Aktuelle Publikationen

What theories explain variation in public opinion toward asylum seekers? We implement a survey experiment in which a representative sample of German residents evaluates vignettes of asylum seekers, which randomly vary attributes that speak to deservingness, economic and religious threat, and gender considerations of attitude formation. We find strong support for deservingness theories. Economic and religious threat theories also receive empirical support. Gender plays a negligible role. Importantly, we also document that economic and—to a lesser extent—religious threat considerations only matter when respondents evaluate economic refugees. By contrast, political refugees are welcomed nearly unconditionally. Our paper thus replicates key findings from Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner (2016) and Czymara and Schmidt-Catran (2016) using a representative sample and points to an important interaction effect in public opinion formation toward asylum seekers: economic threat only gets activated when refugees’ deservingness is in doubt.

Even though human behavior is largely driven by real-time feedback from others, this social complexity is underrepresented in psychological theory, largely because it is so difficult to isolate. In this work, we performed a quasi-experimental analysis of hundreds of millions of chat room messages between young people. This allowed us to reconstruct how-and on what timeline-the valence of one message affects the valence of subsequent messages by others. For the highly emotionally valenced chat messages that we focused on, we found that these messages elicited a general increase of 0.1 to 0.4 messages per minute. This influence started 2 s after the original message and continued out to 60 s. Expanding our focus to include feedback loops-the way a speaker's chat comes back to affect him or her-we found that the stimulating effects of these same chat events started rippling back from others 8 s after the original message, to cause an increase in the speaker's chat that persisted for up to 8 min. This feedback accounted for at least 1% of the bulk of chat. Additionally, a message's valence affects its dynamics, with negative events feeding back more slowly and continuing to affect the speaker longer. By reconstructing the second-by-second dynamics of many psychosocial processes in aggregate, we captured the timescales at which they collectively ripple through a social system to drive system-level outcomes.

The number of migrants worldwide has grown rapidly in recent years and their integration poses challenges such as cultural and language barriers for organizations and societies. Securing and maintaining employment is a key challenge for migrants, yet management research has devoted little attention to migration. We aim to contribute to the emerging literature on this topic by utilizing objective and time-lagged field data from 14,327 mail carriers nested in 737 delivery units of a large Swiss logistics firm. We investigate the link between in/congruence of the number of employees and customers with migration background and customer complaints. Controlling for service quality, we find that congruence between mail carriers and their customers (both low and both high numbers of migrants) is associated with fewer customer complaints, the latter suggesting the existence of a common migrant identity despite national and cultural differences. Surprisingly, we found that it does not matter whether more employees or customers relative to the other group have a migration background, as the results from both incongruence scenarios show increased complaints. We find that units that receive more complaints experience higher rates of voluntary turnover, highlighting how unfair customer complaints can hurt organizations twice, by increasing the risk of loss in both customers and employees.

Peace is fragile, about half of all peace episodes break down within the first eight post‐conflict years. In Sub‐Saharan Africa this risk is even higher. Using survival analysis this paper suggests that while it is difficult to find correlates of peace stabilization, there are some policy relevant results. How a conflict ends is important. Negotiated settlements are fragile but the chances of peace surviving can be significantly improved through the deployment of UN peacekeeping operations. This also appears to be the case for Sub‐Saharan Africa but case study evidence suggests that peacekeepers face particularly complex situations in the region and should therefore be well resourced in order to increase their chance of success.

This study investigates individual managers’ formation of psychic distance perceptions to foreign countries. Adopting a social psychological perspective, we propose that three social-cognitive mechanisms—social comparison, mere exposure, and social learning—help explain why and how country- and individual-level characteristics affect the formation of these perceptions. Based on an international survey of 1591 managers located in 25 countries undertaken between 2003 and 2008, we find that country-specific international experience, formal education, and the use of common language reduce psychic distance perceptions. Surprisingly, and in contrast to conventional wisdom, managers’ international experience and overall work experience do not seem to affect their distance perceptions. Moreover, individual-level antecedents seem to have limited explanatory power relative to country-level factors as predictors of overall psychic distance perceptions, which lends support to the widely-employed practice of operationalizing psychic distances through country-level indicators. In addition to these empirical findings, the study provides a theoretical social psychological framework useful for understanding how psychic distance perceptions are formed.

How do MPs in nascent legislatures choose a political party? We argue that MPs self‐select into groups of like‐minded colleagues to achieve favored policy outputs. MPs identify colleagues with similar preferences based on observed behavior and informative signals such as socioeconomic status, cultural background, and previous political experience. We test this explanation in the first democratically elected German parliament, the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848, that developed a differentiated party system in the absence of electoral and career incentives. Our statistical analysis shows that MPs were significantly more likely to join parties that were similar to them with regard to ideology, age, regional provenance, confession, noble status, and previous parliamentary experience. Qualitative evidence suggests that major changes in the party system were driven by disputes over policy. Our findings are particularly important for countries with more turbulent paths towards parliamentarization than those witnessed by archetypical cases like Britain or the United States.

In the integration literature, the relationship of the European Union (EU) as a donor and the (potential) candidates for EU membership as recipients of democracy promotion is described as asymmetrical. The donor is portrayed to have full whereas recipients have moderate or even no leverage over democratic reform what brings a hierarchical notion of active donors versus passive recipients into the analysis. Taking the local turn into consideration, however, this contribution argues that democracy promotion, is better conceptualized as a dynamic interplay between external and domestic actors. It reveals the toolbox of instruments that both sides dispose of, traces the dynamic use of these instruments, and systematizes the structural and behavioural factors that constrain the negotiation interplay. A case study of negotiations over public administration reform in Croatia in the context of EU enlargement shows that domestic actors dispose of leverage that counterweights external leverage and mitigates the implied hierarchy.

Multiple explanations have been proposed for what drives India’s Hindu–Muslim conflict. Harnessing novel approaches to data acquisition and analysis, this paper uses insights from an electronic survey with 1,414 respondents to test three prominent theories of why individuals promote conflict with out-groups. The results show that security concerns for the future are strong predictors for a hostile stance and approval of violence. Experiences of violence in the past do not seem to systematically perpetuate hostility. Personal experiences with out-groups strongly correlate with hostile sentiments. These results hold across model specifications, post-stratified estimation based on census data, and a benchmark relying on Finite Mixture Models.

Do online ads influence vote choice? We partner with a German party to evaluate the effectiveness of online ads using a cluster-randomized experiment. During the 2016 Berlin state election, 189 postal districts were randomly assigned to (a) emotional ads; (b) factual ads; or (c) no ads. Analyzing electoral results at the postal district level, we find that the overall campaign weakly increased the party’s vote share by 0.7 percentage points (p-value = 0.155). We also estimate a negative effect of the campaign on the vote share of the party’s main competitors of 1.4 percentage points (p-value = 0.094). Turning to the mechanism of persuasion, we find that the factual ads, if anything, fared slightly better than the emotional ads. Our evidence thus provides tentative support that online ads positively affect vote choice.

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dc.contributor.author: Guinaudeau, Isabelle

The debate on effects of globalisation on welfare states is extensive. Often couched in terms of a battle between the compensation and the efficiency theses, the scholarly literature has provided contradictory arguments and findings. This article contributes to the scholarly debate by exploring in greater detail the micro-level foundations of compensation theory. More specifically, we distinguish between individual policy preferences for compensatory social policies (unemployment insurance) and human capital-focused social investment policies (education), and expect globalisation to mainly affect demand for educational investment. A multi-level analysis of International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) survey data provides empirical support for this hypothesis. This finding provides an important revision and extension of the classical analytical perspective of compensation theory, because it shows that citizens value the social investment function of the welfare state above and beyond simple compensation via social transfers. This might be particularly relevant in today's skill-centred knowledge economies.

The past decades witnessed enormous transformations in the built environment of cities, and one of these trends is the development of iconic megaprojects. Public protests against these projects occur frequently, and scholars in urban governance have diagnosed this as an emerging ‘post-political’ condition, that is, as a sign of a deficient democratic politics. Others criticise this kind of reasoning as a ‘post-political-trap’ (Beveridge and Koch, 2017), and demand more research. This article responds to this debate with an empirical study of the popular protests against the infrastructural public transport project Stuttgart 21 in Germany. We apply discourse network analysis to investigate the evolution of the discourse, illuminate multiple dynamic connections between issues and actors, and apply factor analysis to identify the key issues of the conflict. Our study complicates and qualifies the arguments for a ‘post-political’ state of urban politics.

We present a typology of states that distinguishes constellations of state fragility based on empirical patterns. State fragility is here defined as deficiencies in one or more of three core functions of the state. These functions include violence control, implementation capacity, and empirical legitimacy. Violence control refers to the state’s ability to manage the uses of violence within society. Implementation capacity refers to the state’s ability to provide basic public services. Empirical legitimacy refers to the population’s consent to the state’s claim to rule. Employing three to four indicators per dimension for 171 countries over the period 2005–2015 and finite mixture model clustering, we find six dominant constellations that represent different types of state dysfunctionality.

The major influx of refugees to Europe, especially in 2015, has led to immense solidarity, but also hostility among European citizens. In the wake of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ country differences in the willingness to help displaced people have become a salient issue of European integration. In this paper, we explain country differences in the public support for helping refugees across Europe at a critical time-point – spring 2016 – just after the influx of displaced people had peaked. Theoretically, we base our explanation of country differences on economic threat, inter-group contact, welfare state, and political framing theories. Using data from a Eurobarometer survey across the 28 EU member states, we show that solidarity with refugees varies significantly between countries. Controlling for individual characteristics of respondents and utilizing a multilevel design, we find that solidarity with refugees is highest in countries with an extensive welfare state and a historically high share of immigrants, whereas there is no effect of countries’ economic situation or strength of right-wing parties. On the individual level of respondents, however, we find that people with a more precarious economic background, little institutional trust, and a right-wing political orientation express lower solidarity with refugees.

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We develop and test an organizational‐level model of the consequences of diversity climate for company performance. Drawing from affective events theory and the organizational climate literature, we highlight the role of idiosyncrasies in employees' diversity climate perceptions. Specifically, we consider diversity climate strength (i.e., agreement in employees' climate perceptions) as a boundary condition of diversity climate's organizational‐level effects and expect high climate strength to be particularly beneficial in demographically diverse organizations. Moreover, we introduce collective positive affect as an underlying mechanism of diversity climate's conditional effects on company performance. Hypotheses are tested in a study of 82 German small‐and‐medium‐sized companies with 13,695 surveyed employees. Results show a moderated mediation relationship where diversity climate is only positively related to organizational performance (via collective positive affect) at relatively high diversity climate strength. Although this finding holds for both demographically diverse and homogeneous organizations, post hoc analyses provide initial evidence that a strong climate only helps to realize the effects of diversity climate on collective positive affect when members of age‐ and gender‐related demographic subgroups converge in their climate perceptions. Our study contributes to a better understanding of diversity climate as an effective lever for managing diversity.

Can older managers overcome stereotypes relating age to low competence? We integrate the literature on age and cognitive ability with research on innovation to explore whether—and if so, when—employees' age harms performance and promotability appraisals made by their supervisors. Multisource, time‐lag data from 305 project managers indicate that the negative stereotypes can be explained through decreased innovative behavior. However, older employees are not always seen as poorer performers with less potential to be promoted due to their reduced innovative behavior. Rather, interdepartmental collaboration moderates these effects. Specifically, older employees with low interdepartmental collaboration are less innovative and receive worse performance and promotability appraisals than younger employees, but the “age handicap” vanishes when older employees collaborate with members of other departments. Organizations should foster formal or informal collaboration among units to prevent negative consequences of an aging workforce.

Why do prime ministers or presidents appoint non‐elected experts, also known as technocrats, during economic crises? Do they appoint them for their expertise or for their commitment to pro‐market reforms? Answering this question is crucial for understanding and predicting the longer‐term role of technocrats in democracies. With the aid of unique data on the political and personal background of finance ministers in 13 parliamentary and semi‐presidential European democracies this article shows that commitment, not expertise is the primary driver of technocratic appointments during major economic crises. Technocrats are preferred over experienced politicians when the latter lack commitment to policy reform. An important implication of the findings is that technocratic appointments to top economic portfolios in West European countries are unlikely to become the norm outside economic crises, assuming economic crises are short‐lived and not recurring.

How do parties react to unanticipated events such as external shocks? Do they adapt to the consequences of the external shock or do they disregard them? Using the global financial crisis as an empirical example and testing the expectations for parties’ economic policy shifts in 23 European democracies based on Chapel Hill Expert Survey data, the article demonstrates that government parties react more to an external shock than opposition parties, particularly in countries where the external shock has been more severe. This has implications for a broader literature in comparative politics by fostering the dialogue between the political economy literature on external shocks and the literature on party policy shifts by showing the significant impact exogenous events can have on party positioning.