Aktuelle Publikationen

We offer a model of how interest groups affect policy stability. The relationship between interest group density and policy volatility is concave because of two forces: (a) the number and interaction of interest groups in a policy domain and (b) the effect of this interaction on policy image and attention. After laying out the logics of both processes, we identify three ideal type situations: (a) capture (low interest group density, low attention) and (b) deadlock (high interest group density, high attention) lead to low levels of policy volatility while (c) lability (medium interest group density, intermittent attention) leads to high levels of policy volatility. For our empirical evidence, we rely on all budget functions in the American states from 1984 to 2010 and employ generalized additive regression modeling. The article contributes to the literature on understanding interest group strategies, interest group influence in policy making, and broader questions of deliberative democracy.

We point to a popular yet underresearched platform of political information, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Considering the supply side of the marketplace, we argue that personal biographies on the platform are an attractive medium for politicians to enhance their appearance. We trace changes to biographies coming from the parliament using data that cover the entire edit histories for biographies on all German members of parliament for the three last legislative periods. Our findings show editing of personal biographies to be a persistent phenomenon. Moreover, type, timing, and driving factors of editing behavior highlight the importance politicians’ attribute to Wikipedia for pursuing reelection. Our results speak to the domains of political professionalization, voting behavior, and the general measurement of communicative patterns.

Method factors represent variance common to indicators from the same data source. Detecting method factors can help uncover systematic bias in data sources. This article employs confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to detect method factors in 23 democracy indicators from four popular data sources: The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Freedom House, Polity IV, and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. Using three different multi-dimensional concepts of democracy as starting points, we find strong evidence for method factors in all sources. Method-specific factors are strongest when yearly changes in the scores are assessed. The sources find it easier to agree on long-term average scores. We discuss the implications for applied researchers.

Many studies use the same factors to explain attitudes toward specific trade agreements and attitudes toward the principle of free trade and thus treat both objects as interchangeable. Contemporary trade agreements, however, often reach beyond trade in the narrow sense. Consequently, factors unrelated to free trade may affect citizens’ evaluations of these agreements. We propose a model of attitude formation toward specific trade agreements that includes the societal context as a constitutive feature. We expect salient aspects of an agreement to activate corresponding predispositions. Empirically, we compare how this contextual model and a standard model perform in explaining German citizens’ attitudes toward free trade and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The results show that the standard model performs well in explaining public opinion on the principle of free trade but is less useful in explaining attitudes toward TTIP. The latter were driven by postures toward transatlantic cooperation, predispositions toward the role of interest groups in politics, and market regulation – aspects salient in German public discourse about TTIP. In sum, we find ample evidence for the need to differentiate between the two attitude objects and for our contextual model of attitude formation.

In this article, we investigate the effect of European Commission democracy assistance on democratization in the countries of the Western Balkans. The analysis is based on a comprehensive dataset of the financial assistance given by the European Commission to the region from 1994 to 2010. Since this dataset is disaggregated into different sectors, it allows for the distinction between direct and indirect approaches to democracy promotion. The regression results do not confirm the expected positive association between direct democracy promotion and democratization in the Western Balkans. We contextualize our findings by considering the specific post-conflict context in the region and the European Commission’s conflicting policy objectives in play.

The relation between religious organizations and political authority is notoriously tense. Max Weber argued that this is because both compete over the same resource: human commitment. This article revisits Weber’s hypothesis. Specifically, we explore two psychological mechanisms through which Protestant missionaries affect political authority: obedience and persuadability. Exploiting exogenous variation in missionary activity in Peru, we demonstrate that missionaries make converts more obedient, which we attribute to a theological and a social mechanism. Yet, we also find that missionaries make converts less susceptible to persuasion by political authorities because they shift attention from secular topics to questions of theological importance, and endorse a skeptical stance toward the government. Exploiting variation in treatment intensity, we argue that the degree to which political authority is affected depends on a given mission’s theological strictness. We arrive at these findings by combining experimental outcomes and process-tracing evidence using Bayesian integration.

Some European welfare states protect outsiders from economic uncertainty better than others. Conventional theories attribute this either to the material interests of producer groups or the vote-seeking actions of political parties. By contrast, this article focuses on the interaction between trade unions and governments, drawing on empirical experience in Austria and Sweden. High levels of inclusiveness provide trade unions with a powerful interest in protecting outsiders. Governments, however, have moved towards dualistic policy choices, but when weakened by intra-coalitional divisions or a hung parliament, they retain a political incentive to negotiate political deals with trade unions, and this forces them to compensate outsiders for economic uncertainty.

In the German Bundesrat, an arena of horizontal intergovernmental relations, sixteen Länder governments composed of approximately 170 governmental departments coordinate and negotiate their positions on federal motions. This article analyzes the coordination process and argues that the interests that the actors pursue, as well as the coordination strategies stemming from these interests, are less clear-cut than commonly assumed. Based on a novel network dataset collected by the author, evidence is found for sectoral, political party, and territorial coordination strategies. The main findings are first, that political party coordination in Germany is more frequent than territorial coordination but performs a structuring instead of a substantial function during the coordination process. Second, sectoral coordination mainly takes place at an early stage of the coordination process and is able to solve a bulk of coordination problems by drawing on expert knowledge.

Political representation is crucial for the political stability of plural societies. It contributes to political stability by fostering feelings of inclusion and belonging among the minority or by affecting policy responsiveness. Previous research confounds these two types of representation by using descriptive representation as a proxy for policy responsiveness, although the relation between the two is not self-evident as minority representatives can easily be outvoted or marginalised, or represent other constituencies than their group. In this paper, I argue that the effect of representation must be disentangled by studying descriptive representation and policy responsiveness separately. The empirical analysis is based on a cross-sectional time-series design, analysing 90 ethnic minority groups in more than 40 electoral democracies worldwide. I find that descriptive representation has only an accommodative effect if it is sufficiently consequential, and that economic and cultural policies are differently linked to protest: economic rights have a curvilinear effect, whereas cultural rights are associated through a linear effect with protest. I explain this difference with a lack of economic means among economically marginalised groups, which might deter them from protesting.

Public opinion research has found that increasing the investment in education is generally very popular among citizens in Western Europe. However, this evidence from publicly available opinion surveys may be misleading, because these surveys do not force respondents to prioritize between different parts of the education system or between education and other social policies, nor do they provide information about citizens’ willingness to pay for additional investment in education. To address these deficiencies, we conducted an original, representative survey of public opinion on education and related policies in eight European countries. Our analysis confirms that citizens express high levels of support for education even when they are forced to choose between education and other areas of social spending. But not all educational sectors enjoy equally high levels of support: increasing spending on general schooling and vocational education is more popular than increasing spending on higher education and early childhood education. Furthermore, we find that citizens are, in fact, willing to pay additional taxes in order to finance investment in education, at least in some countries and for some sectors of the education system.

Using a gravity model, we examine the dynamics of migration from developing to OECD countries. Origin and destination countries are characterized by substantial differences in incomes, political rights and cultures. Incentives as well as costs shape the decision to migrate. One powerful dynamic effect is that diasporas increase migration, mainly because they lower the cost of migration. Diasporas assist the next wave of migrants by overcoming the high cost of the emigration, in particular when the origin country is far away and poor. The interaction between the diaspora and cultural distance is also significant. Diasporas in culturally distant countries appear to be particularly useful in overcoming the cost of migration. We interpret this as evidence that culturally distant diasporas are less likely to integrate and maintain closer links with their country of origin, while diasporas from culturally similar countries are more likely to integrate and thus be less useful to potential new migrants.

Purpose
Leader sensegiving—the attempt to affect employees’ sensemaking—is a crucial leadership activity during organizational change. Yet, it is unclear how employee sensemaking and leader sensegiving vary across different change phases: Although addressing employee needs is key for successful sensegiving, current literature remains vague about how leaders account for different employee needs over the course of a change process.

Design/Methodology/Approach
Data were obtained from an interview study with organizational members who underwent episodic change. To integrate both perspectives, interviews were conducted with leaders (n = 26) and employees (n = 29). Data were analyzed using template analysis.

Findings
Our analysis revealed and confirmed different sensemaking needs and respective sensegiving foci in each change phase. During exploration, leaders respond to employees’ need for reassurance with receptive sensegiving. During preparation, leaders show participative sensegiving to answer employees’ need for orientation. During implementation, leaders’ compensating sensegiving responds to employees’ need for balance. During evaluation, leaders’ evaluative sensegiving accounts for employees’ need for acknowledgment. Each sensegiving mode is associated with a specific set of discursive and symbolic strategies in each phase.

Implications
This study provides a systematic framework on how leaders can respond successfully to employee sensemaking needs in each change phase using different discursive and symbolic sensegiving strategies.

Originality/Value
The study enhances our understanding of development in sensemaking and sensegiving by outlining the specific interlocking between both processes within the different change phases. Furthermore, it outlines how the relevant sensegiving modes can be obtained through particular symbolic and discursive strategies.

Duration analyses in political science often model nonproportional hazards through interactions with analysis time. To facilitate their interpretation, methodologists have proposed methods to visualize time-varying coefficients or hazard ratios. While these techniques are a useful, initial postestimation step, I argue that they are insufficient to identify the overall impact of a time-varying effect and may lead to faulty inference when a coefficient changes its sign. I show how even significant changes of a coefficient’s sign do not imply that the overall effect is reversed over time. In order to enable a correct interpretation of time-varying effects in this context, researchers should visualize their results with survivor functions. I outline how survivor functions are calculated for models with time-varying effects and demonstrate the need for such a nuanced interpretation using the prominent finding of a time-varying effect of mediation on interstate conflict. The reanalysis of the data using the proposed visualization methods indicates that the conclusions of earlier mediation research are misleading. The example highlights how survivor functions are an essential tool to clarify the ambiguity inherent in time-varying coefficients in event history models.

Research on parliamentary careers has paid little attention to variations in pre-parliamentary career patterns and their value in explaining legislators’ parliamentary success. Using sequence and cluster analysis, this article identifies typical career tracks taken by Party Animals, Local Heroes, Late Bloomers, Land Legislators, High-Flyers and Career Changers based on a comprehensive dataset of German parliamentarians’ biographies (1998–2014). The analysis confirms the role of the party as the primary career facilitator before and within parliament. Nonetheless both Career Changers and High-Flyers climb the greasy pole all the way to the national parliament without much service to the party. The former type, however, suffers from a lack of networks and experience, which is reflected in the limited career success within parliament. This article demonstrates that the use of sequence analysis on career paths offers a promising approach in distinguishing and explaining the opportunities, choices and obstacles MPs face in parliament.

In this paper I present an election forecasting approach to predict the vote share of the governing coalition in German national elections. The model is composed of two independent prediction components: the first is based on poll data, the second on fundamental variables. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages when used in isolation. The basic idea is to use both and find a better informed overall forecast. The predictions are combined using a shrinkage estimator, where the predictions are weighted by their respective prediction uncertainty. The uncertainty of the poll prediction is modelled time-dependent. The result is a dynamic model allowing for predictions longer before the elections highly relying on fundamental variables. With the elections coming closer predictions rely more and more on the polling data.

Almost four decades have passed since the Argentina-Brazil balance of power gave way to a Brazilian uncontested primacy in the Southern Cone. The peaceful and cooperative nature of this regional power transition poses an interesting puzzle for structural theories and those concerned with the US-China transition. Why do certain countries accept accommodation more leniently, like Argentina did? I offer an explanatory model and use process tracing to show that key cooperative turns in this bilateral relationship—during the late 1970s and early 1990s—required concurrent structural changes, both at the international and domestic levels. My conclusions suggest, against the prevalent narrative, that cooperation between Argentina and Brazil was not a product of democracy. Instead, peaceful power transitions take place when the costs of confrontation are high and social coalitions are largely redefined in the declining state.