Aktuelle Publikationen

Although ‘Seguro Popular’ (SP), a healthcare programme for the uninsured, has been in place in Mexico for more than a decade, its consequences for international migration both to and from the country have received little scholarly attention. Using the spatial variation in the programme’s coverage generated through the rollout over time, this paper examines the effects of SP on the number of emigrants and return migrants per household. Based on data from Mexico’s National Survey on Demographic Dynamics for 1997–2014, the analysis confirms that being affiliated to SP does not reduce the number of emigrants per household, but such affiliation is, however, positively related to the number of returnees per household. These results are valid across different subsamples of the population and time periods and are robust to omitted variable bias. Our findings have important implications for understanding the effects of social protection policies on international migration patterns.

Cooperative norms and behavior are considered to be essential requirements for sustainable stabilization and development in conflict-affected states. It is therefore particularly important to understand what factors explain their salience in contexts of war, violence and displacement. In this paper, we assess the role of historical political legacies. We argue that precolonial processes of nation-building have strengthened people’s communal bonds to an imagined community, and that these bonds continue to positively impact present-day cooperative norms and behavior. We investigate this argument using the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as an empirical case. We combine historical information on the location and the main features of the precolonial Bushi Kingdom with original georeferenced survey data to investigate variation in cooperative norms within and outside of the boundaries of the precolonial “nation.” We exploit information on people’s awareness of proverbs associated with the original foundation myths of the kingdom to assess the role of long-term norm persistence. We find evidence in line with our argument on the historical roots of cooperative behavior.

Group members defensively reject out-group criticism in self-reports because they perceive it as more threatening than the same criticism from the in-group (intergroup sensitivity effect). But does this effect motivate action? In five experiments, group members exhibited behavior patterns characteristic of motivated goal pursuit: They prioritized defending their group over completing their individual work (Experiments 1–5), even when work was intrinsically rewarding (Experiment 2) or incentivized (Experiment 3). Lastly, this effect disappeared when group members had attained their goal of protecting their group by other means (i.e., group affirmation; Experiments 4 and 5). Together, the experiments suggest that intergroup sensitivity motivates goal-directed action. We discuss how motivated collective defensiveness may undermine constructive debate and heighten acrimony between groups.

Users frequently use search systems on the Web as well as online social media to learn about ongoing events and public opinion on personalities. Prior studies have shown that the top-ranked results returned by these search engines can shape user opinion about the topic (e.g., event or person) being searched. In case of polarizing topics like politics, where multiple competing perspectives exist, the political bias in the top search results can play a significant role in shaping public opinion towards (or away from) certain perspectives. Given the considerable impact that search bias can have on the user, we propose a generalizable search bias quantification framework that not only measures the political bias in ranked list output by the search system but also decouples the bias introduced by the different sources—input data and ranking system. We apply our framework to study the political bias in searches related to 2016 US Presidential primaries in Twitter social media search and find that both input data and ranking system matter in determining the final search output bias seen by the users. And finally, we use the framework to compare the relative bias for two popular search systems—Twitter social media search and Google web search—for queries related to politicians and political events. We end by discussing some potential solutions to signal the bias in the search results to make the users more aware of them.

What explains states’ sub-national territorial reach? While large parts of the state-building literature have focused on national capabilities, little is known about the determinants of the unevenness of state presence at the sub-national level. This article seeks to fill this gap by looking at early attempts at state building: it investigates the processes of state penetration in the former colony of German East Africa. Contrary to previous studies – which largely emphasized antecedent or structural factors – the current study argues that geographical patterns of state penetration have been driven by the state’s strategic imperative to solidify control over territory and establish political stability. The article tests these propositions using an original, geo-referenced grid-cell dataset for the years 1890 to 1909 based on extensive historical records in German colonial yearbooks and maps.

In light of ongoing debates that discuss the link between Muslim migration and terrorist attacks in various European cities, this paper investigates how attitudes toward (Muslim) immigrants have been affected by these attacks. We draw on a German student survey conducted immediately before and after the attacks in Paris in November 2015. The experimental vignette design allows us to further differentiate between attitudes toward Syrian migrants from different religious backgrounds. We show that the attitudes towards immigration held by students who identify with conservative parties became more negative after the attacks. Immigrants’ religion also plays an important role depending on whether the issue in question is a social or political one. The attitudes of liberal students are hardly affected. This paper goes beyond existing studies that measure attitudes only in the aftermath of such attacks and focuses on attitudes regarding policy responses to terrorist attacks or attitudes towards immigrants in general. We show that such attacks do not lead to negative attitudes in general; they mostly do so for people who attach great importance to issues of national security. We also see that people differentiate between various migrant groups.

In this article, we explore civil society mobilisation and the impact of organised interests on the energy policies of two post-communist countries—Hungary and Czechia—and specifically nuclear energy. Drawing on numerous hypotheses from the literature on organised interests, we explore how open both political systems are for civil society input and what interest group-specific and socio-economic factors mediate the influence of organised interests. Based on the preference attainment method, our case studies focus on the extent to which organised interests have succeeded bringing nuclear energy legislation in line with their preferences. We find that while both democracies are open to civil society input, policy-making is generally conducted in state-industrial circles, whereby anti-nuclear and renewable energy advocates are at best able to make minor corrections to already pre-determined policies.

This article assesses the role of the Directorates Generals (DGs) led by the Commissioners in the EU legislative decision-making by testing two perspectives: ‘the Watchdog’ and ‘the Mandarin’ of the EU principals. The former suggests that a conflict of preferences between the DGs will notify the EU principals of prospective bureaucratic drift, leading to more restrictive discretionary limits imposed on the Commission in the implementation stage. However, if the lead DG acts as the Mandarin, proximity of its preference to the EU principals should result in more executive leeway as its policy preference is more beneficial for the EU legislators. To tests the conjunctions, this study focuses on two dimensions of EU political space: Left-Right (LR) and Pro/Anti-EU. The results suggest that the legislators will indulge the Commission with more leeway for the implementation when their preferences are more congruent with the position of the lead DG on the LR dimension, thus supporting ‘the Mandarin’ perspective.

As obesity constitutes a growing health concern over the world, it has also become an important part of public policy agendas. This paper critically analyses the development of the policy debate and measures around obesity in the UK. The paper contributes to the debate by challenging the current individualized nature of nudge policies as the most popular application of behavioural economics to policy. We argue that it may be possible to change the choice architecture of individuals through nudge, but the overall effectiveness of such policies would be limited because the broader social, economic and political architecture shaping individual choices is ignored. The case of the UK provides a good illustration where concrete policy measures are predominantly focused on choice despite growing recognition of the structural determinants of obesity, and the governments are thus able to avoid threatening free markets and existing economic interests. Whilst the recently introduced sugar tax constitutes a certain shift in policy, it clearly remains an exception within the whole policy package.

Why and how do crises cause European integration? Going beyond case- and policy area-specific analyses, the present paper develops a general, liberal intergovernmentalist model of the crisis-integration link. The empirical process-tracing test of this model is performed on two diverse cases of crises: the BSE Crisis 1996–2002 and the Euro Crisis 2010–13. The original analysis of primary documents and newspaper articles reveals that, as theoretically expected, crises stir high public attention and thus turn policy change in the affected policy areas into a salient issue for governments. This opens a ‘window of opportunity’ for domestic actors to approach their governments with change proposals. Governmental cost–benefit calculations, the distribution of bargaining power at the EU level, as well as supranational activism then explain deeper European integration in response to a crisis. With these findings, the present paper contributes to a broader understanding of the mechanisms of European integration in exceptional times.

Organizations often announce their protest activities prior to their implementation to mobilize awareness, recruit supporters, and receive media attention. We are interested in the effectiveness of protest announcements—that is, under what conditions governments make concessions to avoid having an announced protest take place. Governments assess the costs and benefits of providing concessions by taking into account the level of credible threat of the announced protest and the costs related to concessions. We test these assumptions with a unique data set on protest announcements and concessions in Nepal (2007-2010). Using cross-sectional regressions, we demonstrate that protest announcements by unions, announcements with highly threatening tactics and announcements with minimal demands will bring about concessions from the government. We contribute to the growing literature on different protest tactics by providing systematic empirical evidence, for the first time, on the effectiveness of mere protest announcements.

This article presents ViEWS – a political violence early-warning system that seeks to be maximally transparent, publicly available, and have uniform coverage, and sketches the methodological innovations required to achieve these objectives. ViEWS produces monthly forecasts at the country and subnational level for 36 months into the future and all three UCDP types of organized violence: state-based conflict, non-state conflict, and one-sided violence in Africa. The article presents the methodology and data behind these forecasts, evaluates their predictive performance, provides selected forecasts for October 2018 through October 2021, and indicates future extensions. ViEWS is built as an ensemble of constituent models designed to optimize its predictions. Each of these represents a theme that the conflict research literature suggests is relevant, or implements a specific statistical/machine-learning approach. Current forecasts indicate a persistence of conflict in regions in Africa with a recent history of political violence but also alert to newconflicts such as in Southern Cameroon and NorthernMozambique. The subsequent evaluation additionally shows that ViEWS is able to accurately capture the long-termbehavior of established political violence, as well as diffusion processes such as the spread of violence inCameroon. The performance demonstrated here indicates that ViEWS can be a useful complement to nonpublic conflict-warning systems, and also serves as a reference against which future improvements can be evaluated.

This article analyzes the effect of Franco-German cooperation on Economic and Monetary Union reforms, negotiated between 2010 and 2015. We identify three causal mechanisms theorizing how Franco-German cooperation affected the outcomes of EMU negotiations, namely through (a) the elimination of issues from the negotiation agenda; (b) the identification of compromise solutions or the provision of compensations; and (c) the power-based imposition of joint agreements on other member states. We use process tracing to analyze almost the full sample of contested issues included in the ‘EMU Positions’ dataset. Our findings underline that France and Germany indeed eliminated issues to which they were jointly opposed, but they also positively shaped the agenda by proposing compromises and offering compensation. No evidence supports the power-focused perspective of a Franco-German directoire.

This article examines the extent to which economic or political factors shaped government preferences in the reform of the Economic Monetary Union. A multilevel analysis of European Union member governments’ preferences on 40 EMU reform issues negotiated between 2010 and 2015 suggests that countries’ financial sector exposure has significant explanatory power. Seeking to minimize the risk of costly bailouts, countries with highly exposed financial sectors were more likely to support solutions involving high degrees of European integration. In contrast, political factors had no systematic impact. These findings help to enhance our understanding of preference formation in the European Union and the viability of future EMU reform.

This article analyses the role of the African Union (AU) during the Libyan crisis of 2011. It addresses the question of why the AU has not played a central conflict manager role in that crisis. Inspired by pragmatic eclecticism, we take a theoretical detour to answer this question. Through a neoclassical realist and post-structuralist lens, we provide a novel eclectic reconsideration of the crisis response and we also highlight shared ground between both perspectives. Our theoretical and empirical discussion moves along the categories ‘primacy of power’, ‘discourses’ and ‘leader images’. We highlight the ability of dominant powers to influence the unfolding of events with material forms of power but also through immaterial ones such as the advancement of a dominant discourse on a cosmopolitan liberal order related to the responsibility-to-protect.