Publikationsliste KOPS

Whether or not socially desirable responding (SDR) is a cause for concern in personality assessment has long been debated. For many researchers, McCrae and Costa (1983) laid the issue to rest when they showed that correcting for SDR in self-reports did not improve the agreement with spouse ratings on the NEO Personality Inventory. However, their findings rest on the assumption that observer ratings in general, and spouse ratings in particular, are an unbiased external criterion. If spouse ratings are also susceptible to SDR, correcting for the bias in self-rated measures cannot be assumed to increase agreement between self-reports and spouse ratings, and thus failure to do so should not be taken as evidence for the ineffectiveness of measuring and correcting for SDR. In the present study, McCrae and Costa’s influential study was replicated with the exception of measuring SDR with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, in both self-reports and spouse ratings. Analyses were based on responses from 70 couples who had lived together for at least one year. The results showed that both self-reports and spouse ratings are susceptible to SDR and thus McCrae and Costa’s conclusion is drawn into question.

The collection of articles in this special issue provides a comprehensive analysis of European Union decision-making during the Eurozone crisis. We investigate national preference formation and interstate bargaining related to major reforms of the Economic and Monetary Union. The analyses rely on the new ‘EMU Positions’ dataset. This dataset includes information about the preferences and saliences of all 28 EU member states and key EU institutions, regarding 47 contested issues negotiated between 2010 and 2015. In this introductory article, we first articulate the motivation behind this special issue and outline its collective contribution. We then briefly summarise each article within this collection; the articles analyse agenda setting, preference formation, coalition building, bargaining dynamics, and bargaining success. Finally, we present and discuss the ‘EMU Positions’ dataset.

Using a choice experiment in the lab, we assess the relative importance of different attitudes to income inequality. We elicit subjects’ preferences regarding pairs of payoff distributions within small groups, in a firm-like setting. We find that distributions that satisfy the Pareto-dominance criterion attract unanimous suffrage: all subjects prefer larger inequality provided it makes everyone weakly better off. This is true no matter whether payoffs are based on merit or luck. Unanimity only breaks once subjects’ positions within the income distribution are fixed and known ex-ante. Even then, 75% of subjects prefer Pareto-dominant distributions, but 25% of subjects engage in money burning at the top in order to reduce inequality, even when it does not make anyone better off. A majority of subjects embrace a more equal distribution if their own income or overall efficiency is not at stake. When their own income is at stake and the sum of payoffs remains unaffected, 20% of subjects are willing to pay for a lower degree of inequality.

dc.title:

dc.contributor.author: Jann, Ben; Krumpal, Ivar

dc.title:

dc.contributor.author: Rothman, Jason

This article is concerned with the genesis of German financial liberalisation. A refined inventory of financial system change – including new meso-level data on finance pattern and the marketisation of banking – reveals a varied pattern of change across German finance. It is argued that this financial diversification can only be understood with careful reference to the underlying ideational factors. An analytical narrative traces how technocratic ideas of financial modernisation during the 1980s began to open up space for the political program of finance capitalism to absorb liberal and leftist discontents with insider control and bank dominance. Upon reaching a tipping point of discursive dominance, the program was distinctly adopted across the political economy as the result of compartmentally different political, ideational and structural factors; creating a non-hegemonic financial paradigm that became identifiable in the face of recent crises. By developing analytical steps that link incremental and dynamic theories of institutional change in a conceptual framework of belief shifts, the paper contributes to efforts of adapting existing models of change to complex domains and accounting for the dynamic nature of the paradigm-generating process. The findings inform the larger debate about internal capitalist diversity and the coherence of national economic models.

Kurzinformationsblätter gehören inzwischen zum festen Repertoire der deutschen und europäischen Finanzmarktregulierung. Die Basisinformationsblätter der VO (EU) Nr. 1286/2014 (PRIIP-VO) stellen die jüngste Maßnahme des Unionsgesetzgebers in Bezug auf die Information der Anleger über Finanzmarktprodukte dar. Wichtiger Teil des Regulierungskonzepts ist die Einstandspflicht für die Fehlerfreiheit der den Anlegern gegebenen Informationen. Dementsprechend ordnet die PRIIP-VO in Art. 11 eine zivilrechtliche Haftung für fehlerhafte Basisinformationsblätter an. Diese ist als eigene Anspruchsgrundlage des europäischen Rechts ausgestaltet. Als solche wirft sie eine Vielzahl von Fragen auf, die nicht nur die Anwendung der Vorschrift, sondern auch Grundfragen des Privatrechts der EU und seiner Anspruchsgrundlagen betreffen. Ihnen geht der folgende Beitrag nach.

Does the electoral system affect government partisanship? Iversen and Soskice answer this question in the affirmative. These authors argue that center-right governments dominate in majoritarian systems, whereas proportional representation systems see more center-left governments. They explain this difference by the strategic voting behavior of the middle class under alternative electoral rules. In this study, we test the robustness of their empirical results to alternative measures of the main variables as well as to a completed version of the original data set. Our replication does not corroborate Iversen and Soskice’s empirical findings. First, we cannot substantiate the notion that center-right governments emerge more frequently in majoritarian systems. Second, a time-series cross-section analysis does not support the hypothesis that the electoral system is a significant determinant of partisan control of government.

Functional differentiation is associated with two salient features of globalization: First, societal subsystems such as the economy, science, religion and politics have become increasingly global in terms of the interconnectedness of their operations across the world. Second, they exhibit global structural similarities, for instance regarding functionally specific role relationships and corresponding formal organizations. However, functional differentiation entails not only more interconnectedness and homogenization but also considerable structural and institutional diversity. In this paper, I distinguish and examine two forms of diversity that emerge as consequences of functional differentiation: Varieties of institutional structures that concern different ways of addressing functionally specific problems, on the one hand, and on the other, the variation of forms of structural coupling among subsystems within a particular local or regional context.