Aktuelle Publikationen

This paper presents interdisciplinary research focusing on the municipality of Braunsbach in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, where, in May 2016, a flash flood attracted media attention and scientific scrutiny that highlighted the fact that certain aspects of flood risk were overlooked during earlier assessments conducted by the municipality, such as sediment transport. Using a network analysis and a focus-group discussion, we traced the flow of knowledge through the reported interactions between governmental, private, and academic actors in the two and a half years after the event. From our analysis, we learned that the extreme event attracted scientists to the formal and informal assessment of the hazard and the associated damages. Most importantly, we found conditions under which scientific scrutiny is not detached from but becomes integrated in a governance setting. While it is through this process that sediment transport has become an integral part of flood-risk management in Baden-Württemberg, with an evident impact on the measures already implemented, the impact of morphological changes, as well as large wood and sediment transport, have not been factored into the risk assessment as of yet. These variations in scientific impact on the assessment can be explained by decision biases that can occur when decision makers are under pressure to tackle vulnerabilities and thus lack the time to deliberate in a way that uses all the available evidence.

According to the resource curse theory, persistent violence in developing areas results from rebels’ ability to finance warfare with natural resource revenues. Surprisingly, this overlooks the complexities of raising revenue from a mobile mining population that values security as well as income. The literature thus neglects a fundamental question: what are the incentives of rebel groups to prevent or perpetuate conflict in mining areas? This paper delineates a rational to both increase and decrease violence. Protecting a mine should allow rebels to extract taxes in return. Simultaneously, to maintain this demand for security, rebels may need to destabilize the wider area. The hypotheses are tested with novel data on rebel taxation at over 3’000 artisanal mines in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Supporting the hypotheses, the results show that rebel-taxed mines appear exempt from violence nearby but imperiled at the perimeter.

Despite its many contributions, a central problem in the dualization debate is conceptual overstretching, as we will argue in this short comment. The term “dualization” has been used to describe different processes, which are often subsumed under this heading: the rise of atypical employment, increasing labor market stratification in general, or the partial deregulation of welfare state policies and institutions. This multitude of usages weakens the utility of dualization as a theoretical concept. In the next section, we briefly look at the evolution of the dualization debate on the micro level before we proceed to the macro level. In the concluding section, we speculate about the future of dualization as a concept for describing welfare state transformations.

Proceeding population aging might fuel generational conflicts about the distribution of welfare state resources in the future, but the existing evidence on the extent of generational cleavages in attitudes towards the welfare state is mixed. We argue that these mixed findings are partially related to an underestimation of trade-offs on the level of individual preferences. Using novel data from a survey experiment conducted in eight Western European countries, we show that age-related self-interest is an important determinant of social policy preferences. When elderly respondents are confronted with hypothetical cutbacks in pensions, they are much less likely to support additional education spending. However, we also find evidence for a mediating effect of social trust: high-trusting elderly individuals are more likely to support education spending – contrary to their narrow self-interest – than low-trusting elderly.

Private alternatives to the public provision of welfare state services and benefits have expanded in almost all OECD countries over the past decades. In this paper, we study how this change affects patterns of public support for the welfare state and, in the long term, the political sustainability of solidaristic social policies. Our core argument is that the availability of private alternatives undermines support for public provision of social insurance policies, in particular among the middle and upper-income classes, whose political support is crucial for the political viability of the universalist welfare state regime. We test our theoretical claim empirically with survey data from the ISSP Role of Government module for 20 OECD countries.

In their recent article “A Gendered Resource Curse? Mineral Ownership, Female Unemployment and Domestic Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Mario Krauser, Tim Wegenast, Gerald Schneider, and Ingeborg Elgersmar argue that international mine ownership alters employment possibilities for women in comparison to domestically-owned mines. They make the case that this also alters gender norms and find that foreign ownership decreases domestic violence reporting from women. In this reply, I take a closer look at the proposed mechanisms that local gender norms change around international mines and will review literature that finds persisting effects of gender norms on gender equality. Finally, I will assess the circumstance under which norms may change in response to outside interventions and suggest avenues for future research.

This paper explores the relations of the African Union (AU) with its member states through the lens of principal–agent theory. I consider the AU Commission—an international public administration—as an agent to which its member states—the principals—delegate authority. I show that core assumptions of principal–agent theory apply to the AU’s relations with its member states. These include that principals aim to keep control over their agent, that we find agents acting opportunistically, that principals sanction the agent if needed and that the heterogeneity of preferences amongst principals decreases the level of authority delegated to the agent. However, my analysis also suggests that principal–agent theory needs to broaden its understandings of lock-in effects and of the reasons why states limit their delegation of authority.

We address the failures of the implementation of the European Company Directive and their far-reaching consequences, and discuss options for necessary amendments and improvements. We present empirical data on the characteristics of European companies and their distribution across EU Member States, and discuss major unexpected results of transposition and implementation as well as many evident problems. We then develop options for amendments, including definition of structural changes, mandatory introduction of employee involvement and extension of the ‘before and after’ principle. Finally, we analyse the history of the review process and explain why amendments have not and will most likely not be introduced despite obvious failures and deficiencies.

This article analyses the determinants of citizens' trust in the European Commission. We examined four predictors of citizens' trust in political institutions: political participation, value congruence, performance outcomes and attributability of performance outcomes. We argue that these factors impact trust in the European Commission, which is a necessary precondition for making a risky investment and willingness to pay taxes, which can be understood as behavioural consequences of trust. To examine our hypotheses we have implemented a vignette study. Our analyses show that value congruence, the European Commission's perceived performance and attributability impact risky investments via trust, as expected. Political participation exerts a direct significant influence on risky investments.

Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt eine neue, umfassende Datenbank über die politischen Agenden Deutschlands vor und zeigt ihr Potenzial in der politikwisssenschaftlichen Forschung auf. Dazu fassen wir im ersten Teil den theoretischen Hintergrund – Agendasetzung – kurz zusammen und stellen anschließend die Datenbank vor. Die Datenbank beinhaltet politische Aktivitäten aus allen Etappen des Policyprozesses: die Inputebene (Öffentliche Meinung und Wahlprogramme der Parteien), die Politikprozessebene (Regierungserklärungen, parlamentarische Anfragen und Gesetzesentwürfe) und die Outputebene (Gesetze). Beobachtungen aus jeder Ebene sind thematisch nach dem Schema des Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) codiert und umfassen den Zeitraum von 1977 bis 2013. Schließlich beschreiben wir die gesamte Datenbank kurz und illustrieren am Beispiel der Energiepolitik, wie dadurch politische Prozesse abgebildet und analysiert werden können. Die Datenbank ist zugänglich unter gpa.uni-konstanz.de.

A large body of research indicates that environmental conditions can influence the risk of social unrest. However, we know little about how these effects may change in the long run. Are they likely to remain constant or do they change over time – for example as a consequence of human adaptation? To investigate this question, we rely on a disaggregated analysis of England over a period of more than 300 years. Combining data on geo-referenced food riots with reconstructed climate data, we first assess the impact of annual temperatures on social unrest over the period 1500–1817. We then use our long-term time-series dataset to assess the temporal heterogeneity of year-to-year associations between temperatures and social conflict. Our models show a substantive negative correlation between temperatures and food riots in the aggregate. This association, however, seems to be highly inconsistent over time and largely confined to the 18th century. In addition, we find evidence of decadal processes of adaptation: past exposure to adverse weather conditions dampens the effect of current exposure. Taken together, these findings underline the importance of considering temporal heterogeneities when assessing the climate–conflict nexus and caution against any simple extrapolations of observable present-day effects of environmental conditions into the future.

This article examines shifts in the structures of Ukrainian higher education and research based on historical institutionalism with a focus on the dynamics of change and stability during critical junctures. We show how critical political junctures influence higher education, how institutions of higher education and research have experienced conversion and drift, and how international trends such as quality assurance and the concept of the research university have been implemented in Ukraine. We find that gradual institutional change (conversion) and deliberate non-change (drift) in a political environment characterized by widespread corruption have resulted in a high degree of diversion of both financial and intellectual resources. Due to a lack of political support for the implementation of reforms and rampant political favoritism, organizational forms frequently are mismatched with their core organizational tasks.

Because the American states operate under balanced budget requirements, increases in spending in one area typically entail equal and opposite budget cuts in other programs. The literature analysing the correlates of government spending by policy area has mostly ignored these trade-offs inherent to policymaking, failing to address one of the most politically interesting and important dimensions of fiscal policy. Borrowing from the statistical literature on compositional data, we present more appropriate and efficient methods that explicitly incorporate the budget constraint into models of spending by budget category. We apply these methods to eight categories of spending from the American states over the years 1984–2009 to reveal winners and losers in the scramble for government spending. Our findings show that partisan governments finance their distinct priorities by raiding spending items that the opposition prefers, while different political institutions, economic conditions and state demographics impose different trade-offs across the budget.

While the existence of a ‘Democratic Peace’ (DP) is widely accepted, the various DP theories that seek to explain why democracies rarely fight one another are highly contested. A ‘commercial/capitalist peace’ counterargument maintains that the relationship between democratic politics and peace is spurious: the actual driver is greater trade among democracies. Meanwhile, Realists counter that it is alliances among democratic states, not their democratic nature, that causes peace among them. This research note utilizes novel country feeling thermometer data to explore the debate’s micro-foundations: the underlying drivers of international amity and enmity among democratic citizens in the US, UK, France, and Germany. Utilizing Freedom House and other quantitative measures of freedom, trade, military strength, and racial and cultural difference, it pits the micro-foundations of the DP against its rivals to explain attitude formation among a group of Western democratic publics. Given the resurgence of authoritarianism around the world today, a better understanding of the role of regime type in shaping public opinion – and subsequently war and peace – is urgently needed.

We argue that polygyny creates a social imbalance where few, economically well-off men marry many wives and many poor men marry late or never. By definition, polygyny produces what we refer to as “excess men.” In order to gain material wealth, excess men are likely to raid, plunder, and rob neighboring ethnic groups. We test this hypothesis with georeferenced data on polygyny and intergroup conflict in rural Africa and find strong support. Drawing on Afrobarometer survey data, we explore the underlying mechanisms and find that young men who belong to polygynous groups feel that they are treated more unequally and are readier to use violence in comparison to those belonging to monogamous groups. Our article makes an important contribution to the peace, conflict, and development literature by emphasizing a fundamental aspect of human life: marriage and family.

In this article, we study the political use of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, a particular form of cyberattack that disables web services by flooding them with high levels of data traffic. We argue that websites in nondemocratic regimes should be especially prone to this type of attack, particularly around political focal points such as elections. This is due to two mechanisms: governments employ DoS attacks to censor regime-threatening information, while at the same time, activists use DoS attacks as a tool to publicly undermine the government’s authority. We analyze these mechanisms by relying on measurements of DoS attacks based on large-scale Internet traffic data. Our results show that in authoritarian countries, elections indeed increase the number of DoS attacks. However, these attacks do not seem to be directed primarily against the country itself but rather against other states that serve as hosts for news websites from this country.

How do natural disasters influence social conflict? We build on previous research by drawing more attention to conditional effects. We argue that damage and destruction tend to increase local-level cooperation and cohesion, as common threats and challenges supersede pre-existing communal cleavages. Irregular distribution of reconstruction aid, in the presence of pre-existing social inequalities, however, can dampen these effects and foster social conflict. We test this argument with a village-level analysis of the effects of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal: we rely on data on the exogenous spatial distribution of earthquake intensity, the number of violent events, and the patterns of post-disaster aid distribution. Our findings show that villages exposed to the earthquake experienced a reduction in the number of social conflict events. This pacifying effect is mediated by government aid distribution: as more aid is distributed, the conflict-mitigating effects of the earthquake are weakened. These results highlight the need for more conflict-sensitive reconstruction aid in the aftermath of natural disasters.