Aktuelle Publikationen

What do you do when your field research is called off? The original plan for political scientist Fabian Bergmann was to travel to Norway and Sweden to do research for his doctoral thesis on the indigenous Sámi people. Then the coronavirus hit. Now the project faces the challenge of making contacts at a distance.

The digitization of music has changed how we consume, produce, and distribute music. In this paper, we explore the effects of digitization and streaming on the globalization of popular music. While some argue that digitization has led to more diverse cultural markets, others consider that the increasing accessibility to international music would result in a globalized market where a few artists garner all the attention. We tackle this debate by looking at how cross-country diversity in music charts has evolved over 4 years in 39 countries. We analyze two large-scale datasets from Spotify, the most popular streaming platform at the moment, and iTunes, one of the pioneers in digital music distribution. Our analysis reveals an upward trend in music consumption diversity that started in 2017 and spans across platforms. There are now significantly more songs, artists, and record labels populating the top charts than just a few years ago, making national charts more diverse from a global perspective. Furthermore, this process started at the peaks of countries’ charts, where diversity increased at a faster pace than at their bases. We characterize these changes as a process of Cultural Divergence, in which countries are increasingly distinct in terms of the music populating their music charts.

This article theorises how behavioural public administration can help improve our understanding of frontline policy implementation. The human factors that characterise policy implementation remain undertheorised: individual variation in policy implementation is dismissed as mere “noise” that hinders predictability in policy implementation. This article aims to fill this gap. We provide a model for street level decision-making which outlines the role of heuristics and biases in frontline workers’ allocation of resources and sanctions. Based on an analysis of the behavioural and street-level bureaucracy literature, we present 11 testable propositions that point to predictable patterns in the ways that bounded rationality influences policy implementation and outcomes. Heuristics can help hard-pressed frontline public service workers to make decisions but may also produce social inequity or inefficient or ineffective service. Therefore, we need to improve understanding of biases that are common among frontline workers in order to inform the development of appropriate mitigation strategies, such as de-biasing or even ‘re-biasing’ (nudging).

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dc.contributor.author: Albertoni, Nicolás

Was tun, wenn die Feldforschung ausfällt? Eigentlich wollte der Politikwissenschaftler Fabian Bergmann für seine Doktorarbeit zu den indigenen Sámi in Norwegen und Schweden reisen. Dann kam Corona. Nun steht das Projekt vor der Schwierigkeit, Kontakte auf Distanz zu knüpfen.

Under what conditions do religious groups engage in peace activism? Religious groups engage in peace activism if the associated costs are low and they compete with either conflict party over the interpretation of their religious content concerning war and peace. Peace activism is a promising action as peace activists maintain their positive self-evaluation. I introduce a novel dataset of peace activism for 511 religious groups in 128 countries from 1990 to 2008. Conditional fixed effects and logistic models support my hypotheses. The findings highlight the role of rational considerations in the decision to conduct peace activities by representatives of religious groups.

Emotional facial expressions can inform researchers about an individual's emotional state. Recent technological advances open up new avenues to automatic Facial Expression Recognition (FER). Based on machine learning, such technology can tremendously increase the amount of processed data. FER is now easily accessible and has been validated for the classification of standardized prototypical facial expressions. However, applicability to more naturalistic facial expressions still remains uncertain. Hence, we test and compare performance of three different FER systems (Azure Face API, Microsoft; Face++, Megvii Technology; FaceReader, Noldus Information Technology) with human emotion recognition (A) for standardized posed facial expressions (from prototypical inventories) and (B) for non-standardized acted facial expressions (extracted from emotional movie scenes). For the standardized images, all three systems classify basic emotions accurately (FaceReader is most accurate) and they are mostly on par with human raters. For the non-standardized stimuli, performance drops remarkably for all three systems, but Azure still performs similarly to humans. In addition, all systems and humans alike tend to misclassify some of the non-standardized emotional facial expressions as neutral. In sum, emotion recognition by automated facial expression recognition can be an attractive alternative to human emotion recognition for standardized and non-standardized emotional facial expressions. However, we also found limitations in accuracy for specific facial expressions; clearly there is need for thorough empirical evaluation to guide future developments in computer vision of emotional facial expressions.

In this paper, we take a novel approach to study the empirical relationship between public debate in the media and asylum acceptance rates in Europe from 2002–2016. In theory, an asylum seeker should experience the same likelihood of being granted refugee status from each of the 20 European countries we study. Yet, in practice, acceptance rates vary widely for nearly every asylum country of origin. We address this inconsistency with a data-driven approach by analyzing refugee-related news articles and data on asylum decisions across 20 Europe countries for more than 100 asylum seekers’ countries of origin. We find that: (i) public debate sentiment in the media is strongly associated with European countries’ diverging asylum practices, much more so than social, cultural or economic factors, and (ii) by combining different measures of public debate we can make out-of-sample predictions within 3% of true acceptance rates (on average). We conclude by discussing the practical implications of our findings for European asylum practices.

Despite a growing literature on the politics of evaluation in international organizations (IOs) and beyond, little is known about whether political or administrative stakeholders indeed realize ex-ante political interests through evaluations. This is, however, especially important considering the booming business of evaluation and the proliferation of institutional assessments both in domestic and international politics. We argue that formally independent IO evaluation units informally orientate towards either member states or the IO administration, depending on who controls the unit’s budget, staff, and agenda resources. This should enable either actor to also use evaluation results along pre-defined strategic interests. Interview data gathered among evaluators, secretariat officials, and member state representatives of six IOs support the expected pattern, highlighting striking differences in the orientation of evaluation staff and evaluation use. Findings challenge the technocratic, apolitical image of evaluation, offering practical and theoretical implications for future research.

The secretariats of international organizations (international public administrations [IPA s]) constitute the institutional grid of global governance. While recent research has provided valuable insights into the independent capacities of international organizations (IO s) and the influence of IPA s, we lack systematic knowledge of how scholars conceptualize the preferences of IO staff. This is lamentable because understanding the (unifying) motivations of “international civil servants” helps us to make sense of their behavior and influence during the adoption and application of IO policies. To review how IPA studies conceptualize the preferences of international bureaucrats, this article suggests a fourfold typology of ideal-typical bureaucratic behavior. It distinguishes between the underlying behavioral logic and dominant bureaucratic goal orientation. Applying the typology to thirty-nine journal articles allows us to map IPA preferences and behavior, and shows that the literature predominantly views IPA s as behaving responsibly and less self-centeredly than could be expected from economic accounts of bureaucracy.

Using a unique and original dataset measuring preferences of adults for academic vs. vocational education in Switzerland, we explore differences between Swiss citizens and foreign residents regarding individual preferences for these different types of education. We find that first-generation foreigners exhibit stronger preferences for academic education, whereas the preferences of second-generation foreigners do not significantly differ from those of Swiss citizens. Further, variation across subgroups of foreigners based on their nationality indicates that cultural aspects matter to a certain extent as less well-integrated ethnic groups express stronger preferences for academic education and are also less likely to value the labour market outcomes of vocational education. Interestingly, the presence of a well-established VET system in the country of origin does not appear to strengthen preferences for vocational education in Switzerland. This might be related to less positive labour market outcomes for VET graduates’ countries of origin.

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dc.contributor.author: Leib, Julia

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dc.contributor.author: Stępień, Beata

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dc.contributor.author: Manatschal, Anita; Wisthaler, Verena