Aktuelle Publikationen

Empirical researchers of civil war rarely collect data on violence themselves and instead rely on other sources of information. One frequently used source is media reports, which serve as the basis for many ongoing data projects in the discipline. However, news reports rarely cover a conflict comprehensively and objectively and may therefore be prone to various reporting issues. This article provides an analysis of the accuracy of information given in news reports. In particular, if focuses on two types of “hard facts” that event data sets require: the location of an event and its severity. By linking media reports to firsthand accounts from a military database, the article does two things: (1) it analyzes the determinants of inaccuracy and confirms the expectation that events with a low number of observers tend to have higher reporting inaccuracies and (2) it assesses the magnitude of these inaccuracies and the implications for conducting empirical analyses with media-based event data.

Manual coding of political events from news reports is extremely expensive and time-consuming, whereas completely automatic coding has limitations when it comes to the precision and granularity of the data collected. In this paper, we introduce an alternative strategy by establishing a semi-automatic pipeline, where an automatic classification system eliminates irrelevant source material before further coding is done by humans. Our pipeline relies on a high-performance supervised heterogeneous ensemble classifier working on extremely unbalanced training classes. Deployed to the Mass Mobilization on Autocracies database on protest, the system is able to reduce the number of source articles to be human-coded by more than half, while keeping over 90% of the relevant material.

Does improved communication provided by modern cellphone technology affect the rise or fall of violence during insurgencies? A priori predictions are ambiguous; introducing cellphones can enhance insurgent communications but can also make it easier for the population to share information with counterinsurgents and creates opportunities for signals intelligence collection. We provide the first systematic micro-level test of the effect of cellphone communication on conflict using data on Iraq's cellphone network (2004–2009) and event data on violence. We show that increased mobile communications reduced insurgent violence in Iraq, both at the district level and for specific local coverage areas. The results provide support for models of insurgency that focus on noncombatants providing information as the key constraint on violent groups and highlight the fact that small changes in the transaction costs of cooperating with the government can have large macro effects on conflict.

Germany is a classic example of a conservative welfare state. The production of social services is characterized by a deeply rooted tradition of corporatist governance, in which the “market” has wielded only marginal influence. Since the late 1990s, these corporatist arrangements have been challenged by the growing pressure for marketization; at the same time, a new discourse on social entrepreneurship and innovation has gained importance. This article examines the empirical impact of the social entrepreneurship movement in two domains: old-age care and youth welfare. We discuss the potential role of social entrepreneurship in these fields and argue for a realistic view of the potential for new actors in established governance arrangements. Our observations lead us to conclude that social innovation has developed not primarily as the result of challenges from new actors but rather from intrapreneurship: social innovations originating from within the established organizational field.

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When and why ethnic groups rebel remains a central puzzle in the civil war literature. In this paper, we examine how different types of inequalities affect both an ethnic group’s willingness and opportunity to fight. We argue that political and economic inter-group inequalities motivate ethnic groups to initiate a fight against the state, and that intra-group economic inequality lowers their elite’s costs of providing the necessary material and/or purposive incentives to overcome collective action problems inherent to rebel recruitment. We therefore predict that internally unequal ethnic groups excluded from power and/or significantly richer or poorer relative to the country’s average are most likely to engage in a civil war. To assess our claim empirically, we develop a new global measure of economic inequality by combining high-resolution satellite images of light emissions, spatial population data, and geocoded ethnic settlement areas. After validating our measure at the country- and group level, we include it in a standard statistical model of civil war onset and find considerable support for our theoretical prediction: greater economic inequality within an ethnic group significantly increases the risk of conflict, especially if political or economic inequalities between groups provide a motive.

Online social media has recently irrupted as the last major venue for the propagation of news and cultural content, competing with traditional mass media and allowing citizens to access new sources of information. In this paper, we study collectively filtered news and popular content in Twitter, known as Trending Topics (TTs), to quantify the extent to which they show similar biases known for mass media. We use two datasets collected in 2013 and 2014, including more than 300.000 TTs from 62 countries. The existing patterns of leader-follower relationships among countries reveal systemic biases known for mass media: Countries concentrate their attention to small groups of other countries, generating a pattern of centralization in which TTs follow the gradient of wealth across countries. At the same time, we find subjective biases within language communities linked to the cultural similarity of countries, in which countries with closer cultures and shared languages tend to follow each other’s TTs. Moreover, using a novel methodology based on the Google News service, we study the influence of mass media in TTs for four countries. We find that roughly half of the TTs in Twitter overlap with news reported by mass media, and that the rest of TTs are more likely to spread internationally within Twitter. Our results confirm that online social media have the power to independently spread content beyond mass media, but at the same time social media content follows economic incentives and is subject to cultural factors and language barriers.

Die empirische Forschung zur politischen Gewalt innerhalb von Bürgerkriegen hat in den letzten Jahren einen tiefgehenden Wandel von Makrodesigns hin zu mikrofundierten Studien erfahren. Dieser Trend äußert sich in der verstärkten Verwendung von Umfragen wie auch von Daten, die räumlich oder zeitlich stark desaggregiert sind und mit deren Hilfe sich der Aggregationsbias der traditionellen quantitativen Analysen überwinden lässt. Dank dieser methodischen Innovationen sind einige neue Erkenntnisse etwa zum Zusammenhang zwischen Ungleichheit und politischer Instabilität zu verzeichnen. Dennoch sollte dieses aktive Forschungsfeld sich einigen Herausforderungen stellen, die sich etwa in der begrenzten externen Validität und dem Fehlen von überzeugenden Kausalmechanismen äußern. Nur so ist es der mikrofundierten Forschung möglich, die vielfältigen Resultate in allgemeinere Theorien einzuordnen und die generellen Debatten in der Friedens- und Konfliktforschung zu beeinflussen.

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