Publikationsliste KOPS

Can older managers overcome stereotypes relating age to low competence? We integrate the literature on age and cognitive ability with research on innovation to explore whether—and if so, when—employees' age harms performance and promotability appraisals made by their supervisors. Multisource, time‐lag data from 305 project managers indicate that the negative stereotypes can be explained through decreased innovative behavior. However, older employees are not always seen as poorer performers with less potential to be promoted due to their reduced innovative behavior. Rather, interdepartmental collaboration moderates these effects. Specifically, older employees with low interdepartmental collaboration are less innovative and receive worse performance and promotability appraisals than younger employees, but the “age handicap” vanishes when older employees collaborate with members of other departments. Organizations should foster formal or informal collaboration among units to prevent negative consequences of an aging workforce.

This article presents a new method for reducing socially desirable responding in Internet self-reports of desirable and undesirable behavior. The method is based on moving the request for honest responding, often included in the introduction to surveys, to the questioning phase of the survey. Over a quarter of Internet survey participants do not read survey instructions, and therefore, instead of asking respondents to answer honestly, they were asked whether they responded honestly. Posing the honesty message in the form of questions on honest responding draws attention to the message, increases the processing of it, and puts subsequent questions in context with the questions on honest responding. In three studies (nStudy I = 475, nStudy II = 1,015, nStudy III = 899), we tested whether presenting the questions on honest responding before questions on desirable and undesirable behavior could increase the honesty of responses, under the assumption that less attribution of desirable behavior and/or admitting to more undesirable behavior could be taken to indicate more honest responses. In all studies the participants who were presented with the questions on honest responding before questions on the target behavior produced, on average, significantly less socially desirable responses, though the effect sizes were small in all cases (Cohen's d ranging between 0.02 and 0.28 for single items, and from 0.17 to 0.34 for sum scores). The overall findings and the possible mechanisms behind the influence of the questions concerning honest responding on subsequent questions are discussed, and suggestions are made for future research.

In this article, we explore civil society mobilisation and the impact of organised interests on the energy policies of two post-communist countries—Hungary and Czechia—and specifically nuclear energy. Drawing on numerous hypotheses from the literature on organised interests, we explore how open both political systems are for civil society input and what interest group-specific and socio-economic factors mediate the influence of organised interests. Based on the preference attainment method, our case studies focus on the extent to which organised interests have succeeded bringing nuclear energy legislation in line with their preferences. We find that while both democracies are open to civil society input, policy-making is generally conducted in state-industrial circles, whereby anti-nuclear and renewable energy advocates are at best able to make minor corrections to already pre-determined policies.

Die Studie untersucht die Sensitivität frühpädagogischer Fachkräfte für das Bildungspotential von Alltagssituationen und die sprachbezogene Gestaltung pädagogischer Räume als Aspekte ihres fachdidaktischen Wissens im Bildungsbereich Sprache. Im Rahmen eines zunächst qualitativ-explorativ angelegten Studiendesigns wurden 231 Sprachexpertinnen aus dem Bundesprogramm „Schwerpunkt-Kitas Sprache & Integration“ dazu befragt, welche Situationen des Kita-Alltags sie als relevant erachten, um die kindliche Sprachentwicklung zu unterstützen und was sie unter einer sprachförderlichen Raumgestaltung verstehen. Die Daten wurden im Frühjahr/Sommer 2015 über offene Fragen in einer Onlinebefragung erhoben, inhaltsanalytisch ausgewertet und im weiteren Analyseverlauf in quantifizierbare Daten überführt. Weiterhin wurde untersucht, ob unterschiedliche frühpädagogische Ausbildungsgänge (fachschulisch vs. hochschulisch) mit Unterschieden in Komponenten des fachdidaktischen Wissens einhergehen. Mit Blick auf die Wahrnehmung bildungsrelevanter Alltagssituationen zeigen die Ergebnisse, dass die Mehrheit der Sprachexpertinnen eine Vielzahl unterschiedlicher Situationen als sprachliche Bildungsmöglichkeiten erkannt hat, wobei auch ersichtlich wurde, dass das Konzept der alltagsintegrierten sprachlichen Bildung von einigen Sprachexpertinnen als eher zufällige und beiläufige Interaktion verinnerlicht wurde. Die Ergebnisse zur Frage der sprachbezogenen Raumgestaltung deuten auf einen Entwicklungsbedarf hinsichtlich einer intentionalen Nutzung pädagogischer Räume für die Sprach- und Literacy-Förderung von Kindern hin. Fachschulisch und hochschulisch ausgebildete Sprachexpertinnen unterschieden sich in ihrem Antwortverhalten insgesamt in nur wenigen Aspekten.

In the Indian context, concerns have been raised for many years about the learning outcomes of primary school children. The complexity of the issue makes it difficult to advise stakeholders on what needs to be done to improve learning in primary schools in India. As it has been shown that low socio-economic status is one of the key factors that negatively affect learning outcomes, the focus of the Multilila project (‘Multilingualism and multiliteracy: Raising learning outcomes in challenging contexts in primary schools across India’) is on educational achievement among children of low socio-economic status. In following the development of language, literacy, maths and cognitive abilities of primary school children over two years we hope to throw new light on why multilingual children in India do not always experience the cognitive advantages associated with multilingualism in other contexts. This paper focuses on some of the methodological challenges faced by this project. After explaining the rationale for the study, we sketch the contribution this project can make to the discussion about cognitive advantages of bilingualism. We then focus on the Indian context before presenting the methodology of the project (design, participants, instruments and procedure). Finally, we summarize the key challenges for the project and possible solutions to those challenges, and present an outlook towards the future.

Whether social transfers should be targeted or universal is an unsolved debate particularly relevant for the implementation of social protection schemes in developing countries. While the limited availability of public resources encourages targeting, the difficulty to identify the poor promotes a universal allocation of benefits. To address this question, this study examines the targeting performance of and access to a social welfare scheme for an increasingly vulnerable group – India’s poor older people. The results show that during a time period of social pension reforms, exclusion and inclusion errors were successfully reduced but the exclusion of poor older people continues to be extremely high. Comparing the existing targeting approach to a random allocation, I show that the benefits of targeting are limited. The reforms aimed at increasing the transparency of social pension allocation indeed made the Below Poverty Line ration card the most important determinant of access to social pensions for older people. However, this focus on the ration card promoted by the national government has its own weaknesses. Non-poor older people exploit the unwarranted possession of this ration card and results suggest that after the reforms individuals with direct connections to local government officials are more likely to access social pension benefits. The current targeting approach seems to be beneficial for well-connected older individuals while many poor older people typically lacking these connections lag behind.

This article presents ViEWS – a political violence early-warning system that seeks to be maximally transparent, publicly available, and have uniform coverage, and sketches the methodological innovations required to achieve these objectives. ViEWS produces monthly forecasts at the country and subnational level for 36 months into the future and all three UCDP types of organized violence: state-based conflict, non-state conflict, and one-sided violence in Africa. The article presents the methodology and data behind these forecasts, evaluates their predictive performance, provides selected forecasts for October 2018 through October 2021, and indicates future extensions. ViEWS is built as an ensemble of constituent models designed to optimize its predictions. Each of these represents a theme that the conflict research literature suggests is relevant, or implements a specific statistical/machine-learning approach. Current forecasts indicate a persistence of conflict in regions in Africa with a recent history of political violence but also alert to newconflicts such as in Southern Cameroon and NorthernMozambique. The subsequent evaluation additionally shows that ViEWS is able to accurately capture the long-termbehavior of established political violence, as well as diffusion processes such as the spread of violence inCameroon. The performance demonstrated here indicates that ViEWS can be a useful complement to nonpublic conflict-warning systems, and also serves as a reference against which future improvements can be evaluated.

This article examines the extent to which economic or political factors shaped government preferences in the reform of the Economic Monetary Union. A multilevel analysis of European Union member governments’ preferences on 40 EMU reform issues negotiated between 2010 and 2015 suggests that countries’ financial sector exposure has significant explanatory power. Seeking to minimize the risk of costly bailouts, countries with highly exposed financial sectors were more likely to support solutions involving high degrees of European integration. In contrast, political factors had no systematic impact. These findings help to enhance our understanding of preference formation in the European Union and the viability of future EMU reform.

Humans vary substantially in their willingness to take risks. In a combined sample of over 1 million individuals, we conducted genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of general risk tolerance, adventurousness, and risky behaviors in the driving, drinking, smoking, and sexual domains. Across all GWAS, we identified hundreds of associated loci, including 99 loci associated with general risk tolerance. We report evidence of substantial shared genetic influences across risk tolerance and the risky behaviors: 46 of the 99 general risk tolerance loci contain a lead SNP for at least one of our other GWAS, and general risk tolerance is genetically correlated ([Formula: see text]  ~ 0.25 to 0.50) with a range of risky behaviors. Bioinformatics analyses imply that genes near SNPs associated with general risk tolerance are highly expressed in brain tissues and point to a role for glutamatergic and GABAergic neurotransmission. We found no evidence of enrichment for genes previously hypothesized to relate to risk tolerance.

This article focusses on the evolution of the school governance model in Spain since the 1980s. In Spain and elsewhere in Europe, the state’s monopoly over education has softened and new forms of educational governance have emerged. This has resulted in the decentralization of decision-making authority to individual schools, municipalities, and regions and a significant increase in school autonomy. We explore from a political science perspective how partisan preferences and teachers unions have decisively shaped the reform trajectory. We show that leftist and center-right governments and different teachers’ unions have promoted different versions of school autonomy in line with their ideological rationales, resulting in a reconfiguration of the school governance model with each change in government.

Discrimination is long seen as a meaningful factor for ethnic inequalities on rental housing markets. Yet empirically, the extent of discrimination is still debatable. For the first time, this article provides a quantitative meta-analysis of field experiments (in person audits and correspondence tests) that were run over the last four decades in the United States, Canada and Europe (N = 71). Special focus is given to a possible inflation of effect sizes by publication bias; to time trends; and to evidence for statistical discrimination. Taken together, nearly all experiments document the occurrence of ethnic discrimination. Effect sizes are inflated by publication bias, but there is still substantial evidence left once the bias is removed. The analysis reveals a consistent decline in the extent of discrimination over time, from moderate levels of discrimination in the 1970s and 1980s, up to only small but still statistically significant levels in the 1990s and 2000s. A significant part of the discriminatory behaviour can be attributed to missing information about the social status of applicants, which supports theories on statistical discrimination. It is discussed how future research could move our knowledge on the underlying mechanisms forward.

The public debate around climate change is increasingly polarized. At the same time, the scientific consensus about the causes and consequences of climate change is strong. This inconsistency poses challenges for mitigation and adaptation efforts. The translation of uncertain numerical climate projections into simpler but ambiguous verbal frames may contribute to this polarization. In two experimental studies, we investigated 1) how “communicators” verbally frame a confidence interval regarding projected change in winter precipitation due to climate change (N = 512) and 2) how “listeners” interpret these verbal frames (N = 385). Both studies were preregistered at the Open Science Framework. Communicators who perceived the change as more severe chose a concerned rather than an unconcerned verbal frame. Furthermore, communicators’ verbal frames were associated with their more general beliefs, like political affiliation and environmental values. Listeners exposed to the concerned frame perceived climate change–induced precipitation change to be more severe than those receiving the unconcerned frame. These results are in line with two pilot studies (N = 298 and N = 393, respectively). Underlying general beliefs about climate and the environment likely shape public communication about climate in subtle ways, and thus verbal framing by the media, policymakers, and peers may contribute to public polarization on climate change.