Publikationsliste KOPS

A growing body of research has studied how autocratic regimes interfere with internet communication to contain challenges to their rule. In this review article, we survey the literature and identify the most important directions and challenges for future research. We structure our review along different network layers, each of which provides particular ways of governmental influence and control. While current research has made much progress in understanding individual digital tactics, we argue that there is still a need for theoretical development and empirical progress. First, we need a more comprehensive understanding of how particular tactics fit into an overall digital strategy, but also how they interact with traditional, “offline” means of autocratic politics, such as cooptation or repression. Second, we discuss a number of challenges that empirical research needs to address, such as the effectiveness of digital tactics, the problem of attribution, and the tool dependence of existing research.

Referendums and initiatives have long been described as deliberatively deficient and unfit to implement deliberative democracy. Categorized as aggregative mechanisms, they would undermine quality deliberation by setting predefined policy options to potentially polarizing mass votes, with no room for face-to-face exchange nor opportunities for citizens to develop informed judgments. Recent developments in deliberative democratic theory increasingly challenge this view. This article builds on this literature to argue that referendums and initiatives can serve deliberative systems by incentivising representatives to engage in recursive representation – namely, conversation-like exchange at the mass level with the represented deemed essential to deliberative systems. They do so by modifying the formal opportunity structure of representative actors, which impacts them in popular vote campaigns – but also over the long term. Acknowledging these long-term effects of systems including referendums and initiatives opens new questions that can guide further research on these processes’ value for deliberative democracy.

Sollten die Ausgaben der gesetzlichen Kranken- und der sozialen Pflegeversicherung langfristig stark steigen, werden sowohl die jüngere Generation durch höhere Beiträge als auch die Älteren durch mögliche Leistungseinschränkungen belastet. Auf Grundlage einer neueren nichtparametrischen Schätzung wird eine Simulation der zukünftigen Entwicklung der Beitragssätze in den beiden Zweigen der deutschen Sozialversicherung vorgestellt. Abhängig von verschiedenen Annahmen über das künftige Wachstum des BIP pro Arbeitnehmer ergibt sich dabei ein Gesamtsozialversicherungsbeitragssatz bis 2040 von nahe 50 %. Damit ist die Tragfähigkeit des deutschen Sozialversicherungssystems stark gefährdet.

Recent years have seen a revival of debates about the role of business and the sources of business power in postindustrial political economies. Scholarly accounts commonly distinguish between structural sources of business power, connected to its privileged position in capitalist economies, and instrumental sources, related to direct forms of lobbying by business actors. The authors argue that this distinction overlooks an important third source of business power, which they conceptualize as institutional business power. Institutional business power results when state actors delegate public functions to private business actors. Over time, through policy feedback and lock-in effects, institutional business power contributes to an asymmetrical dependence of the state on the continued commitment of private business actors. This article elaborates the theoretical argument behind this claim, providing empirical examples of growing institutional business power in education in Germany, Sweden, and the United States.

The handling of the 2008 financial crisis has reinforced the conviction that the European Union (EU) is undemocratic and that member states are forced to delegate overwhelming power to a supranational technocracy. However, European countries have engaged with this alleged power drift differently, with only a few member states demanding more parliamentary scrutiny of EU institutions. This article develops a political economy explanation for why only some states have enforced mechanisms to monitor the EU more closely. Our theory focuses on the role of the crisis and the impact of fiscal autonomy in countries outside and inside currency arrangements such as the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). We argue that, in the aftermath of a severe economic shock, member states outside the EMU possess more monetary and fiscal resources to handle the crisis. These would then demand oversight of EU decision-making if their fiscal sustainability depends on the Union. By contrast, Eurozone states that need policy changes cannot address the crisis independently or initiate reforms to scrutinize the EU. Hence, we argue that during the heated moments of severe economic downturns, parliaments in Eurozone countries discuss supranational supervision rarely. As these legislatures have nevertheless to give in to the popular demand for EU control, they express support for more EU supervision in the infrequent times of debate. We provide evidence for our theory with a cross-national analysis of EU oversight institutions, and a new original dataset of parliamentary debates during the Eurozone crisis. Our findings highlight the political consequences that financial nosedives have across the diverse membership of a supranational organization.

The past and arguably the future of the European Union (EU) are characterized by Differentiated Integration (DI). Whereas a number of studies examine country variance in the realization of DI due to state-level characteristics, scholars have rarely addressed sector-specific differentiation. We select Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for such an analysis – the policy domain with the largest budget, most contestation in the Council of Ministers, most redistribution, and most differentiated legal acts. Building on liberal intergovernmentalism, we develop a demand and supply model to explain the number of opt-outs a country realizes in CAP legislation. We hypothesize that the member states’ demand for differentiation is driven by agricultural lobbyism and by the political receptiveness of governments; the supply-side is driven by member states’ voting or bargaining power; and the realized differentiations are a consequence of the interaction of demand and supply. Using all differentiations in new CAP legal acts from 1993 to 2012, we test these hypotheses in a time-series cross-section design. We find that the domestic level of agricultural protectionism, conservative parties in government and voting power are robust predictors of the realization of differentiation in CAP. Our results support the general claim of liberal intergovernmentalism, that domestic societal and economic interests and political bargaining power shape the course of (differentiated) integration.

This article addresses a classic problem of public administration, which is the quest for institutional integrity in the presence of bureaucratic autonomy. It does so in combination with a history of ideas account of the subject with a case study of derailed autonomy at the expense of institutional integrity It does so in combination with a history of ideas account of the subject with a case study of derailed autonomy at the expense of institutional integrity with particularly serious consequences in the form of human casualties. Referring to literature on public values and moral hazard under the condition of bureaucratic discretion, the article argues that harmonizing bureaucratic autonomy and institutional integrity requires commitment to public values that prioritize the protection of basic individual rights over temptations of pragmatic decision making. It is, therefore, a plea for linking traditional lines of thoughts on public administration with a more fine-grained assessment of the ambivalence of governmental agencies as both guardians of, and a menace to, rule-of-law-based protection of civic values.

This study offers a new theoretical and empirical perspective on the dynamic effect of demographic dissimilarity on absenteeism behavior by team members over time. Integrating social identity theory with the theory of anchoring events (i.e., key social interactions), we propose that individual absenteeism behavior depends on the relational dissimilarity to the team age and gender. Using a sample of 2,711 individual newcomers in 820 blue-collar teams tracked over seven years, we show that gender and age dissimilarity effects are not constant over time; rather, dissimilar individuals increase their absences more strongly over the years. Particularly, women and older employees in predominantly male and younger teams show a steeper increase in absenteeism over time and, accordingly, higher absolute absenteeism at later stages of team membership than do their less dissimilar counterparts. We discuss the implications for relational demography and diversity theory as well as for diversity management.

Political coordination and policy outcomes may be the result not only of the position of the ‘median voter’ in a political scale but also of the heterogeneity of preferences around the median. Depending on the level of government and the type of policy, such heterogeneity may lead to lower public spending and redistribution. We assess this issue empirically by analyzing the relationship between the distribution of preferences for redistribution and the amount of public expenditure at different levels of government and for several types of spending in 23 European countries. Our results suggest a negative and significant correlation between heterogeneity of preferences for redistribution and public spending that is stronger at the local level and for redistributive functions, independent of the median individual's preferences.

Most Western societies face the challenge of steadily ageing workforces. In recent decades, research on ageing has intensively focused on the subjective age concept to understand the challenges and risks of increasingly ageing workforces. Nevertheless, the subjective age construct is subject to several conceptual uncertainties, namely, regarding its stability and potential work-specific drivers of subjective age. We address these limitations by a) investigating the stability of subjective age in a worker sample, and b) identifying work-specific drivers (e.g., negative work events, positive work events, work stress) of subjective age perceptions. Building on social identity and lifespan theories, we test our conceptual assumptions with an online sample of 168 U.S. employees, applying growth curve modelling in a daily diary study over one workweek. Results indicate that subjective age is a mutable construct and varies between- and within-person in the course of a workweek. We identify positive work events and work stress as between-person drivers and negative work events as a within-person driver of subjective age. We discuss theoretical implications of these findings as well as consequences for practitioners.

This article examines the role of the institutional power of executives in public budgeting; specifically, how executives change spending on particular budget items. Leveraging extant theories of the policy process concerning preference expression, attention, and institutions, we argue that executives deepen large cuts and boost large increases in budgetary change. The strictures of the budgetary process force trade‐offs for executives in preference expression such that increases to preferred categories typically require decreases in other categories. Literatures in public policy and political representation suggest that all executives would like to express fiscal preferences, thereby contributing to categorical budget oscillations; however, not all executives are created equal. We employ quantile regression to examine whether the institutional strength of governors determine cuts, stasis, and expansion in spending across all budget functions in the American states between 1985 and 2009. Our model includes a host of political and economic variables found in the literature of fiscal policymaking, such as partisanship and divided government. The desire to change policy may be widely shared across executives, but we find that the ability to “top off” categorical increases and bottom out categorical decreases is a function of an executive's capacity to call attention to preferred categories via agenda‐setting power and to secure those changes via veto power. The findings show strong governors are well positioned to influence public policy through the budgetary process.

Social scientists have recently observed a ‘resurgence’ of traditional political institutions on the constitutional level in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, the scope and causes of the resurgence remain unclear. We base our analysis on original data on the degree of constitutional integration of traditional institutions and on their constitutional resurgence since 1990 in 45 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. We test six theoretical explanations for constitutionalization: former colonial rule, democratization, state capacity, economic development, foreign aid and settlement patterns. First, we verify the broad resurgence of traditional political institutions on a constitutional level. Second, our analysis suggests that, particularly in former British colonies, traditional leaders were able to translate the arrangements of British colonial rule as well as the advantages of a country’s deconcentrated settlement pattern into greater constitutional status. Third, settlement patterns proved important for traditional leaders to gain or increase constitutional status – leading to a constitutional resurgence of traditional institutions.

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:
This study investigates perceived accent in the two early-acquired languages of 21 adult-aged bilinguals with Italian as the heritage language (HL) and German as the majority language (ML). We test the relative ability of ‘age of onset (AoO) in German’ (range = 0–6 years) and ‘Italian use’ to predict perceived nativeness in Italian and German.

Design/methodology/approach:
Two accent rating experiments were carried out (one in each language) comparing the bilingual speech samples to those of monolingual and second language (L2) control groups. The samples were rated by German and Italian-speaking judges for foreign accent (‘yes’ or ‘no’) and for degree of certainty (‘certain, ‘semi-certain’, ‘uncertain’).

Data and analysis:
The effects of ‘AoO in German’ and ‘Italian Use’ (operationalized as an Italian Use Score) were analysed using correlational analyses and logistic regression.

Findings/conclusions:
Our results show that almost all bilinguals were indistinguishable from monolingual controls in German, and that their perceived accent in Italian lay somewhere between that of the monolingual and L2 controls. Based on regression analyses, we conclude that a later introduction of the ML has neither a negative effect on the ML itself, nor does it show up advantages in the HL. Instead, how native-like the heritage speakers (HSs) sound in the HL largely depends on HL use. No negative effects of HL use are found for German.

Originality:
We test a new population of Italian HSs in South Germany and compare these results to findings from other HS populations in Germany.

Significance/implications:
This study shows that, although it may be the case for child-aged bilinguals that introducing the ML earlier causes more phonological pressure on the HL, this effect seems to have disappeared by adulthood – at least with regards to perceived global accent. Also, accent in the HL depends on HL use across the lifespan

Spouses (and partners) are the most important source of care in old age. Informal care for frail spouses is provided by both sexes and across all socio-economic backgrounds and welfare policy contexts. There are, however, interesting differences as to whether spouses care alone, receive informal support from other family members or formal support from professional helpers, or outsource the care of their spouse completely. The present article contributes to the literature by differentiating between solo spousal care-giving and shared or outsourced care-giving arrangements, as well as between formal and informal care support. Moreover, we show how care-giving arrangements vary with gender, socio-economic status and welfare policy. Adding to previous research, we compare 17 countries and their expenditures on two elder-care schemes: Cash-for-Care and Care-in-Kind. The empirical analyses draw on the most recent wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) data from 2015. Our results show that men have a higher propensity to share care-giving than women, albeit only with informal supporters. As expected, welfare policy plays a role insofar as higher expenditure on Cash-for-Care schemes encourage informally outsourced care-giving arrangements, whereas Care-in-Kind reduce the likelihood for informally shared or outsourced care-giving arrangements. Moreover, the influence of these welfare policy measures differs between individuals of different socio-economic status but not between men and women.