Aktuelle Publikationen

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Cuatro décadas han pasado desde que el equilibrio de poder argentino-brasileño en el Cono Sur dio paso a una primacía indisputada de Brasil. La naturaleza pacífica y cooperativa de esta transición de poder regional plantea un interesante puzle para las teorías estructuralistas en boga que vaticinan crecientes tenciones entre Estados Unidos y China ¿Por qué ciertos países aceptan su declinación de forma más indulgente, como lo hizo Argentina en aquella coyuntura? En este artículo ofrezco un modelo formal y utilizo la técnica de rastreo de procesos para demostrar que el giro cooperativo clave en esta relación se produjo entre finales de los años setenta y principios de los noventa. Mis conclusiones sugieren, en contra de la narrativa prevalente, que la cooperación entre Argentina y Brasil no fue producto de la democratización. En cambio, el caso Sudamericano sugiere que las transiciones de poder pacíficas tienen lugar cuando los costos de confrontar son altos y las coaliciones de política exterior son redefinidas en el estado declinante.

What happened to citizens’ support for democracy after the Arab Uprisings? Did the support increase, stay the same, or actually decrease after all the protests, regime changes, and reforms? Which theories of citizens’ political attitudes best explain these dynamics? Analysing two waves of the Arab Barometer surveys and employing an item-response method that offers methodological improvements compared to previous studies, this article finds that support for democracy actually decreased in countries that successfully overthrew their dictators during the Uprisings. Following the arguments that emphasize the rational evaluations of citizens, it argues that in countries that had an experience with a freer political system, such as Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen, challenges of democratization and the poor political and economic performances of the governments left citizens disappointed. Despite the hopes that people had at the onset of the Uprisings, the disappointments generated by the unmet expectations eventually led to a decline in support for democracy.

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dc.contributor.author: Dür, Andreas; Moser, Christoph

Under what conditions do protests occur in civil wars? Evidence from case studies suggests that protests can indeed play an important role in contexts of civil wars, with civilians using respective tactics both against the state and rebels. We argue that localities experiencing armed clashes are likely to see protest events in the same month. Civilians conduct protests due to battle-related changes in the local opportunity structures and grievances related to losses experienced through collateral damage. Using spatially disaggregated data on protest and battle events in African civil wars, we find support for our hypothesis that battles trigger civilian protests. This effect is robust to the inclusion of a comprehensive list of confounding variables and alternative model specifications, including the use of different temporal and spatial units. Our findings highlight the role of the civilian population and the spatial relationship between war events and protests in civil wars.

This article focuses on a key episode of anti-Jewish persecution in German-occupied France. In the summer of 1942, a small number of high-ranking dignitaries from the Catholic Church played an important role in stopping a carefully planned deportation scheme that started in earnest with the roundups in Paris and resulted in the internment of thousands of Jews in the infamous Vélodrome d’Hiver stadium. The paper specifically addresses the Catholic church’s paradoxical response. While these religious figures did offer stiff and determined resistance, the Church remained indifferent and inarticulate when anti-Jewish legislation and discrimination was initiated by both German occupation authorities and their Vichy collaborators in late 1940. The article contends that it was not despite but because of the Church’s crucial political role, which served as a main pillar of the Vichy regime, that the intervention against the deportations turned out to be powerful and effective. Moreover, the paper clarifies that Vichy was fully committed to collaborating with the SS and Gestapo apparatus and implementing the deportation scheme and that it did not take any initiative to stop the transfer of Jews to the German persecutors, resulting in the mass murder of approximately 76,000 men, women, and children.

The article deals with the widely neglected employment relations in the public sector of Germany with a special focus on civil servants. It is subdivided into two main parts. A shorter part elaborates on public employees and collective bargaining, a longer one on civil servants and their diverging forms of employment relations without the right to collective bargaining and strike. In order to better understand major changes that have taken place since the mid2000s, we chose a long‐term perspective and examine traditional as well as present forms of interest representation. Limited degrees of decentralisation and their lasting diverging consequences are analysed in great detail.

We analyze an agent-based model to estimate how the costs and benefits of users in an online social network (OSN) impact the robustness of the OSN. Benefits are measured in terms of relative reputation that users receive from their followers. They can be increased by direct and indirect reciprocity in following each other, which leads to a core-periphery structure of the OSN. Costs relate to the effort to login, to maintain the profile, etc. and are assumed as constant for all users. The robustness of the OSN depends on the entry and exit of users over time. Intuitively, one would expect that higher costs lead to more users leaving and hence to a less robust OSN. We demonstrate that an optimal cost level exists, which maximizes both the performance of the OSN, measured by means of the long-term average benefit of its users, and the robustness of the OSN, measured by means of the lifetime of the core of the OSN. Our mathematical and computational analyses unfold how changes in the cost level impact reciprocity and subsequently the core-periphery structure of the OSN, to explain the optimal cost level.

Polarization is threatening the stability of democratic societies. Until now, polarization research has focused on opinion extremeness, overlooking the correlation between different policy issues. In this paper, we explain the emergence of hyperpolarization, i.e., the combination of extremeness and correlation between issues, by developing a new theory of opinion formation called "Weighted Balance Theory (WBT)". WBT extends Heider's cognitive balance theory to encompass multiple weighted attitudes. We validated WBT on empirical data from the 2016 National Election Survey. Furthermore, we developed an opinion dynamics model based on WBT, which, for the first time, is able to generate hyperpolarization and to explain the link between affective and opinion polarization. Finally, our theory encompasses other phenomena of opinion dynamics, including mono-polarization and backfire effects.

The article investigates the role of social grievances, emotions and group solidarity in the spontaneous mobilization of unemployed university graduates in post-revolutionary Tunisia. Using a mixed method approach, I rely on interviews with political and civil actors conducted during fieldwork in 2018, protest event data from the Armed Conflict and Event Data Project, Facebook posts, and secondary literature including additional media reports. My findings indicate that in January 2016, unemployed citizens organized autonomously in response to perceived social grievances and increasing levels of corruption among established trade unions and unemployed organizations. In the case of Tunisia, shared feelings of relative deprivation, compared to the coastal regions, strengthened in-group solidarity among the unemployed in the interior and south and resulted in their collective mobilization.