Publikationsliste KOPS

Do citizens expect candidates who hand out goods at election time to provide services once they take office? The literature provides competing views of the relationship between electoral handouts and service provision. One sees handouts as pre-payment for the vote in lieu of future services; the second understands them as signaling the candidate’s ability to provide future services. In this paper, we examine how electoral handouts may affect expectations of future service provision. We focus on the poor because they are most dependent on such service provision, and on expectations because they are more easily identified and are likely to reflect past experience. We argue the density of social ties within the community should moderate the relationship between candidates’ campaign handouts and expectations of future services. We test this argument using hierarchical models to analyze observational and experimental data from over 14,000 poor Kenyans, Malawians, and Zambians in 631 communities. We find that respondents generally view monetary handouts to be in lieu of future services. However, we also find important differences in communities with more and less dense social ties. Vote-buying is more common and seen as more acceptable in socially dense than in less dense communities. Respondents from socially dense communities are also less likely to expect future service provision; however, they do not see candidates who give handouts as significantly less likely to provide services than those who do not. Indeed, there is evidence that not providing handouts in these communities may signal the candidate’s inability to provide services. These findings highlight the importance of considering how communities’ social density affects expectations over service provision and the need to consider, more broadly, how social context affects the distributive consequences of clientelism.

The literature on social and wealth inequality has long acknowledged the importance of intergenerational wealth transmission (IWT) to inequality in homeownership tenure. However, it has paid insufficient attention to the institutional structures that moderate these inequalities. Therefore, in this study, we ask how institutional factors via differential housing finance systems and governmental housing policies, moderate the association between IWT and homeownership tenure. This is done by using the framework of housing regime configurations and mortgage market financialization. To do so, we pooled data for 20 European countries from the European Central Bank’s Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) for 2010–2017, for household heads aged 25–40. Our main findings show consistent contradiction to the welfare state–homeownership “trade-off” hypothesis: that is, when the rental market is more heavily regulated, it is actually young adults who benefited from IWT or who received higher value of IWT have a higher probability of mortgaged homeownership. Paradoxically, when housing finance institutions are more active and generous, the wealthiest young adults hold an advantage in mortgaged homeownership. Therefore, liberal mortgage markets actually serve to enable wealthier young adults to reproduce and preserve their parental wealth status. Further, when housing prices are less affordable (median mortgage-to-income ratio), those who have received a higher amount of IWT hold an advantage in mortgaged homeownership. We discuss the implications of our findings, which cut across the socioeconomic, spatial, and demographical arenas.

The gender gap pervades many core aspects of political science. This article reports that females continue to be under-represented as authors and reviewers in European Union Politics and that these differences have only diminished slightly since the second half of the 2000s. We also report that females use more cautious and modest language in their correspondence with the editorial office, but do not find evidence that this under-studied aspect of the gender gap affects the outcome of the reviewing process. The authors discuss some measures European Union Politics and other journals might take to address the imbalance.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents an enormous challenge for healthcare systems around the globe. Using original panel survey data for the case of Germany, this article studies how specific trust in the healthcare system to cope with this crisis has evolved during the course of the pandemic and whether this specific form of trust is associated with general political trust. The article finds strong evidence for a positive and robust association between generalized political trust and performance perceptions regarding the efficiency and fairness of the crisis response as well as individual treatment conditions. The article also shows that specific trust in healthcare remained relatively stable throughout 2020, but declined significantly in the spring of 2021.

Following its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s macroeconomic stability will worsen; foreign trade and Russia-bound investment will dry up; and human capital will become scarce. Russia will not fully compensate these losses with increased economic engagement with China, with particular deficiencies likely in high-tech areas for Russia. Import substitution is also unlikely to allow Russia to innovate its way out of economic isolation or escape the resource curse. As Kremlin-connected elites further dominate the impoverished economy, crony state capitalism and kleptocracy will rise. The global repercussions of Russia’s war will include commodity shocks and the attendant supply chain disruptions and inflationary pressures. In terms of FDI, the global industries in energy, auto, and consumer goods will be particularly affected. The loss of the Russian market will be less critical to sales revenues. Structurally, Russia’s forced decoupling from the global economy may lead to the fragmentation of global financial infrastructure and the formation of economically contained blocks.

In this article, we study the receipt of informal support during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. The containment measures have had various, far-reaching consequences for the wellbeing of people, creating demands for economic, practical, and emotional support-even among individuals who hitherto were not in need of support. Existing research has shown substantial levels of informal support during the pandemic, often based on individuals' existing social networks, but has predominantly taken the perspective of donors. In this article, we focus on the "demand" or recipient "side" of informal support, and ask: (1) Who receives which type of informal social support during the pandemic? (2) Who reports unmet need? (3) Which factors explain support receipt, unmet need and the type of support received? To explain patterns of receiving social support, we identify "classic" life course and "new" pandemic-specific risks and complement this perspective with individuals' support potentials from their social networks. Empirically, we use data from an online survey, collected among a quota sample of the German population (n = 4,496) at the end of the first lockdown in late spring 2020. Our analysis shows that one in six respondents received social support, while only 3% report unmet need. Practical and emotional support are most widespread. Using logistic and multinomial logistic regression models our results show that social support in general and the type of support received can be explained by life course and pandemic risks, while unmet need is mainly a consequence of social network structure.

How do face-to-face, assembly processes, and non-face-to-face, popular vote processes impact the decisions made by citizens? Normative discussions of the comparative merits of these two broad types of participatory decision-making processes partly rely on empirical assumptions concerning this question. In this paper, we test the central assumption that assemblies lead to decisions that are more widely supported by participants than popular votes. We do so by analyzing 1,400 decisions made through these processes on the highly salient issue of municipal mergers in Swiss municipalities since 1999. We find that assembly decisions are consistently made by larger majorities than popular vote decisions and that this relationship is significantly mediated by turnout. This suggests that higher levels of agreement in assemblies mainly result from selection biases – with fewer dissenting citizens participating in assemblies than in popular votes – rather than from internal dynamics in assemblies.

This article addresses the discrepancy between the explanation and the prediction of political violence through the development of different models that approximate the decision-making on war and peace. Borrowing from the crisis bargaining literature, the prediction models particularly consider the situational attributes through which players can challenge the status quo. We distinguish between direct and indirect proxies of a weakening of the status quo and show that adding decision-making data can improve the accuracy of cross-sectional forecasting models. The study, which demonstrates the increased conflict risk due to the COVID-19 pandemic and thus another development upsetting the status quo, discusses the usefulness of decision-making forecasts through various case study illustrations.

The article analyses the strategies of Hungarian higher education interest organisations against the encroachments on academic freedom by Viktor Orbán’s governments. We contrast the 2012-2013 and 2017-2019 protest waves and find that innovations in strategy came from new organisations in both periods, whereas established ones were rather passive or opted for the status quo. However, in the second period, new actors consciously declined to pursue wider systemic goals and aimed at building up formal organisations instead of loose, movement-like networks. The focus on keeping a unified front and interest representation on the workplace level did not change the overall outcome. Just like during the first period, the government was able to reach its goals without major concessions. Nevertheless, during the second protest wave the government was unable to divide and pacify its opponents, which stripped it of its legalistic strategy and revealed its authoritarianism.

Implicit and explicit gender biases in media representations of individuals have long existed. Women are less likely to be represented in gender-neutral media content (representation bias), and their face-to-body ratio in images is often lower (face-ism bias). In this article, we look at representativeness and face-ism in search engine image results. We systematically queried four search engines (Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex) from three locations, using two browsers and in two waves, with gender-neutral (person, intelligent person) and gendered (woman, intelligent woman, man, intelligent man) terminology, accessing the top 100 image results. We employed automatic identification for the individual’s gender expression (female/male) and the calculation of the face-to-body ratio of individuals depicted. We find that, as in other forms of media, search engine images perpetuate biases to the detriment of women, confirming the existence of the representation and face-ism biases. In-depth algorithmic debiasing with a specific focus on gender bias is overdue.

Across many countries, increases in inequality driven by rising top incomes and wealth have not been accompanied by growing popular concern. In fact, citizens in unequal societies are less concerned than those in more egalitarian societies. Understanding how the general public perceive richness is an essential step towards resolving this paradox. We discuss findings from focus group research in London, UK, a profoundly and visibly unequal city, which sought to explore public perceptions of richness and the rich. Participants from diverse socio-economic backgrounds discussed their views of the ‘wealthy’ and the ‘super rich’ with reference to both vast economic resources and more intangible aspects, including, crucially, security. High levels of wealth and income were perceived to be necessary for achieving security for oneself and one’s family. The security of the rich was discussed in contrast to participants’ own and others’ insecurity in the context of a (neo)liberal welfare regime – specifically, insecurity about housing, personal finances, social security, health care and the future of the welfare state. In unequal countries, where insecurity is widespread, lack of confidence in collective welfare state provision may serve in the public imagination to legitimate private wealth accumulation and richness as a form of self-protection.

Liberalization poses significant challenges for the continued provision of collective goods within coordinated market economies (CME). Extant scholarship suggests two dominant sets of responses. Either CMEs continue to rely on employer coordination, but only for a privileged core, leading to dualization. Or, in cases where the state enjoys high capacity, the state instead compensates for liberalization but ends up crowding out employer coordination. In both cases, the result is decreasing employer coordination. We argue that in CMEs, the state may also play the role of “orchestrator” by supporting the revitalization of employer coordination. It does so through the deployment of ideational and institutional resources that mobilize employers’ associations on a voluntary basis. Applying our framework to a core area of coordinated capitalism, vocational education and training, we show that in both Germany and Switzerland, this indirect and soft form of state intervention was instrumental for turning around their crisis-stricken vocational training systems.

New technologies are a key driver of labor market change in recent decades. There are renewed concerns that technological developments in areas such as robotics and artificial intelligence will destroy jobs and create political upheaval. This article reviews the vibrant debate about the economic consequences of recent technological change and then discusses research about how digitalization may affect political participation, vote choice, and policy preferences. It is increasingly well established that routine workers have been the main losers of recent technological change and disproportionately support populist parties. However, at the same time, digitalization also creates a large group of economic winners who support the political status quo. The mechanisms connecting technology-related workplace risks to political behavior and policy demands are less well understood. Voters may fail to fully comprehend the relative importance of different causes of structural economic change and misattribute blame to other factors. We conclude with a list of pressing research questions.