Publikationsliste KOPS

Most states acknowledge the significance of Indigenous rights to rectify past injustices. Yet, on the domestic level, the realization of these rights depends on national policies. For democratic societies, questions about public opinion toward Indigenous policies are thus of great interest but remain largely unstudied. To what extent does the ethnic majority support policies conducive to Indigenous rights realization? And how different are the Indigenous population’s policy preferences? I use original experimental data from a vignette study to investigate these questions in the case of the Sámi people in Norway and Sweden. I hypothesize that groups’ attitudes are shaped by policies’ potential to alter the social status hierarchy between the majority and Indigenous populations. The results provide a nuanced picture. The ethnic majority shows significantly less support for policies facilitating Sámi linguistic, self-governance, and territorial rights. While the Sámi have, in general, more positive attitudes toward such policies, their support seems to be less pronounced than the majority’s resistance. Moreover, as attitudes are surprisingly similar when compared between Norway and Sweden, a country’s existing policy context does not appear to be crucial in the formation of these preferences.

Although recognized as a defining feature of the current political era, populism and its implications for non-market strategy remain undertheorized. We offer a framework that (a) conceptualizes populism and its progression over time; (b) outlines the risks populism generates for firms; and (c) theorizes effective nonmarket strategies under populism. Our framework anchors the political risk profile of populism in three interdependent elements: anti-establishment ideology, de-institutionalization, and short-term policy bias. These elements jointly shape the policymaking dynamics and institutional risks for firms under populism. Our analysis shows how firms can calibrate two nonmarket strategies – political ties and corporate social responsibility – to mitigate populism-related risks. We specify how particular configurations of political ties and CSR activities, aimed at the populist leadership, bureaucrats, political opposition, and societal stakeholders, minimize risk under populism. Further, we theorize how the effectiveness of specific attributes of political ties and CSR – namely their relative covertness (more vs. less concealed) and their relative focus (narrowly vs. widely targeted) – varies as a function of firm type (insiders vs. outsiders) and the probability of populist regime collapse. Finally, we address how motivated reasoning may bias firms' assessments of regime fragility and resulting strategy choices.

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.

This paper studies the determinants of support for future generations, using novel survey data for the case of Germany. I find significant, but not overwhelming support for prioritizing the needs of future generations vs. the acute needs of present-day citizens. Moreover, individual-level and contextual factors matter too. High-income and highly educated citizens are on average more supportive of the needs of future generations, the elderly and women less so. Left-wing supporters are equally more supportive of future generations, especially supporters of the Greens and those subscribing to ‘green-alternative-liberal’ values. Supporters of the right-wing populist AfD are most strongly opposed. General political trust boosts support for future generations, and economically thriving local economies are associated with higher levels of support for future generations as well.

To what extent, and under what conditions, have workfare reforms shaped public opinion towards the unemployed? This article unpacks the punitive and enabling dimensions of the workfare turn and examines how changes to the rights and obligations of the unemployed have influenced related policy preferences. To do so, it presents a novel dataset on these reforms across a diverse set of welfare states and investigates potential feedback effects by combining our data with four waves of survey data from Europe and North America. Results suggest that while enabling measures generate more lenient attitudes towards the unemployed, punitive measures have no clear effect on public opinion – but they do accentuate the gap between the preferences of high- and low-income individuals. This leads us to conclude that the trend towards punitive and enabling measures since the 1980s has not broadly undermined solidarity with the unemployed, though it has increased income-based polarization.

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) will greatly impact the lives of individuals with visual impairments, but how they differ in expectations compared to sighted individuals is not clear. The present research reports results based on survey responses from 114 visually impaired participants and 117 panel recruited participants without visual impairments, from Germany. Their attitudes towards autonomous vehicles and their expectations for consequences of wide-spread adoption of CAVs are assessed. Results indicate significantly more positive CAV attitudes in participants with visual impairments compared to those without visual impairments. Mediation analyses indicate that visually impaired individuals’ more positive CAV attitudes (compared to sighted individuals’) are largely explained by higher hopes for independence, and more optimistic expectations regarding safety and sustainability. Policy makers should ensure accessibility without sacrificing goals for higher safety and lower ecological impact to make CAVs an acceptable inclusive mobility solution.

Economic inequality constitutes a defining challenge of our time and it remains puzzling why rising levels of inequality have not led to more redistribution. In this article a novel individual-level perspective is taken, with a focus on how much legislators and citizens agree on questions of redistribution and inequality, and what causes these mismatches. The study compares legislators’ views to a representative citizen sample in Switzerland. The results show considerable disagreement between the groups with legislators being more sceptical towards redistribution and seeing inequality as fairer outcome. The mismatch is only partially explained by legislators’ higher social status. Ideology plays a fundamental role as more polarisation according to ideological lines is found among elites and their attitudes are also more rooted in their ideology. In sum, the findings point to some underexplored angles of the puzzle of why not more redistribution has been observed and thus offer a valuable addition to the existing literature.

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.

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.

Spoken administrative language is a critical element in the relationship between citizens and the state, especially when it comes to face-to-face interactions between officials and citizens during the delivery of public services. But preceding work offers little insights on the verbal features of street-level bureaucracy. Drawing on communication studies, we argue that administrative language differs along both a relational and an informational linguistic component. To test the consequentiality of this theory, we design a factorial survey experiment with a representative sample of 1,402 German citizens. Participants evaluated audio recordings of a hypothetical service encounter where we systematically varied the language used by the official and the service decision, measuring participants’ service satisfaction as the main outcome. Based on regression analysis, we find that relational elements of administrative language improve citizen satisfaction, independent of the service outcome, but that the effect does not hold for the informational component. These findings emphasize the importance of relational communication in citizen-state interactions, which tends to be neglected in public administration theory and practice.

Fifty years after Feagin’s pioneering 1972 study, we present a systematic review of the measurement of attributions for poverty and economic inequality. We conducted a search for articles published from 1972 to 2023 in APA PsycArticles, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, APA PsycInfo, PSYNDEX Literature with PSYNDEX Tests, and Google Scholar. We used the following English keywords: “poor”, “poverty”, “inequality”, “attribution”, and “attributions” and their equivalents in Spanish. Applying our inclusion and exclusion criteria led to a final sample of 74 articles. We report three main findings. First, the majority of studies classify attributions on the dimensions of individualistic vs. structural. Second, there is a clear tendency to measure attributions for domestic poverty without considering supranational factors or poverty as a global challenge. Third, studies focus almost exclusively on poverty rather than (economic) inequality. We identify potential for future development within the literature, namely, from a domestic to a global perspective, from locus to controllability, and from poverty to inequality.