Publikationsliste KOPS

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dc.contributor.author: Rothman, Jason

This article is concerned with the genesis of German financial liberalisation. A refined inventory of financial system change – including new meso-level data on finance pattern and the marketisation of banking – reveals a varied pattern of change across German finance. It is argued that this financial diversification can only be understood with careful reference to the underlying ideational factors. An analytical narrative traces how technocratic ideas of financial modernisation during the 1980s began to open up space for the political program of finance capitalism to absorb liberal and leftist discontents with insider control and bank dominance. Upon reaching a tipping point of discursive dominance, the program was distinctly adopted across the political economy as the result of compartmentally different political, ideational and structural factors; creating a non-hegemonic financial paradigm that became identifiable in the face of recent crises. By developing analytical steps that link incremental and dynamic theories of institutional change in a conceptual framework of belief shifts, the paper contributes to efforts of adapting existing models of change to complex domains and accounting for the dynamic nature of the paradigm-generating process. The findings inform the larger debate about internal capitalist diversity and the coherence of national economic models.

Kurzinformationsblätter gehören inzwischen zum festen Repertoire der deutschen und europäischen Finanzmarktregulierung. Die Basisinformationsblätter der VO (EU) Nr. 1286/2014 (PRIIP-VO) stellen die jüngste Maßnahme des Unionsgesetzgebers in Bezug auf die Information der Anleger über Finanzmarktprodukte dar. Wichtiger Teil des Regulierungskonzepts ist die Einstandspflicht für die Fehlerfreiheit der den Anlegern gegebenen Informationen. Dementsprechend ordnet die PRIIP-VO in Art. 11 eine zivilrechtliche Haftung für fehlerhafte Basisinformationsblätter an. Diese ist als eigene Anspruchsgrundlage des europäischen Rechts ausgestaltet. Als solche wirft sie eine Vielzahl von Fragen auf, die nicht nur die Anwendung der Vorschrift, sondern auch Grundfragen des Privatrechts der EU und seiner Anspruchsgrundlagen betreffen. Ihnen geht der folgende Beitrag nach.

Does the electoral system affect government partisanship? Iversen and Soskice answer this question in the affirmative. These authors argue that center-right governments dominate in majoritarian systems, whereas proportional representation systems see more center-left governments. They explain this difference by the strategic voting behavior of the middle class under alternative electoral rules. In this study, we test the robustness of their empirical results to alternative measures of the main variables as well as to a completed version of the original data set. Our replication does not corroborate Iversen and Soskice’s empirical findings. First, we cannot substantiate the notion that center-right governments emerge more frequently in majoritarian systems. Second, a time-series cross-section analysis does not support the hypothesis that the electoral system is a significant determinant of partisan control of government.

Functional differentiation is associated with two salient features of globalization: First, societal subsystems such as the economy, science, religion and politics have become increasingly global in terms of the interconnectedness of their operations across the world. Second, they exhibit global structural similarities, for instance regarding functionally specific role relationships and corresponding formal organizations. However, functional differentiation entails not only more interconnectedness and homogenization but also considerable structural and institutional diversity. In this paper, I distinguish and examine two forms of diversity that emerge as consequences of functional differentiation: Varieties of institutional structures that concern different ways of addressing functionally specific problems, on the one hand, and on the other, the variation of forms of structural coupling among subsystems within a particular local or regional context.

This article reports on a Digital Humanities research project which is concerned with the automated linguistic and visual analysis of political discourses with a particular focus on the concept of deliberative communication. According to the theory of deliberative communication as discussed within political science, political debates should be inclusive and stakeholders participating in these debates are required to justify their positions rationally and respectfully and should eventually defer to the better argument. The focus of the article is on the novel interactive visualizations that combine linguistic and statistical cues to analyze the deliberative quality of communication automatically. In particular, we quantify the degree of deliberation for four dimensions of communication: Participation, Respect, Argumentation and Justification, and Persuasiveness. Yet, these four dimensions have not been linked within a combined linguistic and visual framework, but each single dimension helps determining the degree of deliberation independently from each other. Since at its core, deliberation requires sustained and appropriate modes of communication, our main contribution is the automatic annotation and disambiguation of causal connectors and discourse particles.

Gender pay gaps likely persist in Western societies because both men and women consider somewhat lower earnings for female employees than for otherwise similar male employees to be fair. Two different theoretical approaches explain “legitimate” wage gaps: same-gender referent theory and reward expectations theory. The first approach states that women compare their lower earnings primarily with that of other underpaid women; the second approach argues that both men and women value gender as a status variable that yields lower expectations about how much each gender should be paid for otherwise equal work. This article is the first to analyze hypotheses contrasting the two theories using an experimental factorial survey design. In 2009, approximately 1,600 German residents rated more than 26,000 descriptions of fictitious employees. The labor market characteristics of each employee and the amount of information given about them were experimentally varied across all descriptions. The results primarily support reward expectations theory. Both men and women produced gender pay gaps in their fairness ratings (with the mean ratio of just female-to-male wages being .92). Respondents framed the just pay ratios by the gender inequalities they experienced in their own occupations, and some evidence of gender-specific evaluation standards emerged.

The global expansion of the Internet is frequently associated with increased government transparency, political rights, and democracy. However, this assumption depends on marginalized groups getting access in the first place. Here we document a strong and persistent political bias in the allocation of Internet coverage across ethnic groups worldwide. Using estimates of Internet penetration obtained through network measurements, we show that politically excluded groups suffer from significantly lower Internet penetration rates compared with those in power, an effect that cannot be explained by economic or geographic factors. Our findings underline one of the central impediments to "liberation technology," which is that governments still play a key role in the allocation of the Internet and can, intentionally or not, sabotage its liberating effects.

The 2008 global financial crisis came with fears—and, for some, hopes—that a new wave of public mobilization would emerge in industrialized countries. Especially throughout the European Union (EU), the epicenter of the crisis, large protests were expected. Yet, the energy with which social groups mobilized against the proposed austerity measures quickly fizzled. This article provides new evidence for why this was the case. In line with Neo-Keynesian theory, we argue that the interest rate adjustments and political announcements of the European Central Bank (ECB) limited the potential for mass unrest in the member states of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) affected by the crisis. We provide evidence for our argument with yearly panel data and a new original data set of monthly political protests between 2001 and 2013. Our analyses support the hypothesis that the ECB was able to successfully assuage dissatisfaction with the limited reform options of the Eurozone member states in the wake of the Eurocrisis.

We describe migrants' early patterns of identification with the receiving society and explain why these differ by migrants' origins. Using longitudinal data from a novel survey among recent immigrants from Poland and Turkey in Germany enables us to analyse the nexus between social assimilation, ethnic boundaries and identification more directly than previous studies. Theoretically, we start out from assimilation theory and its assumption that migrants' identification with the receiving country is a consequence of their preceding social and cognitive assimilation and from the literature on ethnic boundaries. Results suggest that Turkish new migrants start out with higher levels of identification with Germany than Poles. Over time, however, their national identification decreases while it increases for Poles. This is partly explained by the fact that Turkish migrants' social assimilation stagnates; more importantly, only Turks perceive more rather than less discrimination and value incompatibility over time. While both groups' identificational integration with the receiving country thus starts out from different conditions, they do not show a fundamentally dissimilar pattern with respect to the consequences of assimilation and discrimination for their national identification. Yet, the negative impact of the latter is stronger for Turks than for Poles, reflecting the greater salience of ethnic boundaries for this group.

The classical outbidding model of ethnic politics argues that democratic competition involving ethnic parties inevitably leads to ethnic outbidding where parties adopt ever more extreme positions. However, recent small-N studies show that ethnic outbidding is only one of a range of strategies available to ethnic parties. This article seeks to explain why some ethnic parties are extremist, whereas others adopt moderate positions. Drawing on the ethnic outbidding and the nested competition model of ethnic party competition, it is hypothesised that the ethnic segmentation of the electoral market, and the relative salience of an ethnically cross-cutting economic dimension of party competition, account for the varying degrees of extremism. Hypotheses are tested drawing on a novel, expert-survey-based dataset that provides indicators for the positions of 83 ethnonational minority parties in 22 European democracies in 2011. Results of ordinary least squares and two-level linear regressions show that as the economic dimension gains importance, parties become more moderate relative to the party system mean. The electorate's ethnic segmentation has a positive effect on extremism, but this effect is not significant in all models. Contrary to expectations, higher ethnic segmentation of the party system is associated with more moderate positions in the majority of the estimated models.

In this article, we offer an explanation for varying patterns of territorial reforms aimed at accommodating claims for more substate autonomy in multinational states. We argue that the interaction between preferences of state-wide and non-statewide parties, their negotiation power and the negotiation mode accounts for specific patterns of territorial change. Analytically, we advance existing research in two ways: First, by analyzing territorial change in a two-dimensional space (vertical and horizontal), we pay explicit attention to jurisdictional heterogeneity between substates. Second, by applying an actor-centered institutionalist approach, we highlight the strategic potential of actors within the institutional setting. The comparative analysis of thirteen processes of territorial change in four multinational Western democracies—Canada, Belgium, Spain, and the UK—reveals, first, certain conditional effects of the independent variables on specific patterns of territorial change and, second, how the negotiation mode impacts on a party’s negotiation power.

Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct measures of cognitive skills is mostly restricted to early-career workers in the United States. Analysis of the new PIAAC survey of adult skills over the full lifecycle in 23 countries shows that the focus on early-career earnings leads to underestimating the lifetime returns to skills by about one quarter. On average, a one-standard-deviation increase in numeracy skills is associated with an 18 percent wage increase among prime-age workers. But this masks considerable heterogeneity across countries. Eight countries, including all Nordic countries, have returns between 12 and 15 percent, while six are above 21 percent with the largest return being 28 percent in the United States. Estimates are remarkably robust to different earnings and skill measures, additional controls, and various subgroups. Instrumental-variable models that use skill variation stemming from school attainment, parental education, or compulsory-schooling laws provide even higher estimates. Intriguingly, returns to skills are systematically lower in countries with higher union density, stricter employment protection, and larger public-sector shares.

This paper examines the impact of social heterogeneity on in-kind redistribution. We contribute to the previous literature in two ways: we consider i) the provision of several public goods and ii) agents different not only in income, but also in their preferences over the various goods provided by the public sector. In this setting, both the distribution and size of goods provision depend on the heterogeneity of preferences. Our main result is that preference heterogeneity tends to decrease in-kind redistribution, while income inequality tends to increase it. An empirical investigation based on United States Census Bureau data confirms these theoretical findings.

We develop and analyze a labor market model in which heterogeneous firms operate under decreasing returns and compete for labor by posting long-term contracts. Firms achieve faster growth by offering higher lifetime wages, which allows them to fill vacancies with higher probability, consistent with recent empirical findings. The model also captures several other regularities about firm size, job flows, and pay, and generates sluggish aggregate dynamics of labor market variables. In contrast to existing bargaining models with large firms, efficiency obtains and the model allows a tractable characterization over the business cycle.