Publikationsliste KOPS

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COVID-19 vaccination rates slowed in many countries during the second half of 2021, along with the emergence of vocal opposition, particularly to mandated vaccinations. Who are those resisting vaccination? Under what conditions do they change their minds? Our three-wave representative panel survey from Germany allows us to estimate the dynamics of vaccine opposition, providing the following answers. Without mandates, it may be difficult to reach and to sustain the near-universal level of repeated vaccinations apparently required to contain the Delta, Omicron, and likely subsequent variants. But mandates substantially increase opposition to vaccination. We find that few were opposed to voluntary vaccination in all three waves of the survey. They are just 3.3% of our panel, a number that we demonstrate is unlikely to be the result of response error. In contrast, the fraction consistently opposed to enforced vaccinations is 16.5%. Under both policies, those consistently opposed and those switching from opposition to supporting vaccination are sociodemographically virtually indistinguishable from other Germans. Thus, the mechanisms accounting for the dynamics of vaccine attitudes may apply generally across societal groups. What differentiates them from others are their beliefs about vaccination effectiveness, their trust in public institutions, and whether they perceive enforced vaccination as a restriction on their freedom. We find that changing these beliefs is both possible and necessary to increase vaccine willingness, even in the case of mandates. An inference is that well-designed policies of persuasion and enforcement will be complementary, not alternatives.

Contact restrictions and distancing measures are among the most effective non-pharmaceutical measures to stop the spread of the SARS-CoV2 virus. Yet, research has only begun to understand the wider social consequences of these interventions. This study investigates how individuals' social networks have changed since the outbreak of the pandemic and how this is related to individuals' socio-economic positions and their socio-demographic characteristics. Based on a large quota sample of the German adult population, we investigate the loss and gain of strong and weak social ties during the pandemic. While about one third of respondents reported losing of contact with acquaintances, every fourth person has lost contact to a friend. Forming new social ties occurs less frequently. Only 10-15% report having made new acquaintances (15%) or friends (10%) during the pandemic. Overall, more than half of our respondents did not report any change, however. Changes in social networks are linked to both socio-demographic and socio-economic characteristics, such as age, gender, education, and migration background, providing key insights into a yet underexplored dimension of pandemic-related social inequality.

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The COVID-19 lockdown measures have challenged individuals to reconcile employment, childcare, and housework. This article addresses whether these challenges have reduced life satisfaction among German women by focusing on their labor market status and drawing upon a topical online survey (Kantar) collected in Germany at two points in time: May 2020 and November 2020. We find that part-time employed women were better protected against a decline in life satisfaction, but only during the first lockdown. Economically inactive women were most likely to experience a decline in life satisfaction during the first lockdown, but least likely during the second lockdown. Life satisfaction has further decreased between the first and the second lockdown, and the likelihood of a decrease has converged for full-time, part-time, and economically inactive women.

Background and aims
Although large-scale population studies have linked the use of classic psychedelics (lysergic acid diethylamide, psilocybin, or mescaline) to reduced odds of physical health problems, mental health problems, and criminal behavior, the roughly 35 million adults in the United States who have used classic psychedelics are nonetheless stigmatized in the American job market. Various federal organizations in the United States automatically reject applicants on the sole basis of prior psychedelic use, thereby practicing an open form of legal discrimination against these applicants. The present study investigates whether this discrimination can be justified based on associations between lifetime classic psychedelic use and motivationally-based workplace absenteeism.

Methods
Using pooled cross-sectional data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2013–2019) on 193,320 employed adults in the United States, this study tests whether lifetime classic psychedelic use predicts the number of workdays employees skipped in the last month (i.e., motivationally-based workplace absenteeism).

Results
After adjusting for sociodemographics, physical health indicators, and other substance use, no significant association between lifetime classic psychedelic use and motivationally-based workplace absenteeism is found.

Conclusion
This study builds on classic psychedelic research that is just beginning to take work-specific outcomes into account and offers empirical justification for the elimination of arbitrary drug-based recruitment policies in the workplace.

Coupled women typically have lower earnings than their male partners. This gender income gap within couples has declined over time, but we lack information about the drivers behind the decline. Here, we analyze the role of increased participation in education and the labor market, as well as changes in social policies, on the decline of the gender income gap within couples in West Germany from 1978 to 2011, using Microcensus data. We show that women’s increased labor market participation and their increased transfer incomes are the major sources of the reduction in the gap. Both trends are strongly connected to family policies. We also shed light on the role of men in the overall trend. Their increased full-time premiums and educational attainment are important counter-trends that outweigh the role of increased unemployment and part-time employment levels among men in reducing the gap.

Though the extent of wealth inequality across many nations is now well attested, along with the social and political challenges this might entail, there appears to be relatively little popular support for increased taxation of wealth. We argue that a sociological ‘phenomenological’ perspective of wealth can shed light on this conundrum. Such a perspective accounts for how wealth is experienced and understood by people, revealing its qualitative, extra-economic nature. Though its pecuniary value is certainly salient, wealth is rarely perceived in purely financial terms. This phenomenological perspective draws out that wealth has temporal and relational features that exceed purely economistic calculations. Wealth has temporal features as it conveys future potential and it is relational because acquiring wealth entails familial and social relationships, rather than individualistic and strategic ones. It is seen as taking responsibility for oneself and one’s family. We schematically contrast this with historical periods where wealth was more clearly bound up with visible exclusive relations associated with slavery and the conspicuous consumption of landed estates to suggest that this form of ordinary wealth is not generally perecieved in such exclusionary terms. In a time of welfare retrenchment and anxiety surrounding social safety nets, the temporal and familial qualities of wealth are particularly salient as they connect to private insurance against risk. This orientation helps us to understand why certain forms of wealth may not be identified as socially undesirable or problematic today, even though they may be deeply unevenly distributed.

Postindustrial occupational change has ended an era of unprecedented upward mobility. We examine the political implications of this immense structural shift by introducing the concept of status discordance, which we operationalize as the difference between status expectations formed during childhood and outcomes realized in adulthood. We leverage German household panel data and predictive modeling to provide empirical estimates of status expectations based on childhood circumstances and parental background. The analysis reveals that political dissatisfaction is widespread among voters who fall short of intergenerational status expectations. We show that such dissatisfaction is associated with higher abstention rates, less mainstream party support, and more radical voting. Moreover, we explore variation in status discordance by gender, education, and occupation, which influence the choice between radical left and right parties. Our findings highlight how expectations about opportunities underlie generational voting patterns and shed light on the ongoing breakdown of the postwar political consensus.

Though the literature on perceptions of inequality and studies of ‘elites’ have identified the importance of meritocratic beliefs in legitimating inequality, little is known about the role of pay setting processes in sustaining ideals of meritocracy. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with UK-based top income earners working mainly in finance, I analyse how top income earners perceive economic inequality. My study highlights the crucial role of performance pay for perceptions that top incomes are meritocratically deserved. Participants expressed the view that performance pay, an increasingly prevalent pay-setting practice, ensures that top incomes reflect a share of economic ‘value created’ for shareholders, clients or investors. Focusing on narrow, economic criteria of evaluation perceived as objective, the majority of respondents (‘performance pay meritocrats’) justified any income difference as deserved if it reflects economic contribution. Meanwhile, a minority of respondents (‘social reflexivists’) applied broader evaluative criteria including distributive justice and social contributions.

International aid donors now allocate the majority of development assistance to conflict-affected countries. Aid scholarship largely classifies this subset of recipients as poorly governed countries where donors bypass the government in favor or third-party implementers. We argue that further disaggregation shows how donors use different aid types—humanitarian, transitional, development, and budgetary aid—to support postconflict transitions. We expect that when a postconflict country signals progression toward peace, donors will give development and budgetary aid to the government and withdraw humanitarian and transitional aid; when the country signals regression toward violence, donors will do the inverse. To test our expectations, we use an original survey-embedded experiment completed by 1,130 aid experts around the globe. Our findings generally support our expectations, although they reveal important nuances. In particular, they show that experts are more certain of how donors aid countries that are progressing toward peace than those that are returning to war.