Aktuelle Publikationen

This article analyzes the patterns of informal political exchange between Ghanaian parliamentarians. Whereas research on Western parliaments identifies the party dimension as the strongest predictor for explaining exchange patterns, we develop three possible theoretical explanations for non-Western legislatures. We try to explain informal political exchange by shared ideology (party), solidarity (ethnicity), or same material interests (region). We test our claims by a novel data set based on a survey with almost all members of the current Ghanaian legislature. We analyze the exchange network using exponential random graph models. Our results suggest that regional origin, as compared to party attachment and ethnicity, is the superior predictor for informal political exchange between parliamentarians.

In studying how to best understand social program introduction, political scientists have built up a laundry list of contributory factors. We suggest, however, that “objective” problem pressure has been incorrectly neglected by many scholars in recent decades—and the well-known case of Germany’s nineteenth-century introduction of social insurance legislation provides a clear illustration of this point. In explaining the origins and design of German social insurance, the interplay of three factors is key: first, exceptionally high problem pressure, connected to both labor market- and state-building processes; second, a fragile institutional context dominated by Prussia; and third, the party political constellation. In making this argument, we draw on “open functional reasoning” and extract implications from the case study to further refine the underlying theory. Specifically, we find that goal-oriented action may both be more common and more prone to compromise than the theory suggests. As such, we not only present an argument for considering the potential impact of problem pressure, but also lay out and refine an approach to doing so. In contrasting this approach to the problematic functionalism that initially inclined many scholars to neglect of problem pressure, we hope to help rehabilitate the concept—and in the process strengthen the explanatory power of research in sociology and political science.

Social investment has recently received much attention among policy-makers and welfare state scholars, but the existing literature remains focused on policy-making on the macro level. We expand this perspective by studying public opinion towards social investment compared to other welfare policies, exploiting new public opinion data from eight European countries. We identify three latent dimensions of welfare state preferences: ‘social investment’; ‘passive transfers’; and ‘workfare’ policies. We find that social investment is far more popular compared to the other two. Furthermore, we identify distinct supporting groups: passive transfer policies are most supported by low-income, low-educated people, by individuals leaning towards traditional social values and by those subscribing to left-wing economic attitudes. Social investment policies are supported by a broad coalition of individuals with higher educational backgrounds and left-libertarian views from all economic strata. Workfare policies are most popular with high-income individuals and those subscribing to economically conservative and traditional authoritarian values.

In all advanced democracies, policies related to the welfare state are the largest part of public policy activity. Cross-pressured by globalization, deindustrialization, rising public debts, demographic changes, permanent austerity and the rise of 'new social risks', welfare states in post-industrial democracies have entered a new phase of consolidation and transformation since the 1980s. Against early fears, retrenchment has not been 'the only game in town'. Rather, many countries have expanded new welfare policies such as 'social investments'. This collection adds to the recent literature on the emergence of the 'social investment state' in several ways: (1) it assesses to what degree social investment policies have become established across countries and at the EU level; (2) it demonstrates that and why the politics of social investment are different from those of compensatory social policies on the micro and macro level; and (3) it points at important socio-economic effects of social investments.

Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) have become the most prevalent form of international trade liberalization in recent decades, even though it remains far from clear what their effects on economies and their key units, firms, are. This paper evaluates the distributional consequences of trade liberalization within industries differentiating two distinct aspects in which trade liberalization could result in higher trade flows: the intensive vs. the extensive margin of trade. In particular, we analyze whether trade liberalization leads to increased trade flows because either firms trade more volume in products they have already traded before (intensive margin) or because they start to trade products they have not traded previously (extensive margin), or both. We test these arguments for the Dominican Republic–Central America–United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) and exporting firms based in Costa Rica for the time-period 2008–2014. The results of our study suggest that the effects of CAFTA-DR depend not only on whether we analyze the extensive versus the intensive margin of trade but also whether the product in question is homogenous or differentiated and whether the exporting firm under analysis is small or large. In particular, we find support for the theoretical expectation that firms exporting heterogeneous products, such as textiles, gain from trade agreements, such as CAFTA-DR, in that they can export more varieties of their products. Yet at the same time, they tend to lose at the intensive margin by a reduction in their trade volume while the opposite pattern occurs for firms exporting homogenous products.

The concept of the social investment welfare state has received a lot of attention and support both from academics and policymakers. It is therefore commonly assumed that policies such as investing in education or family services would also receive significant support from the mass public. While there are some indications of this, existing comparative surveys of public opinion usually do not take into account how citizens perceive and react to policy trade-offs, i.e. how they respond when forced to prioritize between different types of social policies, which is more realistic given budget constraints. This article presents original data from a representative survey of public opinion in eight Western European countries, studying how support for social investment policies changes when additional spending on these policies would have to be financed with cutbacks in other parts of the welfare state. The central findings are that citizens generally dislike being forced to cut back one type of social spending to expand another, but there is a significant degree of variation across individuals and policy fields. Material self-interest and ideological predispositions as well as their interaction help understanding differences in the acceptance of these trade-offs. The findings have important implications for the political viability of social investment policies. Political parties aiming to expand social investment in a context of fiscal austerity are confronted with different and distinct electoral constraints and challenges given the respective preferences of their electorates.

This article analyses the role of partisan politics in the recent expansion of early childhood education and care in the German Länder. In contrast to recent work in comparative public policy that often diagnoses a waning of partisan effects, we find broad support for the notion that partisan differences continue to matter in this policy field. The government participation of left-wing parties is positively and significantly associated with changes in public spending on early childhood education, independent of whether this is measured as a percentage of gross domestic product or in terms of per-capita spending. In contrast, left-wing partisanship is not associated with changes in the share of public spending devoted to independent (private) institutions. Coalition status, particularly governing in a Grand Coalition, somewhat mediates these effects. Our empirical analysis is based on the findings from a cross-sectional time-series analysis based on an original data set of spending data for the 16 Länder for the time period between 1992 and 2010.

Online Open Innovation (OI) platforms like Challenge.gov are used to post public sector problem statements, collect and evaluate ideas submitted by citizens with the goal to increase government innovation. Using quantitative data extracted from contests posted to Challenge.gov and qualitative interviews with thirty-six public managers in fourteen federal departments contribute to the discovery and analysis of intra-, inter, and extra-organizational factors that drive or hinder the implementation of OI in the public sector. The analysis shows that system-inherent barriers hinder public sector organizations to adopt this procedural and technological innovation. However, when the mandate of the innovation policy aligns with the mission of the organization, it opens opportunities for change in innovation acquisition and standard operating procedures.

This article revisits the influential partisan alignment hypothesis, which posits that subnational governments aligned with central governments exhibit higher expenditures. To promote their own and their party’s re-election chances, central government politicians allocate more resources to ideologically aligned co-partisans at the subnational level. Consequently, aligned subnational governments exhibit higher expenditures than non-aligned ones. This article examines alignment effects in subnational education spending. Education is a crucial test case because, unlike other expenditures, the allocation of education spending is discretionary and often does not follow precise formulas. Using a novel dataset covering 266 subnational regions in 14 countries over 20 years, we offer the first cross-country analysis of alignment effects. Controlling for rival explanations, the findings reveal alignment effects on subnational education expenditures. Furthermore, political institutions matter, as alignment effects are stronger in countries where subnational governments have more discretion over education policy while lacking their own revenue sources (vertical fiscal imbalance). These findings imply that decentralisation might increase educational and socio-economic inequalities.

Previous research has established a link between oil production and armed conflict in low- and middle-income countries. Oil-related grievances are viewed as a key variable driving resentment and antistate attitudes. However, the off-the-shelf measures of existing studies (oil exports, oil revenues per capita, etc.) measure dependence and richness, not grievances among the population. This article contributes to filling this gap. Relying on an original opinion poll from the conflict-ridden Niger Delta, the analysis shows that both rebel-pursued, collective grievances (unfair oil revenue distribution) and individual grievances (livelihood destruction due to oil production) make people support antistate violence. These results lend micro-level evidence to the grievance mechanism linking oil and (support for) rebellion.

The public opinion–policy linkage has received scholarly attention for a long time. After all, this linkage is not only a key characteristic of democracy, but one of the most important aspects and quality criteria of a functioning representative democracy. Despite more than 50 years of political science research, there is still a lot of controversy about how the linkage between public opinion and policy actually works. Two related but distinct strands have formed in the literature—one focusing on responsiveness, the other on congruence. While both schools of thought are ultimately interested in the link between public opinion and representatives’ position or behavior they pursue two different strategies leading to confusion over the concepts and measurement in question. We provide a mutually exclusive conceptualization of congruence and responsiveness and structure the review of the extensive literature accordingly. In addition to providing greater theoretical coherence, our conceptualization fosters further development in the field by deliberately combining the two concepts with the research strands on public policy and representation. We conclude with a call for a more integrated research agenda and introduce a novel concept of “congruent responsiveness.”

Offering a framework for ethical assessment, this article draws attention to the ethical issues accompanying empirical research on security. Speaking to the various subfields and schools of broadly conceived applied security studies, we classify the many ethical issues specific to empirical research on security, conflict, and political violence into researcher-related problems, subject-related problems, and result-related problems. We evaluate the importance and variations of these issues and highlight potential mitigation pathways. This effort brings together an existing but fragmented literature and builds upon the authors’ own experiences in several subfields and schools of “hands-on” research on security and political violence.

This article examines to what extent different formal conceptualizations of ideological conflict can help to explain the capacity for and speed of policy change in the European Union (EU). We compare the core and the winset, two competing concepts based on the spatial theory of voting. The empirical analysis shows that the latter concept bears a strong and systematic influence on decision making in the EU. The smaller the winset containing the outcomes that a majority of actors in the Council of the EU prefers over the status quo, the longer a decision-making process lasts and the smaller the potential for policy change.

The focus in the security and development debate is on collective violence and the World Bank’s World Development Report 2017 is typical by mainly considering the effects of organized armed conflict. In this article I argue that interpersonal violence affects many more people globally and should receive more attention as well as aid. The adverse consequences from interpersonal violence on socioeconomic development are likely to be large but much of this violence is hidden in plain sight. Women and children are at particularly high risk of being victims of violence but since most of this violence is perpetrated in the domestic sphere it is less likely to affect the collective conscience.

This article examines the long-term impact of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) on prosocial behavior in Sierra Leone. Two theoretical arguments are developed and tested. The first draws on the feminist literature and suggests the presence of a decay mechanism: victims and their families are stigmatized by their community and excluded from social networks. The second integrates new insights from social psychology, psychological trauma research, and anthropology, and argues for a resilience mechanism. It argues that CRSV-affected households have a strong incentive to remain part of their community and will invest more effort and resources into the community to avert social exclusion than unaffected households. Using data on 5,475 Sierra Leonean households, the author finds that exposure to CRSV increases prosocial behavior—cooperation, helping, and altruism—which supports the resilience hypothesis. The results are robust to an instrumental variable estimation. The ramifications of this finding go beyond the case of Sierra Leone and generate a more general question: What makes communities resilient to shocks and trauma?

The political power of labor unions is a contentious issue in the social sciences. Departing from the dominant focus on membership size, we argue that unions’ influence on national law making is based to an important degree on their local organization. We delineate the novel hypothesis that the horizontal concentration of union members within electoral districts matters. To test it, we draw on administrative records and map the membership size and concentration of local unions to districts of the US House of Representatives, 2003–12. We find that, controlling for membership size, representatives from districts with less concentrated unions have more liberal voting records than their peers. This concentration effect survives numerous district controls and relaxing OLS assumptions. While surprising for several theoretical perspectives, it is consistent with theories based on social incentives. These results have implications for our broader understanding of political representation and the role of groups in democratic politics.

Governments need to adapt to changes in their internal and external environments and create systems that allow them to scan trends, identify developments, predict their potential impact on the organization, and quickly learn how to implement changes to their standard operating procedures. As a response, government organizations are adopting agile approaches as part of their process redesigns, project management, and software development approaches. Although agility and adaptiveness are long in use in the private sector, they have been increasingly adopted in the public sector literature and practices. In order to understand the existing theoretical and practical foundations of the field, we have conducted a systematic literature review and identified four streams of research areas: (1) software development approaches, (2) project management approaches, (3) application areas, and (4) potential outcomes. In this article, we synthesize this literature, provide an outlook on future research questions, and introduce several articles as part of the current special issue focused on agile government.