sociological mechanisms can explain these inequalities in helping? Using data from a topical online-survey based on a quota sample which was collected, during the heydays of the first lockdown in Germany, we find that one of two respondents engages in some sort of local solidarity. Depending on the recipient and the way of helping – up to half of these helping arrangements has newly emerged and does not build on already existing (pre-crisis) help-arrangements. Differences between income and educational groups can mostly be explained by attitudes and social networks. Embeddedness in formal networks is particularly important for extending help to previously unknown recipients in the community. This article contributes to the literature on the social origins of help and the initiation of social capital during crises in general, and the political discussion about solidarity in the COVID-19 pandemic in particular.

Esta sección analiza las respuestas gubernamentales a la pandemia de COVID-19 en cinco países de América Latina: Argentina, Brasil, Perú, México y Uruguay. Los artículos abordan la evolución de la pandemia y la construcción de políticas de emergencia en estos países, con énfasis en las dinámicas de cooperación y conflicto entre presidentes, congresos, burocracias y gobiernos subnacionales. En conjunto, los artículos apuntan a factores que contribuyeron a diversos grados de gobernanza de la crisis, desde el liderazgo presidencial hasta los límites estructurales de la acción gubernamental. En particular, los estudios permiten una evaluación más exhaustiva de las respuestas de los presidentes, que varían entre la inacción presidencial, la retórica populista y la toma de decisiones políticamente costosa.

This article contributes to the literature on party appeals to social groups by introducing a new dataset on group and policy appeals in Scandinavia (2009–2015). In addition to coding to what social groups parties appeal, we collected information on what policies parties offer for the groups they mention and what goals and instruments they specify for such policies. The latter advance makes it possible to present new insights on the extent to which group appeals are actually substantial and meaningful. We find that left, centre and right parties appeal to broad demographic categories rather than class. There are almost no appeals to the middle class, although the frequent reference to a category ‘all’ can be interpreted as a functional equivalent for middle-class appeals. Finally, parties clearly still make substantial policy proposals and address concrete policy problems, but with only small differences in such appeals across the left–right spectrum.

Previous work on remittances and incumbency support has focused on recipients’ (pocketbook and sociotropic) economic assessments. In Mexico, however, crime has become the second (if not the first) concern of voters and security evaluations have become closely linked to the national executive’s performance. In this paper we posit that in Mexico remittances can also increase incumbent support through their effect on recipients’ security assessments. We attribute this finding to remittances allowing recipients to take crime-preventive measures and alleviate some of the pressure associated with crime and violence, which in turn improves recipients’ assessments of the security situation of the country and evaluations of the incumbent. Using individual data from Mexico for the period 2006–2017, we find that remittance recipients have higher levels of perceived personal safety and better national security evaluations than non-recipients, and that security assessments are a significant predictor of presidential approval rates. The evidence thus suggests that in Mexico, where crime is rising, and presidents are increasingly rewarded or blamed for containing violence, the effect of remittances on presidential approval also operates through improved personal safety perceptions and public security assessments.

Concurrent elections are widely used to increase turnout. We theorize and show empirically how concurrency affects electoral outcomes. First, concurrency increases turnout and thereby the participation of peripheral voters. Second, in combined elections, one electoral arena affects the other. In our case of majoritarian executive elections concurrent to proportional representation (PR) legislative elections, the centripetal tendency of majoritarian elections colors off to the concurrent PR race. Third, concurrency also entails spillovers of the incumbency advantage of executive officeholders to the concurrent legislative race. Drawing on quasi-random variation in local election timing in Germany, we show that concurrency increases turnout as well as council votes for the incumbent mayor's party and centrist parties more generally, with slightly more pronounced gains for the political left. As a consequence, concurrent elections consolidate party systems and political power by leading to less fragmented municipal councils and more unified local governments.

Background: Communicating official public health information about infectious diseases is complicated by the fact that individuals receive much of their information from their social contacts, either via interpersonal interaction or social media, which can be prone to bias and misconception.

Objective: This study aims to evaluate the effect of public health campaigns and the effect of socially communicated health information on learning about diseases simultaneously. Although extant literature addresses the effect of one source of information (official or social) or the other, it has not addressed the simultaneous interaction of official information (OI) and social information (SI) in an experimental setting.

Methods: We used a series of experiments that exposed participants to both OI and structured SI about the symptoms and spread of hepatitis C over a series of 10 rounds of computer-based interactions. Participants were randomly assigned to receive a high, low, or control intensity of OI and to receive accurate or inaccurate SI about the disease.

Results: A total of 195 participants consented to participate in the study. Of these respondents, 186 had complete responses across all ten experimental rounds, which corresponds to a 4.6% (9/195) nonresponse rate. The OI high intensity treatment increases learning over the control condition for all symptom and contagion questions when individuals have lower levels of baseline knowledge (all P values ≤.04). The accurate SI condition increased learning across experimental rounds over the inaccurate condition (all P values ≤.01). We find limited evidence of an interaction between official and SI about infectious diseases.

Conclusions: This project demonstrates that exposure to official public health information increases individuals’ knowledge of the spread and symptoms of a disease. Socially shared information also facilitates the learning of accurate and inaccurate information, though to a lesser extent than exposure to OI. Although the effect of OI persists, preliminary results suggest that it can be degraded by persistent contradictory SI over time.

Most democracies allow their members of parliament to concurrently be employed in the private sector. A widespread worry is that politicians leverage their current or past posts within parliament, for example, as ministers or committee chairs, to gain lucrative jobs. However, we know little about whether “moonlighting” income is indeed driven by these positions. I analyze comprehensive new panel data on the private sector earnings of all members of the UK House of Commons during 2010–16. Focusing on within-legislator variation, I find that currently holding an influential position does not cause an increase in income from outside jobs. Politicians do see higher earnings soon after leaving their parliamentary posts, but this effect is concentrated among cabinet ministers. The article advances the literature by identifying which political posts lead to financial benefits in the private sector—and when.

Recent research documents that voters infer that governing coalition partners share similar ideologies, independently of these parties’ actual policy statements. We argue that citizens estimate party positions from more general forms of interparty cooperation and conflict, particularly near the times of national elections. We analyze tens of thousands of media reports on elite interactions from 13 Western democracies between 2001 and 2014, and show that—controlling for coalition arrangements and for the policy tones of parties’ election manifestos—voters infer greater left–right agreement between pairs of parties that have more cooperative public relationships, but that this “cooperation effect” is only evident near the times of national elections. Our findings have implications for parties’ policy images and for mass–elite linkages.

High levels of crime are a key driver of emigration from Latin America and the Caribbean. But can emigration change public opinion about how best to respond to crime? Focusing on the political economy of remittances—the money migrants send to their families and communities—this study argues that emigration can increase support for violent responses to crime. Migrants’ families often spend remittances on investment goods, which makes them more vulnerable to crime and more supportive of violence to protect themselves. An analysis of AmericasBarometer data finds that remittance recipients are more likely both to fear crime and to be victims of crime than nonrecipients. They are also more approving of vigilantism, more tolerant of police bending the law to apprehend criminals, and more supportive of deploying the military in crime fighting. These findings contribute to our knowledge of the consequences of international migration for political development in migrant-sending countries.

Postindustrialization and occupational change considerably complicate partisan politics of the welfare state. This article asks about the determinants of contemporary social democratic labor market policy. We argue that the composition of their support base is a critical constraint and empirically demonstrate that the actual electoral clout of different voter segments decisively affects policy outcomes under left government. We calculate the electoral relevance of two crucial subgroups of the social democratic coalition, labor market insiders and outsiders, in 19 European democracies and combine these indicators with original data capturing the specific content of labor market reforms. The analysis reveals considerable levels of responsiveness and demonstrates that relative electoral relevance is consistently related to policy outcomes. Social democratic governments with a stronger support base among the atypically employed push labor market reforms on their behalf—and vice versa. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of policy-making in postindustrial societies.

National identities are often conceived of as factors that lend structure and stability to citizens’ political opinions on issues such as immigration. While citizens who define national membership in ethno-cultural terms are less likely to support immigration, those with a civic conception are more likely to do so. The authors propose that defining national identity along both ethno-cultural and civic lines may give rise to conflicting considerations, leading people to experience ambivalence, implying that national identities may serve less as a stabilizing force than suggested by previous research. Findings from heterogeneous choice models and a unique survey experiment show that German citizens with mixed conceptions of national identity had more variable and more malleable opinions than individuals with ideal-type conceptions during the 2015/2016 European refugee crisis. The findings point to an identity-based source of ambivalence and extend current understandings of how people form attitudes towards immigration.

Background:
Ocular vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (oVEMP) testing in response to air-conducted sound (ACS) has excellent sensitivity and specificity for superior semicircular canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS). However, patients with SCDS may experience vertigo with the test, and recent works recommend minimizing acoustic energy during VEMP testing.

Purpose:
To develop an oVEMP protocol that reduces discomfort and increases safety without compromising reliability.

Methods:
Subjects: Fifteen patients diagnosed with SCDS based on clinical presentation, audiometry, standard VEMP testing, and computed tomography (CT) imaging. There were 17 SCDS-affected ears and 13 unaffected ears. In nine (53%) of the SCDS-affected ears surgical repair was indicated, and SCD was confirmed in each. oVEMPs were recorded in response to ACS using 500 Hz tone bursts or clicks. oVEMP amplitudes evoked by 100 stimuli (standard protocol) were compared with experimental protocols with only 40 or 20 stimuli.

Results:
In all three protocols, oVEMP amplitudes in SCDS-affected ears were significantly higher than in the unaffected ears (p < 0.001). 500 Hz tone bursts evoked oVEMPs with excellent (>90%) sensitivity and specificity in each of the three protocols. However, in the unaffected ears, lowering to 20 stimuli reduced the detection of oVEMP responses in some ears. Following surgical repair, oVEMPs normalized in each of the protocols.

Conclusion:
In oVEMP testing using ACS for SCDS, reducing the number of trials from 100 to 40 stimuli results in a more tolerable and theoretically safer test without compromising its effectiveness for the diagnosis of SCDS. Reducing to 20 stimuli may degrade specificity with clicks.