Aktuelle Publikationen

Parties and politicians want their messages to generate media coverage and thereby reach voters. This article examines how attributes related to content and sender affect whether party messages are likely to get media attention. Based on content analyses of 1,613 party press releases and 6,512 media reports in a parliamentary, multiparty context, we suggest that party messages are more likely to make it into the news if they address concerns that are already important to the media or other parties. Discussing these issues may particularly help opposition parties and lower-profile politicians get media attention. These results confirm the importance of agenda setting and gatekeeping, shed light on the potential success of party strategies, and have implications for political fairness and representation.

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We provide an agent-based model to explain the emergence of collective opinions not based on feedback between different opinions, but based on emotional interactions between agents. The driving variable is the emotional state of agents, characterized by their valence, quantifying the emotion from unpleasant to pleasant, and their arousal, quantifying the degree of activity associated with the emotion. Both determine their emotional expression, from which collective emotional information is generated. This information feeds back on the dynamics of emotional states and individual opinions in a nonlinear manner. We derive the critical conditions for emotional interactions to obtain either consensus or polarization of opinions. Stochastic agent-based simulations and formal analyses of the model explain our results. Possible ways to validate the model are discussed.

We sometimes dismiss Agile methods too easily, demeaning them as nothing but colorful post-its and hype. How can we help public managers understand how Agile concepts can—and should—be part of their standard toolbox of teams and managers working at all levels of government? Two points are critical: First, Agile fits well with the core values of modern government. Second, practical applications can help project teams become Agile.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have implemented a wide range of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Monitoring and documenting government strategies during the COVID-19 crisis is crucial to understand the progression of the epidemic. Following a content analysis strategy of existing public information sources, we developed a specific hierarchical coding scheme for NPIs. We generated a comprehensive structured dataset of government interventions and their respective timelines of implementation. To improve transparency and motivate collaborative validation process, information sources are shared via an open library. We also provide codes that enable users to visualise the dataset. Standardization and structure of the dataset facilitate inter-country comparison and the assessment of the impacts of different NPI categories on the epidemic parameters, population health indicators, the economy, and human rights, among others. This dataset provides an in-depth insight of the government strategies and can be a valuable tool for developing relevant preparedness plans for pandemic. We intend to further develop and update this dataset until the end of December 2020.

Public opinion can often become a key challenge to international cooperation efforts. In their attempt to garner support for their position, stakeholders fight for the hearts and minds of the public based on arguments about the consequences of different policy options. But to what extent do individuals' preferences change when exposed to such information? And how does this depend on the information being congruent or contradictory to pre-existing preferences? We address these questions in the context of the negotiations on the potentially largest regional trade agreement in history: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Based on a two-waves-panel-survey-experiment fielded in Germany and the United States, we examine how individuals' prior opinion influences the way they process new information. We argue that individuals' existing priors about how they generally think about economic openness interact with new information to inform their opinion about the specific policy proposal at hand. Our experimental results show that while prior opinion constrains opinion updating to some degree, overall, citizens update their existing beliefs in line with new information. This updating process can even result in respondents changing their opinion, although only in one direction: namely to turn from a TTIP supporter to a TTIP opponent.

Despite extensive research, there is no agreement on the value of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour at the aggregate or the industrial level. Utilizing 2,419 estimates from 77 studies published between 1961 and 2017, this paper provides the first meta-regression analysis for the US economy. We show that the heterogeneity in previously reported estimates is driven primarily by modelling decisions for technological dynamics. Throughout the analysis, the hypothesis of a Cobb–Douglas production function is rejected. Based on our meta-regression sample, we estimate a long-run meta-elasticity for the aggregate economy in the range of 0.45–0.87. Most industrial estimates do not deviate significantly from the estimate for the aggregate economy.

One of the core disputes in the literature on economic statecraft addresses the conditions under which multilateral sanctions are more successful than unilateral ones. Our game-theoretic model implies that extant assessments do not sufficiently differentiate between the varying abilities of multilateral and unilateral senders in credibly threatening and carrying out sanctions. We introduce a selection argument that focuses on the complex decision-making process of the European Union (EU) to impose sanctions. In comparison to the United States (US), the institutional structure of the EU and conflicting economic interests of multiple principals make the imposition of sanctions much more difficult. In addition, the international organization is less accountable vis-à-vis the voters. Both mechanisms render sanction threats by the EU less credible. Since the United States as a unilateral sender can issue more credible sanction threats, imposed US sanctions are a negative selection of cases and thus less successful than restrictive measures imposed by the EU. We test these propositions with a new dataset on threatened and imposed sanctions by the European Union and the United States for the period between 1989 and 2015. The empirical evidence demonstrates that EU sanctions are indeed more successful than those by the US. In contrast, US sanction threats are more successful than those by the EU. We provide evidence for the difficulties of multilateral senders to impose sanctions by showing that EU sanctions are both less likely and less severe, the more varied the economic links of the multilateral sender with the sanctioned state are.

The ability to produce desired outcomes represents an important basis of the legitimacy of social policies. Nonetheless, policy outcomes have not systematically figured in the analysis of childcare regimes despite growing political interest in issues such as female employment, gender wage gap, and men's involvement in childcare. In this article, we use fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to investigate the relationship between the configuration of policy instruments, attitudes toward childcare and outcomes in 21 European countries. Our results show that there is only one mix of policy instruments consistently linked with positive gender equality outcomes and this route has the quality of the universal caregiver model. It also demonstrates that both a combination of policy instruments and favorable attitudinal factors are necessary to produce desirable outcomes in the gender division of paid work and unpaid childcare.