Publikationsliste KOPS

In this article, we analyze how European Union Politics has evolved over the last 25 years. Our analysis demonstrates that the goals the editorial team has pursued over this quarter century have only partly been reached. While the journal has helped to consolidate EU studies as a field of research in its own rights, several problems of representation persist in the journal and the social sciences in general. We identify besides the well-known gender gap that especially authors from the (European) South and East continue to be underrepresented in submitted and published articles. While less represented and successful at the submission stage, our results show that female scholars are more likely than male author teams to publish high-impact articles. Our findings indicate that studies of political behavior, broadly conceived, and articles using quantitative methods are well-represented. The article concludes with some remarks on how the journal might help to further professionalize the study of the EU in the coming years.

To what extent have Latin America's Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs adopted different forms of conditionality? What are the main features of this variation, if any? In this article, we show that conditionalities vary across Latin America's CCTs and across time within programs. Drawing on existing conceptualizations of welfare conditionality and a novel, purpose-built dataset covering 16 countries from 1997 to 2019, we analyze the evolution and variation in the design of welfare conditionality in the region. We find that conditionalities among Latin America's CCTs exhibit many different types and also vary significantly in how the program's main attributes—behavioral requirements, monitoring, and sanctioning rules—combine and evolve across time in each program. These combinations show that governments do not consistently produce “pure” CCT models but instead use conditionality features in many different ways and also adjust them over time, frequently to make more explicit what they expect from CCT recipients.

Politicians often engage in blame avoidance behaviours in order to evade electoral punishment following allegations of misconduct. A key question concerns the (in)effectiveness of such behaviours in mitigating voter opinions about the alleged misconduct and the appropriate punishment. In this article, we examine how this (in)effectiveness may be shaped by: (1) the characteristics of blame avoidance behaviours, and (2) voters' partisan (mis)alignment with the alleged offender. We address this question using a between-subject survey experiment among a sample of Norwegian citizens (N = 1996). Our main findings suggest that blame avoidance behaviours can be effective in mitigating voters' assessment of the alleged misconduct and of the punishment the politician should face. This is particularly true when it concerns politicians from respondents' most-preferred party, and among left-wing voters. These findings help explain when and why scandals may (fail to) affect politicians’ electoral fortunes.

Refugee men are found to be less deserving of government support than refugee women. However, is this still the case if they engage in economic reciprocal behavior and attitudes? Following theories on gender stereotypes and benevolent sexism, we argue that economic activity is expected less of female than of male refugees and that this translates into gendered perceptions of deservingness of financial support. Analyzing data from a 2016 factorial survey experiment in Germany, we show that male refugees are more likely to get “punished” if unwilling to work. Future studies should thus include gender-related aspects when assessing deservingness perceptions.

Does technological change fuel political disruption? Drawing on fine-grained labor market data from Germany, this paper examines how technological change affects regional electorates. We first show that the well-known decline in manufacturing and routine jobs in regions with higher robot adoption or investment in information and communication technology (ICT) was more than compensated by parallel employment growth in the service sector and cognitive non-routine occupations. This change in the regional composition of the workforce has important political implications: Workers trained for these new sectors typically hold progressive political values and support progressive pro-system parties. Overall, this composition effect dominates the politically perilous direct effect of automation-induced substitution. As a result, technology-adopting regions are unlikely to turn into populist-authoritarian strongholds.

Given that Facebook is still the most widely used social networking site in the world, its influence on democratic processes is under constant scrutiny. Academics have put a special focus on Facebook’s role in inhibiting or enhancing citizens’ news exposure. Recent studies using digital behavioral data have analyzed the prevalence and effects of “Facebook news referrals.” Using a web tracking tool that captures general browsing behavior as well as public posts seen on Facebook, this paper lays the groundwork for the field by assessing the validity of previously proposed operationalizations. We validate news referrals by investigating whether different measures actually reflect exposure to a news URL a user saw on Facebook. We furthermore assess the effects of news referrals on central outcomes in extant literature, contingent on different operationalizations. The results show that the most precise measure of news referrals are click identifiers attached to news URLs by Facebook. Different operationalizations of referrals have theoretically impactful consequences for the substantive understanding of Facebook’s role in high-choice online environments. The paper demonstrates the need for academics to constantly innovate in order to measure citizens’ online behavior in an ecologically valid manner.