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As we know from comparative public policy, bureaucracies contribute to a considerable degree to the contents and the ways of policy-making. One important driver of administrative policy-making are their specific “styles” or “cultures”. “Administrative styles” are understood here as the standard operating procedures and routines that characterize the behavior and activities of administrative bodies in initiating, drafting and implementing policy. In this article, we convey the concept of Administrative Styles to the level of International Organizations (IOs) and apply it to the Organization for Economic Development and Co-Operation (OECD). The article proceeds in three steps: First, the concept of administrative styles is introduced and refined. Drawing on expert interviews with OECD staff, we secondly show that consideration of OECD administrative styles significantly advances the literature’s understanding of the organization. Finally, we give an outlook on new research avenues and the relevance of our findings for the study of International Public Administrations (IPAs) more generally.

This article is concerned with explaining why peace endures in countries that have experienced a civil armed conflict. We use a mixed methods approach by evaluating six case studies (Burundi, East Timor, El Salvador, Liberia, Nepal, Sierra Leone) and survival analysis that allows us to consider 205 peace episodes since 1990. We find that it is difficult to explain why peace endures using statistical analysis but there is some indication that conflict termination is important in post-conflict stabilisation: negotiated settlements are more likely to break down than military victories. We also consider the impact of UN peacekeeping operations on the duration of peace but find little evidence of their contribution. However, in situations where UN peacekeeping operations are deployed in support of negotiated settlements they do seem to contribute to peace stabilisation.

Crises, especially economic crises are an immanent element of modern market societies. While some research has been devoted to understanding the consequences of such crises on consumption, a systematic integrative approach to this problem is still missing. In this editorial we develop an encompassing model for the study of crises and consumption, to identify and connect the different elements important for understanding and explaining the relationship. Thereafter we present the papers of this special issue and discuss their contributions, based on the proposed framework. Suggestions for future research conclude the editorial.

A method for predicting conflict zones in civil wars based on point process models is presented in this paper. Instead of testing the validity of specific theoretical conjectures about the determinants of violence in a causal framework, this paper builds on classic literature and a wide body of recent studies to predict conflict zones based on a series of geographic conditions. Using an innovative cross-validation design, the study shows that the quantitative research program on the micro-foundations of violence in civil conflict has crafted generalizable insights permitting out-of-sample predictions of conflict zones. The study region is delimited to ten countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that experienced full-blown insurgencies in the post-Cold War era.

What determines the type of violence used by military actors in civil wars? Drawing on Kalyvas’s “information problem” and Boulding’s “loss of strength gradient”, this paper proposes a simple model of how the violence becomes more indiscriminate as a function of distance from the actors’ power centers. The proposed mechanism is a growing inability of the actors to distinguish between collaborators of the adversary and innocent bystanders. Tested on the conflict event level for 11 cases of insurgency, the results indicate that a simple distance-decay mechanism can explain the occurrence of indiscriminate violence to a large extent.

At least part of the academic literature on public administration asserts that the mass media is responsible for the somewhat negative popular image of administrative agencies. Through negative reporting about the (mis-)behaviour of civil servants or about public administration as a whole, the media shape stereotypes in the collective mind of the citizens. However, while the ascribed role of mass media reporting is plausible, these effects have not yet been empirically verified. This article summarises the scientific discussion about the relationship between public administration and the mass media. Furthermore, it adds to this discussion by simultaneously examining both media usage and attitudes towards administrative agencies in Germany through a secondary analysis of data spanning nearly 30 years.

Social media measurement is important for understanding an organization's reach and engagement with its audiences. In response to Warren Kagarise and Staci M. Zavattaro's question about what works in social media measurement, this article discusses how public administration researchers and practitioners are using social media data that they can easily collect from social media platforms and contrasts these practices with data measurement efforts that can provide deeper insights for evidence-based decision making. This evidence includes interactivity and connectivity among citizens, attributes of network actors, and network structures and positions to understand how content travels through the network and who are the influential actors.

This article explores potential cleavages and conflicts between political support coalitions of social investment versus classical social transfer policies. To that extent, we analyse international survey data from the European Social Survey (ESS) for 21 European countries. Our central finding is that different welfare state beneficiary groups perceive and react negatively to increased government involvement in policy fields from which they do not benefit themselves: single parents are more likely to oppose government support for the unemployed when long-term replacement rates in the unemployment benefit scheme are high. Vice versa, the unemployed are less likely to support the public provision of childcare services if the latter is already well-funded. This finding has implications for the study of welfare states in general because it implies that in mature welfare states, political conflicts may be less about the welfare state as such, but about the distribution of welfare state services and benefits between different groups of beneficiaries.

The continuously growing use of digital services has provided social scientists with an expanding reservoir of data, potentially holding valuable insights into human behavior and social systems. This has often been associated with the terms “big data” and “computational social science.” Using such data, social scientists have argued, will enable us to better understand social, political, and economic life. Yet this new data type comes not only with promises but with challenges as well. These include developing standards for data collection, preparation, analysis, and reporting; establishing more systematic links between established theories within the existing body of research in the social sciences; and moving away from proofs-of-concepts toward the systematic development and testing of hypotheses. In this article, we map these promises and challenges in detail and introduce five highly innovative contributions collected in this special issue. These articles illustrate impressively the potential of digital trace data in the social science all the while remaining conscious of its pitfalls.

Research on budgeting has taken various theoretical and methodological approaches, and these differences have prevented scholars using these various approaches from discussing their common topic. In this collection, we have gathered a group of prominent scholars to explore the intermingling of budgets and politics from an assortment of theoretical and methodological perspectives. This culminated in a collection that highlights not only the breadth of current research but also the range of what remains underexplored.

How do states build a security apparatus after violent resistance against state rule? This article argues that in early periods of state building two main factors shape the process: the macro-strategic goals of the state and administrative challenges of personnel management. These dynamics are studied in the context of the establishment of police forces in the settler colony of German Southwest Africa, present-day Namibia. The empirical analysis relies on information about the location of police stations and a near full census of police forces, compiled from the German Federal Archives. A mismatch is found between the allocation of police presence and the allocation of police personnel. The first was driven by the strategic value of locations in terms of extractive potential, political importance, and the presence of critical infrastructure, whereas the allocation of individual officers was likely affected by adverse selection, which led to the assignment of low-quality recruits to strategically important locations.

Explanatory models accounting for variation in policy choices by democratic governments usually include a demand (by the public) and a supply (by the government) component, whereas the latter component is usually better developed from a measurement viewpoint. The main reason is that public opinion surveys, the standard approach to measuring public demand, are expensive, difficult to implement simultaneously for different countries for purposes of crossnational comparison and impossible to implement ex post for purposes of longitudinal analysis if survey data for past time periods are lacking. We therefore propose a new approach to measuring public demand, focussing on political claims made by nongovernmental actors and expressed in the news. To demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of our measure of published opinion, we focus on climate policy in the time period between 1995 and 2010. When comparing the new measure of published opinion with the best available public opinion survey and internet search data, it turns out that our data can serve as a meaningful proxy for public demand.

In this article, we examine the relationship between metrics documenting politics-related Twitter activity with election results and trends in opinion polls. Various studies have proposed the possibility of inferring public opinion based on digital trace data collected on Twitter and even the possibility to predict election results based on aggregates of mentions of political actors. Yet, a systematic attempt at a validation of Twitter as an indicator for political support is lacking. In this article, building on social science methodology, we test the validity of the relationship between various Twitter-based metrics of public attention toward politics with election results and opinion polls. All indicators tested in this article suggest caution in the attempt to infer public opinion or predict election results based on Twitter messages. In all tested metrics, indicators based on Twitter mentions of political parties differed strongly from parties’ results in elections or opinion polls. This leads us to question the power of Twitter to infer levels of political support of political actors. Instead, Twitter appears to promise insights into temporal dynamics of public attention toward politics.

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Existing typologies of the European administrative space locate decision‐making powers with the European Commission, member state governments, and EU and national agencies, sometimes aided through regulatory networks. This article argues that those typologies are incomplete because they do not take into account the existence of transnational executive bodies. These are public authorities that are responsible for administering and implementing EU policies across multiple member states, that are part of neither domestic nor EU institutions and whose decisions are legally binding. They represent a potentially highly prevalent form of governance in a previously uncharted area of the European administrative space. We document their workings by presenting a case study of the Rhine‐Alpine Corridor organization, a transnational executive body implementing parts of the EU rail freight policy.

The literature on nationalism and civil war provides compelling evidence that territory is highly identity-relevant and strongly associated with conflict. However, it remains unclear which territorial characteristics determine this process, and how groups demanding self-determination differ from their counterparts not seeking greater rights. I argue that groups claim self-rule if they assign symbolic relevance to their land in contrast to material or strategic value, due to the positive effect of symbolic attachments on group cohesion. I present new data on the value of territory and self-determination demands, and propose a new and comprehensive measure of symbolic territory. The findings reveal that variation in symbolic value shows a considerably stronger association with self-determination demands than material and strategic territory. This highlights new research avenues investigating the role of territorial value in subnational conflicts, as well as the systematic differences in conflict behavior between groups demanding self-rule and non-disputants.

What are the causes and consequences of colonial rule? This introduction to the special issue “Comparative Politics of Colonialism and Its Legacies” surveys recent literature in political science, sociology, and economics that addresses colonial state building and colonial legacies. Past research has made important contributions to our understanding of colonialism’s long-term effects on political, social, and economic development. Existing work emphasizes the role of critical junctures and institutions in understanding the transmission of those effects to present-day outcomes and embraces the idea of design-based inference for empirical analysis. The four articles of this special issue add to existing research but also represent new research trends: increased attention to (1) the internal dynamics of colonial intervention; (2) noninstitutional transmission mechanisms; (3) the role of context conditions at times of colonial intervention; and (4) a finer-grained disaggregation of outcomes, explanatory factors, and units of analysis.

The relationship between legislatures and bureaucracies is typically modeled as a principal–agent game. Legislators can acquire information about the (non-)compliance of bureaucrats at some specific cost. Previous studies consider the information from oversight to be perfect, which contradicts most real-world applications. We therefore provide a model that includes random noise as part of the information. The quality of provided goods usually increases with information accuracy while simultaneously requiring less oversight. However, bureaucrats never provide high quality if information accuracy is below a specific threshold. We assess the empirical validity of our predictions in a lab experiment. Our data show that information accuracy is indeed an important determinant of both legislator and bureaucrat decision-making.

Since Ted Gurr’s Why Men Rebel it has become conventional wisdom that (relative) deprivation creates grievances and that these grievances in turn lead to intergroup violence. Recently, studies have yielded evidence that the exclusion of ethnic groups is a substantial conflict risk. From a theoretical angle, the relationship is straightforward and is likely to unfold as a causal chain that runs from objective discrimination to (subjective) grievances and then to violence. We test this proposition with unique group-format data on 433 religious minorities in the developing world from 1990 to 2008. While religious discrimination indeed increases the likelihood of grievances, neither grievances nor discrimination are connected to violence. This finding is supported by a large number of robustness checks. Conceptually, discrimination and grievances can take very different shapes and opportunity plays a much bigger role than any grievance-based approach expects.

Younger employees are often promoted into supervisory positions in which they then manage older subordinates. Do companies benefit or suffer when supervisors and subordinates have inverse age differences? In this study, we examine how average age differences between younger supervisors and older subordinates are linked to the emotions that prevail in the workforce, and to company performance. We propose that the average age differences determine how frequently older subordinates and their coworkers experience negative emotions, and that these emotion frequency levels in turn relate to company performance. The indirect relationship between age differences and performance occurs only if subordinates express their feelings toward their supervisor, but the association is neutralized if emotions are suppressed. We find consistent evidence for this theoretical model in a study of 61 companies with multiple respondents.