Aktuelle Publikationen

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Crowd‐coding is a novel technique that allows for fast, affordable and reproducible online categorisation of large numbers of statements. It combines judgements by multiple, paid, non‐expert coders to avoid miscoding(s). It has been argued that crowd‐coding could replace expert judgements, using the coding of political texts as an example in which both strategies produce similar results. Since crowd‐coding yields the potential to extend the replication standard to data production and to ‘scale’ coding schemes based on a modest number of carefully devised test questions and answers, it is important that its possibilities and limitations are better understood. While previous results for low complexity coding tasks are encouraging, this study assesses whether and under what conditions simple and complex coding tasks can be outsourced to the crowd without sacrificing content validity in return for scalability. The simple task is to decide whether a party statement counts as positive reference to a concept – in this case: equality. The complex task is to distinguish between five concepts of equality. To account for the crowd‐coder's contextual knowledge, the IP restrictions are varied. The basis for comparisons is 1,404 party statements, coded by experts and the crowd (resulting in 30,000 online judgements). Comparisons of the expert‐crowd match at the level of statements and party manifestos show that the results are substantively similar even for the complex task, suggesting that complex category schemes can be scaled via crowd‐coding. The match is only slightly higher when IP restrictions are used as an approximation of coder expertise.

Economic prosperity is the best recipe for an incumbent government to be re‐elected. However, the financial crisis was significantly more consequential for governing parties in young rather than in established democracies. This article introduces the age of democracy as a contextual explanation which moderates the degree to which citizens vote retrospectively. It shows a curvilinear effect of the age of democracy on retrospective economic voting. In a first stage after the transition to democracy, reform governments suffer from a general anti‐incumbency effect, unrelated to economic performance. In a second step, citizens in young democracies relate the legitimacy of democratic actors to their economic performance rather than to procedural rules, and connect economic outcomes closely to incumbent support. As democracies mature, actors profit from a reservoir of legitimacy, and retrospective voting declines. Empirically, these hypotheses are corroborated by data on vote change and economic performance in 59 democracies worldwide, over 25 years.

Legislators are political actors whose main goal is to get re‐elected. They use their legislative repertoire to help them cater to the interests of their principals. It is argued in this article that we need to move beyond treating electoral systems as monolithic entities, as if all legislators operating under the same set of macro‐rules shared the same set of incentives. Rather, we need to account for within‐system variation – namely, candidate selection rules and individual electoral vulnerability. Using a most different systems design, Germany, Ireland and Portugal are leveraged with both cross‐system and within‐system variation. An original dataset of 345,000 parliamentary questions is used. Findings show that candidate selection rules blur canonical electoral system boundaries. Electoral vulnerability has a similar effect in closed‐list and mixed systems, but not in preferential voting settings.

The literature of comparative political economy considers the Danish “Flexicurity” model the egalitarian variety of contemporary capitalism. This article, however, contests this common assessment by tracing the gradual policy changes that led to an erosion of its security-related components. Comparing the rise and erosion of the Danish “Flexicurity” model, it argues that the explanation for this reform trajectory lies in the exclusion of the labour movement from the policy-making process. Danish minority governments gained little by involving unions, because they were no longer reliant on an extra-parliamentary channel of consensus mobilisation. Flexible majority-building in the parliamentary arena allowed them to seek their preferred policy output independent from union consent. The onset of the Great Recession therefore allowed governments of the right as well as the left to dismiss the one single actor that mobilised political support for workers at risk of unemployment. Without the involvement of organised labour, the concept of “Flexicurity” cannot live up to its promise of mitigating economic uncertainty on a volatile labour market.

This article focusses on the evolution of the school governance model in Spain since the 1980s. In Spain and elsewhere in Europe, the state’s monopoly over education has softened and new forms of educational governance have emerged. This has resulted in the decentralization of decision-making authority to individual schools, municipalities, and regions and a significant increase in school autonomy. We explore from a political science perspective how partisan preferences and teachers unions have decisively shaped the reform trajectory. We show that leftist and center-right governments and different teachers’ unions have promoted different versions of school autonomy in line with their ideological rationales, resulting in a reconfiguration of the school governance model with each change in government.

Organizations increasingly rely on algorithm-based HR decision-making to monitor their employees. This trend is reinforced by the technology industry claiming that its decision-making tools are efficient and objective, downplaying their potential biases. In our manuscript, we identify an important challenge arising from the efficiency-driven logic of algorithm-based HR decision-making, namely that it may shift the delicate balance between employees' personal integrity and compliance more in the direction of compliance. We suggest that critical data literacy, ethical awareness, the use of participatory design methods, and private regulatory regimes within civil society can help overcome these challenges. Our paper contributes to literature on workplace monitoring, critical data studies, personal integrity, and literature at the intersection between HR management and corporate responsibility.

Die Forschung über internationale Sanktionen hat sich in der Vergangenheit vor allem auf die Implementierung und Wirksamkeit konzentriert und die Beendigung außer Acht gelassen. Traditionelle Erklärungsansätze, die Sanktionen als Instrument rationaler, zwischenstaatlicher Verhandlungen betrachten, erklären die Dauer und das Ende von Sanktionen mit Hilfe von Kosten-Nutzen-Rechnungen. Dabei wird jedoch das Wechselspiel zwischen Lockerung, Stagnation und Intensivierung von Sanktionen unzureichend erfasst. Auch die vielfältigen sozialen Beziehungen und die politischen Signale, die von einer Beendigung von Sanktionen ausgehen, finden nicht ausreichend Beachtung. Um diese Lücken zu schließen, schlägt der Artikel ein prozessorientiertes und relationales Verständnis der Beendigung von Sanktionen vor. Es wird auch berücksichtigt, dass die Aufhebung von Sanktionen die politische Isolation des Sanktionszieles beendet, was Gegenstand intensiver diskursiver Auseinandersetzungen sein kann. Fallstudien zu Simbabwe und dem Iran veranschaulichen, wie ein solcher Ansatz Aufschluss über verschiedene Handlungslogiken gibt, die Prozesse der Sanktionsbeendigung prägen, und so zu einem ganzheitlicheren Verständnis von Sanktionen beiträgt.

Social class, with its potentially pivotal influence on both policy-making and electoral outcomes tied to the welfare state, is a frequent fixture in academic and political discussions about social policy. Yet these discussions presuppose that class identity is in fact tied up with distinct attitudes toward the welfare state. Using original data from ten surveys fielded in the United States and Western Europe, we investigate the relationship between class and general stances toward the welfare state as a whole, with the goal of determining whether class affects how individuals understand and relate to the welfare state. Our findings suggest that, although class markers are tied to objective and subjective positional considerations about one's place in the society, they nevertheless do not seem to shape stances toward the welfare state. What is more, this is equally true across the various welfare state types, as we find no evidence that so-called ‘middle-class welfare states’ engender more positive middle-class attitudes than other regimes. Based on our analysis, we propose that researchers would do better to focus on household income rather than class; while income may not be a perfect predictor of attitudes toward the welfare state, it is a markedly better one than class.