Aktuelle Publikationen

Dieser Artikel ist eine kritische Diskussion der Bildungsreformen in Deutschland. Dabei werden insbesondere Entwicklungen in den Bereichen frühkindliche Erziehung, Schulpolitik und berufliche Bildung betrachtet. Die Grundtendenz der Reformdynamik in diesen Bereichen ist aus einer Perspektive der sozialen Gerechtigkeit durchaus positiv zu bewerten. Die Kernthese des Artikels ist jedoch, dass viele der angestoßenen Reformen Gefahr laufen, auf halbem Weg steckenzubleiben. Die nur teilweise Umsetzung von Reformen wiederum kann bestehende Bildungs- und soziale Ungleichheiten verschärfen, statt diese abzubauen, wie an mehreren Beispielen gezeigt wird. Progressive Bildungspolitik sieht sich daher häufig mit dem Dilemma konfrontiert, dass Reformen, die auf eine Verminderung von Ungleichheiten zielen, neue Ungleichheiten hervorrufen können. Einbezogen wird auch das Thema der digitalen Transformation und ihrer Auswirkungen auf die berufliche Bildung. Die rapide fortschreitende Automatisierung und Digitalisierung der Arbeitswelt wird voraussichtlich bestehende Fliehkräfte im System der beruflichen Bildung verstärken.

According to conventional wisdom, strategic natural resources like oil are harmful to international peace. Nonetheless, there is little comparative work on the link between resources and interstate conflicts. Analyzing the impact of oil on militarized interstate disputes on the dyadic level of analysis for the period from 1946 to 2001, this paper shows that oil in fact influences the conflict potential between countries. Results of logistic regressions suggest that absolute oil abundance as well as oil dependence increase the risk of dispute involvement. We find that in particular oil production, oil reserves, oil dependence, and oil exports are associated with a higher risk of initiating conflict while countries enjoying large oil reserves are more frequently the target of military actions. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that the presence of large oil deposits also increase the intensity of international disputes. Relative measures of oil abundance such as per capita oil production, in contrast, do not affect countries’ dispute proneness. Increased militarization, the internationalization of intrastate violence, the indulgence of an oil-dependent world community and so-called “classical resource wars”—rather than domestic political mechanisms inherent to the rentier state—are likely to explain our findings.

Nearly all research on the political impact of Americans’ religious and secular orientations assumes that such orientations are exogenous to politics. Using multiwave panel and experimental data, we find that religious and secular orientations are endogenous to political orientations. In other words, religion and secularism are a consequence as well as a cause of politics. In showing this, we make three major contributions. First, we conceptualize and measure secular orientations in a new way—not just as the absence of religion, but also as an affirmative secular identity and positive commitment to secular principles. Second, our panel and experimental data allow for the most definitive test to date of whether political orientations exert a causal effect on religious and secular orientations. Third, we isolate the conditions under which politics affects religious–secular perspectives, thus identifying the mechanism that underlies political orientations.

We examine whether exposure to several salient counterexamples reduces the effect of stereotypes on voting. By taking advantage of a series of seven plagiarism scandals in Germany—a country with high regard for academic credentials where academic titles (Dr. and Prof.) get printed on ballot papers—we test whether the tendency to vote for candidates with a doctor’s title decreased in the wake of the scandals. Using cross- sectional and longitudinal estimators and controlling for a large range of potential confounders, we find that the electoral advantage of candidates with a doctor’s title shrinks from a good half of a percentage point before the scandals down to a third after the scandals. In line with a subtyping hypothesis, the reduction is stronger for candidates from traditional middle-class parties (i.e., the parties of the politicians who were implicated in the scandals). Neither of these effects turns out to be strong enough to reach statistical significance, however. We conclude that seven negative examples in one legislative term had no noticeable effect on the tendency to select candidates based on academic titles. Our study provides a rare opportunity to test the effect of stereotype-disconfirming information on electoral behavior. Our results contribute to a literature demonstrating the resilience of stereotypes to disconfirming information. They also suggest that plagiarism affairs are unlikely to reduce electoral incentives for politicians to obtain a fake doctorate.

Forschungsfrage: Ist Altersdiversität positiv oder negativ für die Team- und Unternehmensleistung?

Methodik: Analyse der aktuellen empirischen wissenschaftlichen Literatur zur Thematik

Praktische Implikationen: Altersdiversität alleine hat nur einen geringen Einfluss auf die Leistungsfähigkeit von Teams und Unternehmen. Entscheidend ist vielmehr, dass die Rahmenbedingungen im Personalmanagement und Führungsverhalten so genutzt werden, dass die Vorteile der Kompetenzen und Erfahrungshintergründe der verschiedenen Altersgruppen optimal für gemeinsame Ziele zum Tragen kommen.

This article introduces two advanced analytical strategies for analyzing contextual-level outcomes in multilevel models: the multilevel SEM and the two-step approach. Since these strategies are seldom used in comparative survey research, we first discuss their methodological and statistical advantages over the more commonly applied approach of group mean aggregation. We then illustrate these advantages in an empirical analysis of the effect of citizens' support for democratic values at the individual level on a contextual-level outcome – the persistence of democracy – drawing on data from the World Values Survey and the Quality of Government project. Whereas we found no significant effect of support for democratic values in the model using simple group mean aggregation, citizens' support for democratic values was a significant predictor of democracies' estimated survival rate when applying latent aggregation in multilevel SEM and the two-step approach. The article corroborates previous concerns with simple aggregation and demonstrates how researchers can improve the validity of their analyses of contextual-level outcomes by using alternative strategies of aggregation.

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Does the electoral system affect government partisanship? Iversen and Soskice answer this question in the affirmative. These authors argue that center-right governments dominate in majoritarian systems, whereas proportional representation systems see more center-left governments. They explain this difference by the strategic voting behavior of the middle class under alternative electoral rules. In this study, we test the robustness of their empirical results to alternative measures of the main variables as well as to a completed version of the original data set. Our replication does not corroborate Iversen and Soskice’s empirical findings. First, we cannot substantiate the notion that center-right governments emerge more frequently in majoritarian systems. Second, a time-series cross-section analysis does not support the hypothesis that the electoral system is a significant determinant of partisan control of government.

Social networks affect individuals’ economic opportunities and well-being. However, few of the factors thought to shape networks—culture, language, education, and income—were empirically validated at scale. To fill this gap, we collected a large number of social media posts from a major US metropolitan area. By associating these posts with US Census tracts through their locations, we linked socioeconomic indicators to group-level signals extracted from social media, including emotions, language, and online social ties. Our analysis shows that tracts with higher education levels have weaker social ties, but this effect is attenuated for tracts with high ratio of Hispanic residents. Negative emotions are associated with more frequent online interactions, or stronger social ties, while positive emotions are associated with weaker ties. These results hold for both Spanish and English tweets, evidencing that language does not affect this relationship between emotion and social ties. Our findings highlight the role of cognitive and demographic factors in online interactions and demonstrate the value of traditional social science sources, like US Census data, within social media studies.

This article argues that elite theories can contribute significantly to our understanding of democratization. Existing elite theories on the relationship between elite configurations and regime outcomes will be critically reviewed and then tested in two case studies, Ghana and Togo. While Ghana is one of Africa's most democratic countries, Togo has remained an electoral autocracy. The empirical evidence is based on a unique data set that maps the interaction patterns between Members of Parliament (MPs) in each of the countries. Using social network analysis, the article shows that the elite interactions differ systematically between the countries. MPs in Ghana form a dense and strongly interconnected network that bridges ethnic and party cleavages. Moreover, MPs from different parties have developed a measure of trust in one another. In Togo, by contrast, there is much more suspicion between government and opposition, and much less cooperation.

Online social media are information resources that can have a transformative power in society. While the Web was envisioned as an equalizing force that allows everyone to access information, the digital divide prevents large amounts of people from being present online. Online social media in particular are prone to gender inequality, an important issue given the link between social media use and employment. Understanding gender inequality in social media is a challenging task due to the necessity of data sources that can provide large-scale measurements across multiple countries. Here we show how the Facebook Gender Divide (FGD), a metric based on aggregated statistics of more than 1.4 Billion users in 217 countries, explains various aspects of worldwide gender inequality. Our analysis shows that the FGD encodes gender equality indices in education, health, and economic opportunity. We find gender differences in network externalities that suggest that using social media has an added value for women. Furthermore, we find that low values of the FGD are associated with increases in economic gender equality. Our results suggest that online social networks, while suffering evident gender imbalance, may lower the barriers that women have to access informational resources and help to narrow the economic gender gap.