Publikationsliste KOPS

This review article and special issue introduction argues that studying the relationship between the populist radical right and the welfare state requires bridging literatures that have so far advanced with little mutual engagement: party politics and voting behaviour research on the one hand, and comparative political economy and welfare state research on the other. In this way, the article highlights the advantages of connecting different academic sub-fields in studying radical right politics. First, the literature of comparative political economy on the multi-dimensionality of welfare politics can contribute to a clearer understanding of both the welfare-related causes and consequences of radical right support. Second, the party politics literature on the radical right’s ideology provides theoretical tools to explain the welfare-related consequences of populist radical right parties. The article illustrates the advantages of bridging these literatures through the empirical contributions in this special issue and concludes with avenues of future research.

The European Union, the United Nations, and the United States frequently use economic sanctions. This article introduces the EUSANCT Dataset—which amends, merges, and updates some of the most widely used sanctions databases—to trace the evolution of sanctions after the Cold War. The dataset contains case-level and dyadic information on 326 threatened and imposed sanctions by the EU, the UN, and the US. We show that the usage and overall success of sanctions have not grown from 1989 to 2015 and that while the US is the most active sanctioner, the EU and the UN appear more successful.

In Germany, studies have shown that official coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination coverage estimated using data collected directly from vaccination centers, hospitals, and physicians is lower than that calculated using surveys of the general population. Public debate has since centered on whether the official statistics are failing to capture the actual vaccination coverage. The authors argue that the topic of one’s COVID-19 vaccination status is sensitive in times of a pandemic and that estimates based on surveys are biased by social desirability. The authors investigate this conjecture using an experimental method called the item count technique, which provides respondents with the opportunity to answer in an anonymous setting. Estimates obtained using the item count technique are compared with those obtained using the conventional method of asking directly. Results show that social desirability bias leads some unvaccinated individuals to claim they are vaccinated. Conventional survey studies thus likely overestimate vaccination coverage because of misreporting by survey respondents.

Agency has received much attention in recent historical institutionalist theorizing of change processes, but remains largely disconnected from questions about mechanisms that stabilize institutions. To help fill this lacuna, the paper presents bricolage as one key mechanism through which actors stabilize an institutional setup. It suggests that institutions may be defended by keeping intact the institutional logic on which the incumbent coalition is based, but rearrange the salience of the ideational and institutional elements that make up the existing institutional setup. The empirical relevance of the argument is supported through a case analysis of a 1980-reform that could have changed the face of German corporatism, but never was, namely the policy of collective equity funds (Tariffonds). Through process tracing, we explain the fate of the reform with the effectiveness of a last-minute intervention based on a bricolage of the extant institutional logic.

Despite questions having a long-standing history in theoretical linguistics, the interface between empirically grounded corpus linguistics of questioning behaviour and analytically driven pragmatic theory of question structure and context has received significantly less attention. This paper aims to contribute to this field of research by showing that a four-way categorisation into question types, namely, pure questioning, assertive questioning, rhetorical questioning and challenge questioning, allows us to capture and represent questions in over two million words in natural language argumentative dialogue. In this type of dialogue questioning has been claimed to serve as the engine that drives the shape and development of a discourse. Our investigation covers three genres of argumentative discourse in which questions play a key role, namely political debates, moral dilemmas and sessions of participatory deliberative democracy. Through deep algorithmic analysis of the data, we test a variety of hypotheses from argumentation and linguistic theory, clearly demonstrating for the first time that (particular types of) questions directly catalyse argument structure and that the illocutionary consequences of non-canonical questions are much more varied than previously thought.

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Research on differentiated integration (DI) in the European Union has burgeoned in recent years. However, we still know little about citizens’ attitudes towards the phenomenon. In this article, we argue that at the level of individual citizens, liberal economic values increase support for DI. Stronger preferences for equality, in contrast, make opposition to the concept more likely. Similarly, concerns about discriminatory differentiation at the member state level lead citizens to oppose DI. We test the theoretical claims by analysing survey data on citizens’ attitudes towards a ‘multi-speed Europe’. Supporters of DI, indeed, are marked by liberal economic attitudes. In contrast to general EU support, we do not find robust correlations with socio-demographic variables. Moreover, the data reveal striking differences amongst macro-regions: support for DI has become much lower in Southern European states. We attribute this opposition to negative repercussions of the Eurozone crisis.