Aktuelle Publikationen

Die digitale Transformation macht deutlich, dass der öffentlichen Verwaltung zur Umsetzung Kompetenzen fehlen. Dieser Beitrag berichtet über die Ergebnisse von Experteninterviews und zeigt Wege zur digitalen Maturität der öffentlichen Verwaltung auf.

Are self-interest or presumably stable value orientations and other predispositions the main drivers behind social policy attitudes? This article contributes to this debate by moving away from its binary discussion. It differentiates between attitude changes driven by self-interest that are in line with pre-existing predispositions and those that are not. Empirically, this article focuses on changes of labour market policy attitudes after employment transitions and job insecurity changes. More precisely, this article differentiates between attitude changes within three subgroups. (A) People whose self-interest after the employment transitions reinforces their prior predispositions. (B) People without strong prior predispositions, who are thus unconstrained by them. And (C) people whose self-interest after the employment transitions contradicts their prior predispositions. Panel analyses with fixed effects use German SOEP waves from 1997 and 2002. Main effects suggest an important role for self-interest as they show significant attitudinal reactions after most of the transitions and perception changes. However, subgroup analyses result in a somewhat mixed picture. They show attitude changes within different subgroups after different transitions and perception changes. This mixed empirical picture suggests caution when interpreting attitudinal change or stability after changing material circumstances as a sign for the relative importance of self-interest or predispositions.

We present a polling strategy to predict and analyze runoff elections using the 2017 French presidential race as an empirical case. This strategy employs rejective probability sampling to identify a small sample of polling stations that is balanced with respect to past election results. We then survey the voters’ candidate evaluations in first-round exit polls. We poststratify the voter sample to first-round election returns to account for nonresponse and coverage issues, and impute missing candidate evaluations to emulate campaign learning. Next, the votes for eliminated competitors are redistributed according to their supporters’ lower-order preferences. Finally, the predictions are validated against official results and other polls. We end with a discussion of the advantages and limitations of this approach.

Media psychological research has identified a broad range of gratifications that can result from playing digital games and fuel players’ entertainment experiences. Most of these studies focused on pleasurable, hedonic entertainment experiences (i.e., enjoyment). However, scholarship increasingly acknowledges that digital games can also offer more profound (eudaimonic) entertainment experiences, characterized by the feeling of being moved and the experience of meaningfulness (i.e., appreciation). Knowledge about the antecedents of this form of digital game entertainment experiences is still sparse; thus, the present study investigates the role of well-established gaming gratifications for the emergence of both enjoyment and appreciation. In addition, trait-like preferences for eudaimonic and hedonic entertainment (i.e., entertainment motivations) are investigated as possible antecedents of players’ entertainment experiences. Empirically, the study builds on a 2-wave online survey of U.S. players of the action-role-playing game Mass Effect: Andromeda (n = 1,074). The findings show that obtained gaming-specific gratifications are closely related to players’ enjoyment but also to their appreciation of the game. In contrast, trait-like entertainment motivations only exert a small influence on both entertainment experiences. Implications for theorizing and investigating gaming entertainment experiences are discussed.

This article addresses the debate on the political professionalization backgrounds of executive candidates at the regional level. At this level, two opposing forces may intervene. On the one hand, as regional executive offices attain authority, more experienced politicians may become increasingly interested in seeking such positions. On the other, the concomitant presidentialization of regional elections by the major parties may render them attractive to well-known political outsiders. Using an original data set comprising the political backgrounds of Spanish regional executive candidates, our findings show that the greater the degree of authority held by regional governments, the higher their degree of political insiderness. However, the argument in favour of a greater presence of outsiders in the major parties does not seem to be supported.

Understanding the temporal dynamics of affect is crucial for our understanding human emotions in general. In this study, we empirically test a computational model of affective dynamics by analyzing a large-scale dataset of Facebook status updates using text analysis techniques. Our analyses support the central assumptions of our model: After stimulation, affective states, quantified as valence and arousal, exponentially return to an individual-specific baseline. On average, this baseline is at a slightly positive valence value and at a moderate arousal point below the midpoint. Furthermore, affective expression, in this case posting a status update on Facebook, immediately pushes arousal and valence towards the baseline by a proportional value. These results are robust to the choice of the text analysis technique and illustrate the fast timescale of affective dynamics through social media text. These outcomes are of high relevance for affective computing, the detection and modeling of collective emotions, the refinement of psychological research methodology, and the detection of abnormal, and potentially pathological, individual affect dynamics.

In this article, I introduce contextualized repertoire maps as a qualitative approach to the study of news-related media use. With their origins in the sociological analysis of personal networks, egocentric network maps are adapted here to visualize patterns of media use and then contextualized with qualitative interviews and data collected during participant observation. This integrative approach is illustrated by a study of the routines and practices of news consumption within and around social media platforms. I demonstrate how the mapping exercise can complement other qualitative methods to explore the structure, meaning and processes of cross-media user practices and discuss the scope and limits for visualizing and analyzing the interrelatedness between social media platforms and traditional mass media.

The dynamics of collaboration networks of firms follow a life cycle of growth and decline. That does not imply they also become less resilient. Instead, declining collaboration networks may still have the ability to mitigate shocks from firms leaving and to recover from these losses by adapting to new partners. To demonstrate this, we analyze 21.500 R&D collaborations of 14.500 firms in six different industrial sectors over 25 years. We calculate time-dependent probabilities of firms leaving the network and simulate drop-out cascades to determine the expected dynamics of decline. We then show that deviations from these expectations result from the adaptivity of the network, which mitigates the decline. These deviations can be used as a measure of network resilience.

Past studies on government survival in parliamentary democracies have been limited to national governments. However, most societies live in a multilevel polity where different policies are decided at distinct governmental layers. So far, the conditions triggering sub-national governments’ termination have remained unexplored. Our paper makes a twofold contribution to the literature. First, we explicitly focus our analysis on the sub-national government level. Second, we expand the analytical scope by assuming a multilevel setting, in which the survival of sub-national governments is dependent on both the party composition of the national government (vertical congruence) and their sub-national peers (horizontal congruence). We test the impact of both congruence measures on the early termination risk of regional governments. Our analysis is complemented by including “traditional” factors from national government termination literature, such as structural attributes of governments and their bargaining environment, into empirical modelling. Analysing a novel dataset on 494 regional governments in Germany and Spain we find that the risk of sub-national government termination is related to varying levels of vertical congruence. Furthermore, we find interesting explanatory variation between the two countries with regard to the effect size of economic performance, regional authority and congruence.

When analyzing situations in which multiple people are experiencing emotions together—whether the emotions are positive or negative and whether the situations are online or offline—we are intuitively drawn to the emotions of each individual in the situation. However, this type of analysis often seems incomplete. In many of the cases in which people experience emotions together, there appear to be emergent macrolevel affective processes that cannot be readily captured at the individual level. In this article, we examine these macrolevel affective phenomena, which are termed collective emotions. We open with a general review of research on collective psychological processes. We then define collective emotions and discuss their key features. Next, we focus our attention on the emergent properties of collective emotions and map them using three dimensions: quality, magnitude, and time course. Finally, we discuss pressing open questions and future directions for research on collective emotions.

Die Gewalt gegen Bürgermeister, Landräte und Verwaltungsmitarbeiter scheint seit einiger Zeit deutlich zuzunehmen. Kaum eine Woche vergeht, in der nicht von körperlichen Übergriffen, Beleidigungen oder anderen Anfeindungen gegen sie in den Medien berichtet wird. Der vorliegende Beitrag will erstens einen Überblick über zentrale Ergebnisse ausgewählter Studien der letzten knapp zehn Jahre geben; zweitens widmet sich der Beitrag auf der Basis von Umfragedaten den Fragen, ob es systematische Faktoren gibt, die diese Anfeindungen erklären können und ob sich diese zwischen Verwaltungsmitarbeitern und Kommunalpolitikern unterscheiden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Gründe für gewaltsame Übergriffe vielfältig sind. Gefährdet sind die untersuchten Personengruppen vor allem auf kommunaler Ebene bzw. in Großstädten.

The goal of this article is to develop an empirically grounded framework to analyze how new technologies, particularly those used in the realm of datafication, alter or expand traditional organizational control configurations. Datafication technologies for employee-related data-gathering, analysis, interpretation, and learning are increasingly applied in the workplace. Yet there remains a lack of detailed insight regarding the effects of these technologies on traditional control. To convey a better understanding of such datafication technologies in employee management and control, we used a three-step, exploratory, multi-method morphological analysis. In step 1, we developed a framework based on 26 semi-structured interviews with technological experts. In step 2, we refined and redefined the framework in [...] and redefined the framework in four workshops with scholars specializing in topics that emerged in step 1. In step 3, we evaluated and validated the framework using potential and actual users of datafication technology controls. As a result, our refined and validated “Datafication Technology Control Configuration” (DTCC) framework comprises 11 technology control dimensions and 36 technology control elements, offering the first insights into how datafication technologies can change our understanding of traditional control configurations.