Publikationsliste KOPS

In this article, we study the political use of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, a particular form of cyberattack that disables web services by flooding them with high levels of data traffic. We argue that websites in nondemocratic regimes should be especially prone to this type of attack, particularly around political focal points such as elections. This is due to two mechanisms: governments employ DoS attacks to censor regime-threatening information, while at the same time, activists use DoS attacks as a tool to publicly undermine the government’s authority. We analyze these mechanisms by relying on measurements of DoS attacks based on large-scale Internet traffic data. Our results show that in authoritarian countries, elections indeed increase the number of DoS attacks. However, these attacks do not seem to be directed primarily against the country itself but rather against other states that serve as hosts for news websites from this country.

Individual asylum seekers fail to obtain refugee status at considerably different rates cross- and sub-nationally. However, we do not know whether asylum seekers also face similar discriminatory potential when they appeal a negative decision and, if their appeal fails, when the authorities decide about their deportation. To fill this research gap, we examine inequities in these three stages of asylum decision making across the sixteen German Länder. We argue, based on principal-agent reasoning, that all three authorities empowered in this domain – the regional offices of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), the administrative courts, and the immigration agencies of the states – consider their administrative, socio-economic, and political environments when making a decision. We demonstrate that positive and negative discrimination of asylum seekers does not stop with the initial decision by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, uncovering considerable spatial inequities in the aggregate rulings of the administrative courts on appeals by asylum seekers and the deportations for which the immigration offices of the Länder are responsible. The socio-economic characteristics of a Land and its political situation affect the choices the agents make at all three decision-making stages. Most notably, states with a government led by the Social Democratic Party, or with a long history of SPD dominance, have lower rates of negative decisions.

Das System der beruflichen Bildung leistet einen erheblichen Beitrag zur Integration von Jugendlichen und jungen Erwachsenen mit Fluchthintergrund. Die meisten Bundesländer haben für diese Zielgruppe spezifische Vorbereitungsklassen mit dem Fokus auf Spracherwerb und berufliche Orientierung eingerichtet. Ziel der Bildungsgänge ist der Verbleib der Lernenden im Bildungssystem, im Idealfall der Beginn einer Ausbildung. Inwiefern sich dies mit den beruflichen Wünschen junger Geflüchteter deckt, untersucht dieser Beitrag am Beispiel des Regierungsbezirks Freiburg.

Seit 2015 viele Menschen mit Fluchthintergrund nach Deutschland gezogen sind, stand häufig deren Arbeitsmarktintegration im Zentrum des gesellschaftlichen, politischen und wissenschaftlichen Interesses. Lebenslagen und Lebensformen der gefluchteten Familien wurden hingegen viel weniger thematisiert. Dieser Beitrag präsentiert familiendemografische Daten für Gefluchtete der Herkunftsländer Syrien, Afghanistan, Irak und Eritrea und verdeutlicht den großen Anteil von Familien mit kleinen Kindern unter den nach Deutschland Gefluchteten. Daten zur Nutzung von Kinderbetreuungseinrichtungen von Kindern gefluchteter Familien zeigen, dass institutionelle Kinderbetreuung wesentlich zur Integration und Bildung beitragen kann. Der Wissenschaftliche Beirat für Familienfragen des BMFSFJ versucht, diesen für die Integration zentralen Aspekt in den Diskurs zu Flüchtlingen einzubringen und evidenzbasierte Handlungsempfehlungen zu geben.

Do citizens' preferences about education policies differ across industrialized countries? To gain comparative evidence on public preferences for education spending, we conduct representative experiments with information treatments in Switzerland using identical survey techniques previously used in Germany and the United States. In Switzerland, providing information about actual spending and salary levels reduces support for increased education spending from 54 to 40 percent and for increased teacher salaries from 27 to 19 percent, respectively. The broad patterns of education policy preferences are similar across the three countries when the role of status-quo and information are taken into account.

The distribution of economic resources in couples has been widely researched in both economics and sociology since the 1960s. This article reviews the two lines of research starting from unitary models of behavior and encompassing bargaining theory, the relative resource approach, collective goods and transaction cost theory. Furthermore, we contribute to the literature by suggesting ways of enhancing classic theories through new perspectives. Specifically, we discuss how (a) preferences, (b) macro-level characteristics such as institutional and economic conditions, and (c) meso-level factors like networks and extended families, can deepen our understanding of how economic resources are allocated within couples. Finally, we argue that to overcome the idealized vision of social reality, typical of mainstream research on intra-household financial sharing, it is crucial to incorporate the variation of experiences of contemporary families − in terms of socio-demographic characteristics such as class, race, sexual orientation, partnership type or children − into future studies on intra-household distribution of economic resources.

Do crises increase governmental responsiveness to citizens’ policy demands in the European Union? Building on the responsiveness literature, we challenge the claim that well-organized business interests determine governmental preferences in times of crisis. We argue instead, that vote-seeking governments rather account for citizens’ policy demands, given particularly high levels of saliency and public attention prevalent during crises. To test our theory, we analyse the formation of German governmental preferences on Economic and Monetary Union reforms during the Eurozone Crisis. We use novel data from the ‘EMUChoices’ project, public opinion polls as well as newspaper articles and trace the development of the German government’s positioning on reforms such as the new Eurozone bailout fund or the tightening of fiscal governance rules. Our analyses show that the German government, despite intensive lobbying efforts by banks and industry associations, responded rather closely to the demands of the public. On a normative ground, this finding highlights that input legitimacy in European Union decision-making is stronger than oftentimes assumed, at least at the level of governmental preference formation in times of crises.

Self-reports of adherence to non-pharmaceutical interventions in surveys may be subject to social desirability bias. Existing questioning techniques to reduce bias are rarely used to monitor adherence. We conducted a list experiment to elicit truthful answers to the question whether respondents met friends or acquaintances and thus disregarded the social distancing norm. Our empirical findings are mixed. Using the list experiment, we estimate the prevalence of non-compliant behavior at 28%, whereas the estimate from a direct question is 22%. However, a more permissively phrased direct question included later in the survey yields an estimate of 47%. All three estimates vary consistently across social groups. Interestingly, only the list experiment reveals somewhat higher non-compliance rates among the highly educated compared to those with lower education, yet the variance of the list estimates is considerably higher. We conclude that the list experiment compared unfavorably to simpler direct measurements in our case.