Publikationsliste KOPS

In this paper, we address two empirical puzzles: Why are cross-country differences in the division of labour between public and private education funding so large and why are they politically sustainable in the long term? We argue that electoral institutions play a crucial role in shaping politico-economic distributive coalitions that affected the original division of labour in education financing. In proportional representation systems, the lower and middle classes formed a coalition supporting the establishment of a system with a large share of public funding. In majoritarian systems, in contrast, the middle class voters aligned with the upper income class and supported private education spending instead. Once established, institutional arrangements create feedback effects on the micro-level of attitudes, reinforcing political support even among upper middle classes in public systems. These hypotheses are tested empirically both on the micro level of preferences as well as on the macro level with aggregate data and survey data from the ISSP for 20 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.

Knowledge spillovers through worker mobility between firms, found in previous research, imply that knowledge production within firms creates a positive externality to the hiring firms and their workers. We calculate the shares in the gains from spillovers retained by these parties using matched employer–employee data from Danish manufacturing. We find that around two-thirds of the total output gain (0.1% per year) is netted by the firms as extra profit, about a quarter goes to the incumbent workers as extra wages, while the workers who bring spillovers receive no more than 8% of it. This gains distribution, which favors the hiring firms, is similar for different types of moving workers, and is stable over time.

Two studies were conducted to examine gender differences in trait (habitual) versus state (momentary) mathematics anxiety in a sample of students (Study 1: N = 584; Study 2: N = 111). For trait math anxiety, the findings of both studies replicated previous research showing that female students report higher levels of anxiety than do male students. However, no gender differences were observed for state anxiety, as assessed using experience-sampling methods while students took a math test (Study 1) and attended math classes (Study 2). The discrepant findings for trait versus state math anxiety were partly accounted for by students’ beliefs about their competence in mathematics, with female students reporting lower perceived competence than male students despite having the same average grades in math. Implications for educational practices and the assessment of anxiety are discussed.

dc.title:

dc.contributor.author: Hinzelin, Marc-Olivier

This paper seeks to advance the diversity literature by investigating organizational performance consequences of age diversity. Drawing from social-identity and social-categorization theory, we theoretically argue that, in age-diverse companies, age-based subgrouping processes occur, favouring a shared perception of a negative age-discrimination climate. This perceived negative age-discrimination climate in turn negatively relates to organizational performance. As the main contribution, top managers' negative age-related stereotypes and diversity-friendly HR policies are introduced as organizational-level moderators that increase and attenuate, respectively, the social categorization processes affecting performance in age-diverse companies. We utilized structural equation modelling (SEM) to test the proposed hypotheses using a multisource dataset comprising 147 companies. The results supported all hypotheses, indicating that low negative top managers' age stereotypes as well as high diversity-friendly HR policies are potential organizational factors that can prevent the negative relation of age diversity with organizational performance transmitted through the negative age-discrimination climate. These results are discussed in light of their contribution to the diversity literature and social-categorization theory as well as their implication for practitioners.

dc.title:

We provide experimental evidence on how unequal access to performance enhancing education affects demand for redistribution. People earn money in a real effort experiment andcan then decide how to distribute it among themselves and another subjects. We comparesituations in which randomly chosen people get access to performance enhancing education with situations in which either only luck or only performance determines outcome. Wefind that unequal opportunities evoke a preference for redistribution that is comparable tothe situation when luck alone determines the allocation. However, people with unequalaccess to education are more likely to disagree about the appropriate distribution.

This study sets out to explore the institutional embeddedness of civic engagement in the form of monetary donations and volunteering by firms in Western Europe. Drawing on a recent analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), two contradictory hypotheses—institutional mirror versus substitute—are discussed focusing on three institutional spheres: corporatism, welfare arrangements and statism. The paper argues for moving beyond a linear perspective and takes the interaction of institutional spheres into account. Using a comparative quantitative multilevel approach, institutional, sectoral and organizational determinants of enterprises' civic engagement are empirically analysed drawing on a survey of small- and medium-sized firms in 17 Western European countries. While firm size remains an important determinant of civic engagement, it is shown that the impact of welfare arrangements is conditional on the presence of corporatist arrangements and vice versa. This suggests that civic engagement both mirrors and substitutes for existing institutions, depending on underlying institutional complementarities.

The article describes how the Internet can be used for research both with migrants and on the psychological impressions others have of migrants. Internet-based research methods are currently one of the hot fields in methodology. Though Internet-based research has only a brief history—around 15 years—the field has seen a massive increase in the number of studies conducted on the Internet, and the collection of tools with which to conduct Internet-based research. This development demonstrates a grass-roots change in how research in the behavioural and social sciences is often conducted. In our paper, we use the example of examining social networking Web pages (in terms both of its quantitative and its qualitative aspects) for markers of biculturalism in migrants to illustrate how this type of investigation can be a fruitful avenue for researchers in the area.

A central assumption of deliberative theory is that political preferences are endogenous to decision-making processes in which they are transformed by communicative interaction. We identify discursiveness and coordination of interaction as central determinants of preference change and develop a typology of political modes of interaction that affect the likelihood of preference change differently. These properties are in turn influenced by institutional characteristics of the fora in which communicative interaction takes place. To illustrate our approach empirically we present a comparative analysis of two extreme modes of interaction, ‘debate’ and ‘deliberation’, providing a case study of a parliamentary debate and a citizen conference on the same conflict: the import of embryonic stem cells in Germany. We assess the discursiveness and coordination as well as the amount of preference transformation in both forums.

dc.title:

Compulsory voting (CV) undoubtedly raises electoral turnout. Yet does it also affect individual party choices and aggregate election outcomes? Previous studies have focused on partisan or 'directional' effects of CV in favour of, for example, social-democratic or anti-establishment parties. These effects are usually small, however. Using survey data from the Belgian General Elections Study, this article finds that CV primarily affects the consistency, rather than the direction, of party choices. In particular, the analyses suggest that CV compels a substantial share of uninterested and less knowledgeable voters to the polls. These voters, in turn, cast votes that are clearly less consistent with their own political preferences than those of the more informed and motivated voluntary voters. Claims that CV promotes equal representation of political interests are therefore questionable.

We explore the impact of institutional design on the distribution of changes in outputs of governmental processes in the United States, Belgium, and Denmark. Using comprehensive indicators of governmental actions over several decades, we show that in each country the level of institutional friction increases as we look at processes further along the policy cycle. Assessing multiple policymaking institutions in each country allows us to control for the nature of the policy inputs, as all the institutions we consider cover the full range of social and political issues in the country. We find that all distributions exhibit high kurtosis values, significantly higher than the Normal distribution which would be expected if changes in government attention and activities were proportionate to changes in social inputs. Further, in each country, those institutions that impose higher decision-making costs show progressively higher kurtosis values. The results suggest general patterns that we hypothesize to be related to boundedly rational behavior in a complex social environment.