Publikationsliste KOPS

Researchers have become increasingly interested in age-related constructs other than chronological age, which has been found to explain only small amounts of variance in many important work outcomes. In this editorial that accompanies our special issue of Work, Aging and Retirement on “the multitude of age constructs,” we seek to attain three related goals: First, we provide an overview of our editorial process. Second, we offer brief summaries of the five papers that are included in this special issue. Third, and perhaps representing our most substantive contribution here, we present answers to six “big picture” questions about subjective age to inform future scholarly work. We conclude that, although many important questions about alternative age constructs remain to be answered, the papers in this special issue represent excellent examples of novel work in this arena and suggest several opportunities for how future research could more rigorously and critically apply these constructs to the study of work, aging and retirement.

International organizations (IOs) and their bureaucracies frequently face calls for reform. To express discontent and exert reform pressure, member states can withhold their budgetary contributions to IOs. In extreme cases, these cuts result in organizational crises during which reform efforts become unavoidable, as happened in UNESCO after 2011. Traditional IR research sees member states as being in the driver’s seat when it comes to achieving – or failing to achieve – reform under such conditions, whereas scholars of international public administration underline bureaucratic action or pathology as driving, or preventing, reform. By tracing UNESCO’s reform dynamics from 2011 to 2013, this paper demonstrates how a budget crisis can trigger major reform efforts by IO bureaucracies and by IO member states, but how the lack of joint and synchronized action by both actors still results in failed or limited reform. This contributes to key debates on international public administration, IO reform, and the role of budgetary crisis. The article suggests a dynamic and actor-centred theory of IO reform that highlights the need for synchronized crisis cognition and for substantively and temporally coordinated efforts of both states and bureaucracies as key elements for reform success – and their absence as explanation for failed reform.

Do ethnic riots affect prosocial behavior? A common view among scholars of ethnic violence is that riots increase cooperation within the warring groups, while cooperation across groups is reduced. We revisit this hypothesis by studying the aftermath of the 2010 Osh riot in Kyrgyzstan, which saw Kyrgyz from outside the city kill over 400 Uzbeks. We implement a representative survey, which includes unobtrusive experimental measures of prosocial behavior. Our causal identification strategy exploits variation in the distance of neighborhoods to armored military vehicles, which were instrumental in orchestrating the riot. We find that victimized neighborhoods show substantially lower levels of prosocial behavior. Importantly, we demonstrate that the reduction is similarly stark both within and across groups. Using qualitative interviews, we parse out two mechanisms that help explain the surprising reduction in ingroup prosociality: Victimized Uzbeks felt abandoned by their coethnics, and variation in victimization created a feeling of suspicion.

As political parties expand opportunities for intraparty participation, understanding the effects of participatory events on party actors becomes ever more important. In this study, we investigate the consequences of an intraparty referendum in a state branch of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union on beliefs and attitudes of party members. We use longitudinal survey data bracketing a nonbinding issue referendum on the party’s stance on same-sex marriage. Our analysis shows that the referendum had secondary effects that went beyond the referendum’s primary goal of delivering an informal opinion poll to the party leadership. The experience of having a say in an important policy decision fostered members’ sense of party-specific efficacy. Furthermore, the referendum provided party members with information on elite positions and stimulated leadership evaluation based on issue congruency. Altogether, involvement in intraparty decision-making promotes beliefs and behaviors among the rank and file that are relevant to uphold a vivid and empowering party life.

In the last decade, Europe has been affected by several crises, which had and still have detrimental consequences for the life of many people, suffering from unemployment, poverty and social exclusion. The special issue seeks to explore how these crises have challenged and promoted solidarities within and between European countries. In the introductory paper, first a typology of different types of solidarity – social, political and welfare – is developed to account for the varied meanings and uses of the term. Second, the origins and scopes of the different types of solidarity and their link to crises are discussed. After introducing the special issue papers, five contributions to the understanding of crises and solidarities are highlighted, namely: the meanings of solidarity are varied and discursively contested; different types of solidarity merge and interact; crises are a necessary, but not sufficient condition for solidarity to emerge; crises alter the scope of solidarity; economic shocks can have long-term effects on solidarity. Thus, crises have led to a reconfiguration of solidarities in Europe.

In “Origins and Destinations”, Luthra, Soehl and Waldinger aim at “extending the canon” in research on immigrant integration. They do so by studying group and individual level characteristics across a large number of origin groups, thereby replacing group labels with theoretically relevant variables at the group level. In this review, three challenges in this endeavour are discussed: First of all, the analyses do not allow to disentangle the impact of group and individual level characteristics for all variables alike. Secondly, a primary data collection more tailored to the specifics of their conceptual framework is needed. This would many conclusions about how contexts of emigration and immigration truly matter above and beyond individual characteristic on a more solid ground. And third, the authors’ aim to abandon the use of origin group categories in empirical research on immigrant integration may come at a price.

This article revisits prominent frameworks for understanding traditional political institutions which make pessimistic assessments about their compatibility with democracy. Traditional political institutions are often assumed to be unaccountable because they are led by undemocratic leaders who are not subject to electoral sanctioning. However, drawing on new information from the TradGov Group dataset, an expert survey on the contemporary practices of more than 1,400 ethnic groups that currently have traditional political institutions, we show that these institutions contain their own distinct mechanisms of accountability. In a majority of cases, decision-making is consensual and leaders must account for their actions in various ways. We challenge the electoral accountability framework for understanding the quality of traditional leaders’ performance, instead arguing that traditional political institutions can be compatible with democracy and even accountable to their citizens insofar as they adopt inclusive decision-making processes and their leaders have strong nonelectoral connections to the communities they represent.

Why are some societies more unequal than others? The French revolutionaries believed unequal inheritances among siblings to be responsible for the strict hierarchies of the ancien régime. To achieve equality, the revolutionaries therefore enforced equal inheritance rights. Their goal was to empower women and to disenfranchise the noble class. But do equal inheritances succeed in leveling the societal playing field? We study Germany—a country with pronounced local‐level variation in inheritance customs—and find that municipalities that historically equally apportioned wealth, to this day, elect more women into political councils and have fewer aristocrats in the social elite. Using historic data, we point to two mechanisms: wealth equality and pro‐egalitarian preferences. In a final step, we also show that, counterintuitively, equitable inheritance customs positively predict income inequality. We interpret this finding to mean that equitable inheritances level the playing field by rewarding talent, not status.

In a classical typology, Polanyi distinguishes three basic modes of economic integration: competitive market exchange, redistribution and reciprocity. While markets are dominant in modern capitalism, redistribution and reciprocity are—to varying extent—also part of its institutional architecture. Asking whether such institutional differences are mirrored in distinct ‘moral economies’, we investigate ordinary citizens’ support for market competition, redistribution and reciprocity across 14 capitalist economies. Combining data from three comparative surveys, we analyze, first, the extent to which these principles are supported by citizens and whether they cluster into distinct ‘moral economies’; second, whether these norms are anchored in formal institutional settings; and finally, how privileged and disadvantaged groups differ in their support. While support for market competition is strong across countries, it is to varying degrees complemented by support for redistribution and reciprocity. We identify a competition-dominated, an embedded and a strongly embedded moral economy. The interplay of formal institutions and people’s social–structural position partly explains differences in popular support.

Many constitutions of the world contain special provisions for indigenous communities, granting them particular rights and regulating their traditional political institutions and customary law. Building on rational theories of constitution-making, we employ a demand and supply framework to explain the constitutionalization of such provisions. To test our hypotheses, we code the presence of indigenous provisions in the current constitutions of 193 United Nations member states. We find full democracy and previous conflict to stimulate the inclusion of indigenous group rights but not of customary law and traditional institutions. Customary law and traditional institutions are more likely constitutionalized in countries with high ethnic fractionalization. Low levels of modernity affect particularly the constitutionalization of traditional political institutions, while low levels of development correlate with provisions on customary law. Former British colonies are more likely to constitutionalize customary law.

Decisions under risk in the medical domain have been found to systematically diverge from decisions in the monetary domain. When making choices between monetary options, people commonly rely on a decision strategy that trades off outcomes with their probabilities; when making choices between medical options, people tend to neglect probability information. In two experimental studies, we tested to what extent differences between medical and monetary decisions also emerge when the decision outcomes affect another person. Using a risky choice paradigm for medical and monetary decisions, we compared hypothetical decisions that participants made for themselves to decisions for a socially distant other (Study 1) and to recommendations as financial advisor or doctor (Study 2). In addition, we examined people's information search in a condition in which information about payoff distributions had to be learned from experiential sampling. Formal modeling and analyses of search behavior revealed a similarly pronounced gap between medical and monetary decisions in decisions for others as in decisions for oneself. Our results suggest that when making medical decisions, people try to avoid the worst outcome while neglecting its probability—even when the outcomes affect others rather than themselves.

Contemporary media systems are in transition. The constellation of organizations, groups, and individuals contributing information to national and international news flows has changed as a result of the digital transformation. The “hybrid media system” has proven to be one of the most instructive concepts addressing this change. Its focus on the mutually dependent interconnections between various types of media organizations, actors, and publics has inspired prolific research. Yet the concept can tempt researchers to sidestep systematic analyses of information flows and actors’ differing degrees of influence by treating media systems as a black box. To enable large-scale, empirical comparative studies aimed at identifying interdependencies and power relationships in contemporary media systems, we propose the concept of discursive power. This describes the ability of contributors to communication spaces to introduce, amplify, and maintain topics, frames, and speakers, thus shaping public discourses and controversies that unfold in interconnected communication spaces. We also provide a theoretical framework of how structural features of organizations and media systems contribute to the emergence of discursive power for different types of actors in various contexts. This adds to the theoretical toolkit available to researchers interested in the empirical analysis of contemporary media systems.

There has been a recent surge of political actors and groups challenging the legitimacy of established political institutions and mass media. We argue that this wave is no accident; rather, it is driven by digital media. Digital media allow outside challengers to route around social institutions that structure political discourse, such as parties and legacy media, which have previously held a monopoly on political coordination and information distribution. Digital media have weakened the power of these institutions, allowing outsiders to maintain extreme positions that formerly would have been filtered out or suppressed by institutions structuring political discourse. In this article, we explicate mechanisms linking digital media to the rise of outsiders by discussing the successes of a diverse set of challengers fighting for attention and representation in the different political contexts of the United States, Germany, and China. We thus provide a novel explanation that systematically accounts for the political consequences of digital media.

Einleitung:
In psychologischen Theorien zur Gesundheitsverhaltensförderung nehmen soziale Konstrukte, wie z.B. Normwahrnehmung, einen zentralen Platz ein. Das tatsächliche Verhalten in sozialen Kontexten wird dabei oft außer Acht gelassen. In diesem Vortrag wird daher darauf eingegangen, inwiefern Normwahrnehmungen innerhalb eines sozialen Netzwerks soziale Einflüsse beim Alkoholkonsum erklären können.

Methoden:
109 Psychologiestudierende wurden zu drei Messzeitpunkten innerhalb des ersten Semesters zu ihren alkoholbezogenen Kognitionen, Alkoholkonsum und Freunden innerhalb des Semesters befragt. Zur Vorhersage sozialer Einflüsse auf Alkoholkonsum und Freundschaftsentwicklungen wurden RSiena Modelle angewandt.

Ergebnisse:
Der durchschnittliche Alkoholkonsum von Freunden im Semester sagte den Konsum zum nächsten Messzeitpunkt auch nach der Kontrolle von Kognitionen, wie der Wahrnehmung vom Verhalten der Freunde, vorher (b = 1,89, OR = 6,64, 95%CI [1,28; 34,50], p = 0,022).

Diskussion:
Soziale Einflüsse beim Alkoholkonsum von Erstsemestern können nicht vollständig durch kognitive Konstrukte wie Normwahrnehmungen aufgeklärt werden. Dies suggeriert, dass es zusätzliche soziale Kontexteinflüsse gibt.

What theories explain variation in public opinion toward asylum seekers? We implement a survey experiment in which a representative sample of German residents evaluates vignettes of asylum seekers, which randomly vary attributes that speak to deservingness, economic and religious threat, and gender considerations of attitude formation. We find strong support for deservingness theories. Economic and religious threat theories also receive empirical support. Gender plays a negligible role. Importantly, we also document that economic and—to a lesser extent—religious threat considerations only matter when respondents evaluate economic refugees. By contrast, political refugees are welcomed nearly unconditionally. Our paper thus replicates key findings from Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner (2016) and Czymara and Schmidt-Catran (2016) using a representative sample and points to an important interaction effect in public opinion formation toward asylum seekers: economic threat only gets activated when refugees’ deservingness is in doubt.

The number of migrants worldwide has grown rapidly in recent years and their integration poses challenges such as cultural and language barriers for organizations and societies. Securing and maintaining employment is a key challenge for migrants, yet management research has devoted little attention to migration. We aim to contribute to the emerging literature on this topic by utilizing objective and time-lagged field data from 14,327 mail carriers nested in 737 delivery units of a large Swiss logistics firm. We investigate the link between in/congruence of the number of employees and customers with migration background and customer complaints. Controlling for service quality, we find that congruence between mail carriers and their customers (both low and both high numbers of migrants) is associated with fewer customer complaints, the latter suggesting the existence of a common migrant identity despite national and cultural differences. Surprisingly, we found that it does not matter whether more employees or customers relative to the other group have a migration background, as the results from both incongruence scenarios show increased complaints. We find that units that receive more complaints experience higher rates of voluntary turnover, highlighting how unfair customer complaints can hurt organizations twice, by increasing the risk of loss in both customers and employees.