Aktuelle Publikationen

This paper investigates how the rise of global value chains (GVCs) in international trade affects the political economy of trade disputes. It addresses the gap between the domestic and international politics of trade disputes, which is especially relevant in these times as populist nationalism favors protectionist forces. We advance the argument that firms face institutional disadvantages in opposing protectionist forces at home, as observed in how contesting firms fare in US anti-dumping cases. As a consequence, they have incentive to seek cross-border cooperation with firms along the supply chain to escalate the adoption of anti-dumping measures to WTO disputes. The paper implements a two-stage empirical strategy. First, we examine the political contestation around US anti-dumping cases ongoing in the WTO era that takes place in International Trade Commission (ITC) hearings. We observe that while these cases see significant opposition from firms relying on the imports of intermediate goods, most cases end in favor of petitioners supporting the imposition of anti-dumping duties. In a second step, we quantitatively analyze the effect of intermediate and GVC goods trade in products that are the subjects of anti-dumping cases on the incidence of a formal WTO dispute. The results suggest that the high costs of litigation at the WTO are often prohibitive relative to the volume of trade in question and pose an equally difficult challenge for firms seeking to overturn protectionist measures.

The article studies whether and how negative campaigning is a successful strategy for attaining media attention. It combines extensive content analyses of party and news texts with public opinion surveys to study the success of individual press releases in making the news. The empirical analysis draws on 1496 party press releases and 6512 news reports in all national media outlets during the final 6 weeks of Austria’s 2013 general election campaign. We find that negative campaigning is a successful strategy to attract the attention of journalists and editors. It is particularly relevant for rank-and-file politicians, who lack the intrinsic news value of high public or party office, and for messages that focus on a rival’s best issues. These findings have broader implications for understanding party strategies and ‘negativity bias’ in the news.

What role does horizontal social inequality play for political protest in middle-income countries? We argue that public social service provision is an important driver of state perceptions. When a state fails to deliver services in an equitable manner, trust in institutions erodes and protest becomes more likely. We use a mixed methods design to investigate this argument in South Africa. First, we combine police event records with census data to estimate correlations between service inequality and protests. Second, we draw on an opinion survey with 27,000 respondents to investigate the suggested mechanism linking social inequality to protest through political attitudes. Third, we focus on qualitative protest accounts in two areas identified by a matching approach to assess the plausibility of our quantitative findings. Throughout these analyses, we document a robust association between horizontal social inequality and protest.

Prior research has advanced classical agency theory to account for various characteristics of headquarters (HQ)-subsidiary relations in the multinational corporation (MNC). In an attempt to contribute to this line of research, in this paper, we propose and test an agency model for HQ-subsidiary relations inside the MNC. Drawing on classical agency assumptions, we develop a baseline hypothesis that links informal controls (i.e., socialization), HQ-subsidiary goal conflicts, and the HQ’s use of formal controls (i.e., behavioral controls). We subsequently introduce an important boundary condition, which reflects subsidiaries’ internal agency relations with subsidiary CEOs as second principals. More specifically, we argue that the baseline relationship only holds under low levels of second principal power. To test our model, we employed a unique study design with three parallel surveys addressing the agents and the two principals involved in 131 agency relations within one MNC.

The growing multitude of sophisticated event-level data collection enables novel analyses of conflict. Even when multiple event data sets are available, researchers tend to rely on only one. We instead advocate integrating information from multiple event data sets. The advantages include facilitating analysis of relationships between different types of conflict, providing more comprehensive empirical measurement, and evaluating the relative coverage and quality of data sets. Existing integration efforts have been performed manually, with significant limitations. Therefore, we introduce Matching Event Data by Location, Time and Type (MELTT)—an automated, transparent, reproducible methodology for integrating event data sets. For the cases of Nigeria 2011, South Sudan 2015, and Libya 2014, we show that using MELTT to integrate data from four leading conflict event data sets (Uppsala Conflict Data Project–Georeferenced Event Data, Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, Social Conflict Analysis Database, and Global Terrorism Database) provides a more complete picture of conflict. We also apply multiple systems estimation to show that each of these data sets has substantial missingness in coverage.

Bisher orientieren sich Digitalisierungsbemühungen in der öffentlichen Verwaltung vor allem an den Fachverantwortlichkeiten und Fachprozessen, die in oftmals isoliert operierenden Ressorts organisiert sind. Ein erster Schritt in Richtung Orientierung der Dienstleistungen an den Bedürfnissen der Bürger wurde mit dem OZG angestoßen. Fachverantwortliche müssen sich nun an den Lebenslagen der Bürger orientieren. Auf der Basis von Experteninterviews wurden fünf Schritte abgeleitet, die dabei helfen, digitale Transformationsprojekte umzusetzen (siehe Abbildung).

Studies show that globalisation creates political potentials that can transform electoral competition in Western societies. The specific process of how these potentials become effective is not completely understood. It is argued in the article that attention-grabbing events can trigger the transformation of electoral competition as they force actors to take clear positions and thereby allow citizens to align their partisan preferences and policy attitudes. The article analyses the case of German parties’ reaction to the arrival of large numbers of refugees at Europe’s borders in 2015/16. Using panel data that bracket this event, it is shown how German citizens responded to party behaviour by changing partisan preferences on the basis of prior immigration attitudes. The so-called refugee crisis may thus have been a critical juncture transforming party competition in Germany. As such, the crisis represents a striking example of how events may focus attention on a new policy dimension and catalyse the evolution of new cleavages.

Privacy regulations for online platforms allow users to control their personal data. But what happens when our private attributes or behaviour can be inferred without our personal data? Researchers reveal that the behaviour of individuals is predictable using only the information provided by their friends in an online social network.

While the political nature of evaluation is widely recognized, few attempts exist to conceptualize and compare these politics. This article develops the concept of evaluation stakeholder influence potential, which builds on four political resources for influence (agenda-setting powers, staff and budgetary resources, access to evaluation results, and access to evaluators). These resources are measured for both member states and international public administrations in 24 United Nations organizations. We find that the administration—and not member states—have the largest influence potential in almost two-thirds of the international organizations. Our findings allow classifying them into three groups for which we expect differences in political contestation about evaluation use: two extreme-case groups (either member state or administrative dominance) and a group of contested middle cases. This finding of bureaucratic dominance reinforces literature on bureaucrats as powerful evaluation stakeholders in domestic settings and speaks to nascent research on bureaucratic influence in international organizations.

This paper explores the employment trajectories of workers exposed to technological change. Based on individual-level panel data from the UK, we first confirm that the share of middle-skilled routine workers has declined, while non-routine jobs in both high- and low-skilled occupations have increased, consistent with country-level patterns of job polarization. Next, we zoom in on the actual transition patterns of threatened routine workers. Despite the aggregate decline in routine work, most affected workers manage to remain in the labor market during the time they are in the study: about 64% “survive” in routine work, 24% switch to other (better or worse paying) jobs, almost 10% exit routine work via retirement and only a small minority end up unemployed. Based on this finding, the final part of our analysis studies the economic implications of remaining in a digitalizing occupational environment. We rely on an original approach that specifically captures the impact of information and communication technology at the industry level on labor market outcomes and find evidence for a digital Matthew effect: while outcomes are, on average, positive, it is first and foremost non-routine workers in cognitively demanding jobs that benefit from the penetration of new technologies in the workplace. In the conclusions, we discuss if labor market polarization is a likely source of intensified political conflict.

After collective traumas such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks, members of concerned communities experience intense emotions and talk profusely about them. Although these exchanges resemble simple emotional venting, Durkheim’s theory of collective effervescence postulates that these collective emotions lead to higher levels of solidarity in the affected community. We present the first large-scale test of this theory through the analysis of digital traces of 62,114 Twitter users after the Paris terrorist attacks of November 2015. We found a collective negative emotional response followed by a marked long-term increase in the use of lexical indicators related to solidarity. Expressions of social processes, prosocial behavior, and positive affect were higher in the months after the attacks for the individuals who participated to a higher degree in the collective emotion. Our findings support the conclusion that collective emotions after a disaster are associated with higher solidarity, revealing the social resilience of a community.

Trade policy has become increasingly multidimensional. Current trade agreements not only address market access but also encompass rules and provisions related to flexibility of commitment, investment protection, and dispute settlement mechanisms. Yet, rigorous evidence about how interest groups evaluate each of these in relation to the others remains scarce. We develop a firm-level theoretical framework to explain how firms’ international operations affect their preferences on different trade policy measures. We experimentally evaluate preferences over multiple policy dimensions using a conjoint analysis on firms in Costa Rica. Notably, for many types of firms, the standard trade policy measures of yesteryear—tariffs and subsidies—are no longer their most important concerns. Instead, the degree of firms’ involvement in global value chains shapes their preferences. Multinational corporations care most about protection of their foreign investments. Those exporters who are not central to global supply networks most value strong dispute settlement procedures. Finally, we find that preferences over these policy dimensions are more likely to vary by firm than by industry, which calls into question the existing literature's focus on interindustry distinctions.