Publikationsliste KOPS

Stringent policies that significantly increase the cost of greenhouse gas emissions, such as CO₂, are increasingly necessary for mitigating climate change. Yet while richer individuals in society generate the most CO₂ emissions and thus will face the largest absolute cost burden, they also tend to be more supportive of stringent environmental policies. In this paper, we examine how information about the distribution of carbon emissions by income affects support for carbon taxation. While carbon taxation is widely advocated as the most efficient policy for mitigating climate change, it faces significant political hurdles due to its distributional costs. Using original survey data, with an embedded experiment, we find that providing information about the actual distribution of household CO₂ emissions by income significantly changes individuals' support for carbon taxation. These effects are particularly pronounced at the bottom of the household income distribution, leading to increased support for costly climate policies. However, individuals who believe that carbon taxes will reduce their income continue to hold their level of support for carbon taxation. Our findings have significant implications for understanding the public's response to the distributional consequences of the green transitions and ultimately their political feasibility.

Many workers are experiencing the downsides of being exposed to an overload of information and communication technology (ICT), highlighting the need for resources to cope with the resulting technostress. This article offers a novel cross-level perspective on technostress by examining how the context of the welfare state influences the relationship between income and technostress. Showing that individuals with higher income experience less technostress, this study argues that the welfare state represents an additional coping resource, in particular in the form of unemployment benefits. Since unemployment benefits insure income earners in the case of job loss, the negative effect of income on technostress should increase with higher levels of unemployment generosity. In line with these expectations, empirical results based on original survey data collected in collaboration with the OECD show that the impact of income on technostress varies across welfare state contexts. Implications for public health and policymakers are being discussed.

In numerous countries, both international migration and regional support for far-right political parties are on the rise. This is important considering that a frequent aim of far-right political parties is to aggressively limit the inflow of immigrants. Understanding how regional far-right political support affects the immigrants working in these regions is therefore vital for executives and organizations as a whole. Integrating political science research at the macro-level with stereotype threat theory at the individual level, we argue that regional far-right political support makes negative immigrant stereotypes salient, increasing the number of work-related performance errors conducted by immigrants while reducing those by natives. Using objective field data from a professional sports context, we demonstrate how subordinates’ immigrant status interacts with the political context in which they reside to predict their frequency of performance errors.

Background

Although studies have demonstrated that the use of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is on the rise in the United States, it remains unclear how this trend looks across the hierarchical ladder of the American workforce. This is relevant given that LSD is increasingly being touted as a means of boosting creativity and performance, with mounting anecdotal evidence that business managers in particular are turning to it for inspiration and insight.

Methods

Using pooled cross-sectional data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2006–2014) on 168,920 adults in the United States employed full-time (weighted = 117,270,940), this study investigates how temporal trends in past year LSD use differ among business managers and non-managers.

Results

The results suggest that the prevalence of past year LSD use increased over time at a greater rate among business managers than non-managers and that this difference cannot be accounted for by changes in business managers’ perceived risk of LSD use or general substance use relative to non-managers.

Conclusions

The study’s findings indicate that temporal trends in past year LSD use depend on employees’ hierarchical rank in their organization and suggest that business managers, regardless of gender, are becomingly increasingly interested in the potential competitive advantages that LSD may offer.

The article describes differences in perceived environment attributes across urbanicity levels and assesses the relationship between perceived environment, walking and use of non-motorized vehicles (NMV) in adolescents in urban and rural areas.

The article focusses on the generating mechanisms of residential segregation for the demand side of housing markets, i.e., discriminatory residential preferences of inhabitants regarding the composition of their neighborhood. The data stem from an online survey among a random sample of the population of a mid-sized German city. In a vignette experiment, respondents were asked to rate example residential settings with respect to their attractiveness. The settings varied regarding the ethnic and religious composition of the neighborhood and other neighborhood characteristics that are positively or negatively related to residential attractiveness.

We find that respondents have discriminatory residential preferences toward migrants and the presence of a Muslim community in the neighborhood. One-half of the migrant effect is mitigated if other positively connoted residential characteristics exist. We take this as an indication for statistical discrimination. This does not hold for the “Muslim community” effect. Discrimination gets stronger with higher levels of perceived economic group-threat from migrants. We further find evidence for a cultural group-threat and for the contact hypothesis: religious people are more discriminatory than nonreligious people, and real-life contact with migrants entails less discrimination.

This paper aims to understand how study conditions impact men and women’s dropout intentions differently. As a first step, we analyse the gendered impact of three aspects of study conditions that were at the centre of the Bologna Process: achievement norms, the structure of the curriculum and practical components in the study programme. As a second step, we aim to understand how individual-level differences between men and women (performance, academic self-efficacy and perceived psychological burdens) mediate this gendered impact of study conditions on dropout intentions. We use the German Student Survey data (2000–2016), which allows for valid measurement of study conditions at the subject group level. Our results show that women’s dropout intentions tend to increase in study contexts with high achievement norms, while men benefit more than women from highly structured study contexts. The practical component, in turn, lowers the dropout intentions of both groups equally.

Pseudo-opinions refer to survey respondents giving answers to topics they are unfamiliar with. They are widespread but the reasons why respondents do not just admit they “don’t know” are not well-understood. We investigate the underlying mechanisms for pseudo-opinions in online surveys: do respondents satisfice and perform a “mental coin-flip,” or do they optimize and attempt to “impute a meaning” to the unknown question and answer accordingly? And can we reduce the prevalence of pseudo-opinions by expressing to respondents that it is okay not to have an opinion? To do so, we use fictitious issues. These are survey questions about nonexistent topics and things. We use response latencies as an indicator for the mode of responding, on a continuum from automatic-spontaneous to controlled-deliberate, to investigate whether pseudo-opinions are the result of satisficing or optimizing. We also conduct a survey experiment in which the presence of an explicit “don’t know” category is randomly assigned. The sample (n = 1288) consists of data collected in August 2019 from an online panel provider. The target population was defined as adults between 18–69 years old with internet access residing in Germany. Quotas were put in place for age and sex. We find pseudo-opinions are predicted by faster, automatic responses. This contradicts the widely-assumed imputed meaning model of pseudo-opinions. The presence of an explicit “don’t know” category reduces pseudo-opinions dramatically but does not moderate the effect of deliberate or automatic responding on pseudo-opinions.

Members of the Sámi minorities in Norway and Sweden who identify with their native culture experience discrimination, especially when they use the Sámi language in public. While this is true in both countries, a comparison shows that specific minority policies affect the level of inequality. Spending more on the enhancement of Sámi language and culture—as Norway does—leads to a higher level of (self)esteem and equality

Angehörige der samischen Minderheiten in Norwegen und Schweden, die sich mit ihrer indigenen Kultur identifizieren, erfahren Diskriminierung, insbesondere wenn sie die samische Sprache in der Öffentlichkeit verwenden. Dies trifft zwar auf beide Länder zu, aber im Vergleich zeigt sich, dass die jeweilige Minderheitenpolitik das Ausmaß der Ungleichheit beeinflusst. Wenn – wie in Norwegen – mehr in die Förderung der samischen Sprache und Kultur investiert wird, führt dies zu einem höheren Maß an (Selbst-)Wertschätzung und Gleichheit.

For more than two decades, the work of Blank and Schmidt has greatly influenced empirical research on national attachment. Distinguishing between nationalism, patriotism, and national identity, it rests on a set of item batteries that have since been taken up by numerous researchers. In this contribution, we argue that the categorization of most of these items is inconsistent with the perception of a nonexpert sample and, in some cases, even in direct opposition to it. To substantiate this claim, we present the results of an online survey of German university students ( N  = 424) who were tasked with assigning all items from Blank and Schmidt’s 1997 article to one of the three categories. As hypothesized, the majority of respondents assigned only a few items correctly—so few that their overall agreement with Blank and Schmidt was even lower than what would normally be expected from a random distribution. We also asked about item understandability and found that while some items were considered relatively difficult to understand, there was no obvious correlation between these and the miscategorized ones. Taking this discrepancy between academic and nonacademic concept use into account can further our understanding of national attachment and help us refine existing survey techniques.

Nach dem Bachelorstudium müssen sich Studierende entscheiden, ob sie ein Masterstudium anschließen oder in den Arbeitsmarkt einsteigen. Welche Gründe sprechen subjektiv für oder gegen ein Masterstudium? Welche Rolle spielt die Bildungsherkunft der Studierenden bei dieser Entscheidung? Welche Merkmale von Masterstudiengängen sprechen Studierende besonders an oder schrecken sie ab? Im Artkel werden ausgewählte Ergebnisse einer bundesweiten Erhebung von Studierenden in Deutschland ("Studierendenbefragung in Deutschland") vorgestellt.