Publikationsliste KOPS

While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians’ positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians’ theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one thousand politicians in 11 countries, together with corresponding surveys of more than twelve thousand citizens, we show that politicians overwhelmingly hold thin, minimalist, “democratic realist” theories of voting, while citizens’ theories are more optimistic and policy oriented. Politicians’ theoretical tendencies—along with their theoretical misalignment from citizens—are remarkably consistent across countries. These theories are likely to have important consequences for how politicians campaign, communicate with the public, think about public policy, and represent their constituents.

Under what conditions has corporatist policymaking become institutionalized in newly transitioned democracies? I argue that transitions have provided temporary opportunities for unions to push for laws they can later use to protect their place in economic councils. The relevant sets of legal rules, which I call compulsory deliberation, enable non-‘State official’ members to resist governmental disruption of such councils despite them composing the Executive’s structure. I compare South Africa and Brazil, two ‘most similar’ cases that featured sequences of chronically unstable labor-excluding councils under authoritarian regimes. I argue that the former broke out of this trajectory while the latter did not because South African unions developed aspirations for durable policy influence before the transition, whereas Brazilian ones only did so afterward and thus mobilized too late. Although Brazilian governments have enacted dozens of regulations covering as many councils, these have only served as short-term instruments for marketing policies.

Can armed conflict amplify the societal impacts and humanitarian consequences of natural hazards? Given that these hazards affect millions of people worldwide and that climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, it is paramount that we advance our understanding of what makes societies vulnerable to these hazards. Existing research has focused mainly on political violence as a consequence of natural hazard-related disasters but has neglected that conflict can also be an underlying factor that shapes the impact of these events. Consequently, we know little about whether and how exposure to violent armed conflict increases vulnerability to natural hazards. This study argues that the local dynamics of conflict can have a significant effect on vulnerability and empirically investigates how periods of high-intensity conflict can affect the humanitarian consequences of natural hazards in the context of tropical cyclones in the Philippines. By combining data on physical storm exposure with highly detailed subnational data on disaster fatalities and conflict events, the empirical analysis allows the identification of the independent effect of conflict on hazard impacts. Results show that local periods of high-intensity conflict significantly increase the humanitarian consequences of natural hazards. These results have important implications for research investigating the impacts of disasters on peace and conflict, as they show that the consequences of natural disasters depend fundamentally on pre-existing conflict dynamics.

Despite well-intentioned gender diversity initiatives aimed at addressing gender imbalances by ensuring minimal female representation in predominantly male groups, such tokenism often exacerbates discrimination and social isolation for these women, potentially leading to absenteeism. Research suggests that the benefits of diversity are realized only when the ratio of women to men reaches a critical threshold that allows for genuine integration and participation. However, this threshold remains uncertain. We integrate tokenism theory with social identity and status characteristics theories to investigate the effects of gender ratios within organizational teams on individual absenteeism. Specifically, we theorize a U-shaped relationship between gender dissimilarity and absenteeism for women, but not for men. Study 1, with a one-year cross-lagged design, encompassing 10,332 blue-collar workers in 1064 teams, supports the U-shaped relationship for women, while the relationship for men was non-significant. In Study 2, we use an experimental design with a sample of 370 female blue-collar workers to explore two potential mechanisms that may together explain the U-shaped gender dissimilarity effect for women. We test whether the gender composition of the work group affects both women’s likelihood of reporting unpleasant experiences and the group’s norms regarding absence. We draw theoretical and practical implications from these findings.

The perception of leaders as charismatic personalities has been linked to the level of (positive) emotion in their messages. The present paper reports a cross-modal perception study on the relationship between perceived charisma and positive as well as negative emotions. One hundred forty-nine participants listened or read Brexit speeches by four British politicians (David Cameron, Nicola Sturgeon, Nigel Farage, Theresa May) and rated their charisma using a 7-point Likert scale. Emotions in speeches were quantified on three dimensions (valence, arousal, dominance) and supplemented by analyses of person deixis ( I vs. we ). Results revealed that effects of emotions on perceived charisma are moderated by the modality of speeches. Emotionally positive words as well as inclusive person deixis increased charisma ratings in written messages, but the effect was reduced or not present in auditory versions of these messages. Implications arise for studies of political discourse that tend to focus on scripted speeches.

The “radical right gender gap” is an established finding in contemporary research, indicating that women support populist radical right parties (PRRPs) in significantly lower numbers than men. Despite substantial literature dedicated to uncovering the reasons behind this gap, significant questions remain unanswered. This article examines the nature of the radical right gender gap in greater detail, focusing on Switzerland—a country with one of the most established PRRPs in Western Europe, the SVP/SPP (Schweizer Volkspartei/Swiss People’s Party), making it a representative case. A defining feature of PRRPs that sets them apart from other parties is their clear distinction between in-groups and out-groups in society, coupled with the propagation of nativist and anti-pluralist values. While PRRPs emphasize caring for the in-group, they often advocate excluding the out-group from rights and privileges. This article argues that the preferences of PRRPs and female voters are in stark contrast regarding these issues. Building on empirical evidence that women place more importance on certain features of a democratic system than men do, we propose that this discrepancy may help explain the gender gap in support for these parties. Utilizing data from the European Social Survey 2020, which includes detailed questions on various understandings of democracy, we find robust support for our hypotheses within the Swiss context. Compared to men, women consider protecting the rights of minorities and safeguarding all citizens from poverty as especially important for a functioning democracy. These preferences emerge as influential factors contributing to women’s reluctance to support PRRPs.

Recent years have seen an increased research interest in the determinants of public trust in science. While some argue that democracy should be the political regime most conducive to science, recent debates about salient scientific findings revealed considerable cracks in the public perception of science. We argue that existing cross-national work on trust in science is incomplete because it uses an aggregate concept of “science”. People in different political environments likely have different conceptions of what science is, which can have consequences for perceptions and trust. To remedy this shortcoming, we present results from a preregistered survey experiment in ten countries ( N = 8441), which covers a broad spectrum of political regimes and tests how science and scientists’ characteristics influence public trust. We find that, against expectations, female scientists and scientists engaging in public activism are both perceived as more trustworthy. High-impact research is trusted more than low-impact research, and it does not matter whether a scientist is a co-national. Overall, our experiment reveals few differences across political regimes. Additional survey results show that respondents’ education and exposure to science have similar relationships with trust across autocratic and democratic countries. A striking difference we find is that while political orientation has little impact in autocratic countries, it is strongly related to trust across democracies as perceptions of science become increasingly politicized.

This article evaluates the quality of data collection in individual-level desktop web tracking used in the social sciences and shows that the existing approaches face sampling issues, validity issues due to the lack of content-level data and their disregard for the variety of devices and long-tail consumption patterns as well as transparency and privacy issues. To overcome some of these problems, the article introduces a new academic web tracking solution, WebTrack, an open-source tracking tool maintained by a major European research institution, GESIS. The design logic, the interfaces, and the backend requirements for WebTrack are discussed, followed by a detailed examination of the strengths and weaknesses of the tool. Finally, using data from 1,185 participants, the article empirically illustrates how an improvement in data collection through WebTrack leads to innovative shifts in the use of tracking data. As WebTrack allows for collecting the content people are exposed to beyond the classical news platforms, it can greatly improve the detection of politics-related information consumption in tracking data through automated content analysis compared to traditional approaches that rely on the source-level analysis.

Ethnic movements continue to challenge state governments globally, with many ethnic conflicts revolving around the status of groups’ territories. Yet, politically mobilized ethnic groups vary considerably in their territorial demands: some press for increased autonomy or even outright secession, while others do not make such demands at all and prefer integration in the existing state. What explains this divergence in ethnic group demands with respect to the group's territorial status? We argue that the expected benefits of ethno-regional autonomy or secession compared to integration in a centralized state differ across distinct segments within the group as a function of three structural factors: heterogeneity in the group's income sources, cultural divisions, and territorial fragmentation, leading to disagreement over self-determination demands between different political organizations representing the same ethnic group. We test our argument using an expanded version of the Ethnic Power Relations–Organizations (EPR-O) dataset. Our pre-registered study finds support for one of our hypotheses: heterogeneity in groups’ income sources increases disagreement over self-determination demands. This finding sheds new light on the structural sources of internal divisions within ethno-political movements.

Recent work has demonstrated that perceiving oneself as being treated better by one’s leader compared to one’s coworkers’ treatment by the same leader (i.e., leader-member exchange social comparison; LMXSC) can motivate aggressive behavior towards one’s colleagues. Extending these findings, the current paper argues that high LMXSC employees can also be motivated to show aggressive behavior towards their leader, depending on their early experiences with authority figures (i.e., parents/guardians). Using both experimental and time-lagged field study designs, this study demonstrates that LMXSC elicits hubristic pride which, in turn, motivates supervisor-directed deviance in subordinates who were overindulged by their parents/guardians as children. These findings challenge the assumption that high LMXSC employees reciprocate their leaders’ positive treatment by revealing when and why they can be motivated to demonstrate aggressive and deviant leader-directed behavior.

To what extent have Latin America's Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs adopted different forms of conditionality? What are the main features of this variation, if any? In this article, we show that conditionalities vary across Latin America's CCTs and across time within programs. Drawing on existing conceptualizations of welfare conditionality and a novel, purpose-built dataset covering 16 countries from 1997 to 2019, we analyze the evolution and variation in the design of welfare conditionality in the region. We find that conditionalities among Latin America's CCTs exhibit many different types and also vary significantly in how the program's main attributes—behavioral requirements, monitoring, and sanctioning rules—combine and evolve across time in each program. These combinations show that governments do not consistently produce “pure” CCT models but instead use conditionality features in many different ways and also adjust them over time, frequently to make more explicit what they expect from CCT recipients.

Internet shutdowns have become a popular instrument for repressive regimes to silence dissent in a digitized world. While authorities seek to suppress opponents by imposing Internet outages, we know little about how the public reacts to such incisive measures. The regime might face anger and resentment from the public as a response to Internet deprivation. Why do regimes still use Internet shutdowns when they do not only face economic but also societal losses? In this paper, I argue that Internet shutdowns lower the public’s evaluation of the political leadership as citizens blame the government for the service outages. For the analysis, I combine fine-grained data on Internet outages with survey data from the Afrobarometer and apply an “unexpected event during survey design.” Results show that citizens do not hold the government accountable for Internet disruptions, thus making Internet shutdowns a powerful tool for autocrats to silent dissent digitally.

Over the last decades, many democracies progressed in the political inclusion of Indigenous people and the recognition of their rights. Does this contribute to how satisfied Indigenous people are with how democracy works? Prior empirical evidence suggests it does. As yet, there is, however, little study of the underlying mechanisms and we should not assume a categorically positive correlation between political equality and satisfaction with democracy. Instead, Indigenous affairs need to be sufficiently politicized to matter for Indigenous people's satisfaction with democracy. I test this argument in the case of the Sámi people in Norway and Sweden. While political inequality is comparatively higher in Sweden, Sámi issues are less politicized. Using novel original survey data, I find that here, satisfaction with democracy is not correlated with Sámi ethnicity. Satisfaction levels among Norwegian Sámi, though, are significantly lower than among their non-Indigenous compatriots and strongly shaped by considerations of political inequality.

Modern welfare states compete with private providers of welfare in offering economic security. This is most evident in the case of pensions competing with life insurance and private pensions as well as of public health insurance competing with private insurance providers. The common view of this public–private relationship is one of a trade-off: longitudinally, political scientists describe how retrenchment was pushed by privatized welfare, whereas economists trace the crowding-out of private to public welfare provisions. Cross-sectionally, they claim that countries have lower public spending levels because they have a large private sector. We suggest a more nuanced view. Drawing on a new long-run panel data of public pension and private life insurance expenditures and contributions in 20 OECD countries since Bismarck to the current day, we show that in the postwar years a cross-sectional trade-off emerged, which then faded. Longitudinally, complementary relationships of public and private provision growth have become the norm. We argue theoretically and show empirically that trade-offs only occur if governments still hold (waning) anti-interventionist and pro-market views.

Climate change and most climate policies affect and reinforce different forms of inequalities. For instance, climate change policies that aim to change consumer behavior by increasing the price tag of goods and services that cause carbon emissions often carry a disproportionately higher burden (in terms of financial cost) to those with lower incomes. They can thereby either exacerbate existing income inequalities or contribute to generating new ones. Meanwhile, refraining from engaging with climate mitigation policies will incur other detrimental societal costs: the financial burden and the harmful consequences of climate change that future generations will have to bear if nothing is done. In this paper, we examine how the immediate economic inequality citizens face from climate mitigation policies (regarding carbon taxation) weighs against the long-term generational inequalities future generations will experience. We study how both types of inequality relate to policy support for climate change mitigation policies in the context of Germany. The German case is of special interest because a recent court ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court allows us to test whether making people aware of a new legal reality can bridge the gap between the economic and generational inequality. Our findings using a between-subjects survey experiment fielded among German citizens (N=6,319) in 2022 show that immediate economic concerns trump future generational concerns, generally making citizens less supportive of the policy. This negative support is, however, somewhat mitigated by the supportive signal from the court ruling.

Numerous studies show that properly designed economic sanctions can force the target to refrain from violating international norms. However, policymakers cannot integrate this finding into their ex ante assessments of whether more forceful coercive measures could prevent military coups, human rights violations, or a war of aggression such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this article, we address this shortcoming and introduce counterfactual predictions to answer the what-if question of whether adequate sanctions by the European Union and the United States could have provoked targets to abandon severe norm violations. To this end, a training data set from 1989 to 2008 is used to predict the success of sanctions from 2009 to 2015. Our policy counterfactuals for key sanction cases suggest that stricter EU coercion against Russia after the annexation of Crimea could have triggered policy concessions from the regime of President Putin.

Territorial differentiation entails challenges for legitimate representation as legislators may be empowered to vote on legislation that does not affect their constituencies. A typical example of this democratic dilemma is the “West Lothian question” in the United Kingdom, where all members of the House of Commons can vote on bills that only affect England. The European Union faces a similar dilemma when members of the European Parliament vote on bills from which their member states are exempted. We analyse EU legislators' voting behaviour on differentiated policies to provide the missing empirical evidence for an informed debate about the institutional design of legislative rules under differentiation. We show that legislators abstain more frequently than their party group colleagues when their constituency is not subject to a bill due to sovereignty concerns. This practice of abstention resembles an existing norm in the United Kingdom and mitigates the democratic dilemma associated with differentiation.