TY - THES A1 - Le Noan, Anne-Clémence T1 - Changing the way social inequality in education is treated in France and Germany: Schule macht stark (2019) and Les contrats locaux d’accompagnement (2020) as contrasting examples of layering N2 - France and Germany are among the OECD countries where social origin most strongly affects educational achievement. While the structural causes of this phenomenon have been widely studied, the institutionalization of its policy treatment and the room for manoeuvre available to policymakers to bring change in these two contrasting education systems remain underexplored. This dissertation addresses this gap through a comparative analysis of two recent policies targeting schools in disadvantaged areas: Schule macht stark in Germany and les contrats locaux d’accompagnement in France. Drawing on process-tracing, the analysis of documents and 50 interviews, and grounded in neo-institutionalist theory, this research shows that these policies exemplify layering: strong veto players constrained policymakers to implement change through the addition of experimental initiatives rather than through reform of existing policies. These shifts affected policy orientations—toward greater efficiency in France and greater equity in Germany—policy instruments—via the strengthening of New Public Management—and governance levels—with the involvement of the federal tier in Germany. In France, changes were rapid but short-lived, marked by the political instrumentalization of experimentation. In Germany, they were slower but more enduring, supported by academic expertise. In both cases, broader initiatives—Conseil national de la refondation and the Startchancen-Programm—have continued these trajectories, illustrating the relevance of the layering approach. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 04/2026 Y1 - 2026 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-61674 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-6167 N1 - Shelf mark: 2026D004, 2026D004+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Wilkins, Katherine T1 - The New ‘NORMal’? How innovative actors are reshaping the global approach to controlling corruption N2 - This dissertation explores the evolving global anti-corruption regime and examines the interplay between norms and strategic interests in shaping responses to corruption. While traditional narratives portray anti-corruption policy as a normative undertaking, in this dissertation I argue that states’ responses to corruption are meaningfully shaped by the pursuit of geopolitical interests. At the theoretical level, this dissertation contributes to the rationalism-constructivism debate in international relations theory. Drawing on March and Olsen’s dual logics analytical framework, this dissertation introduces a model of bounded decision-making in which norms serve as boundary conditions for responses, but interests shape their scope and intensity. In this model, states attempt to balance norms and interests by prioritizing interest-driven actions while still seeking to maintain normative legitimacy within the international system. Examining the recent decade of anti-corruption rulemaking and a key case of enforcement, this dissertation offers evidence that states may introduce or enforce anti-corruption rules as an instrument of geopolitical strategy. These findings have broad implications for international cooperation on corruption. Additionally, this dissertation contributes to the theoretical understanding of norm development within the analytical framework of network governance theory, which posits that complex global challenges can be effectively addressed through decentralized approaches to governance. This research further examines the role of non-state actors in anti- corruption governance, offering new evidence of how non-state actors navigate norm development, and examining these processes in the context of broader governance trends, especially the shifting relationships between state and non-state actors. These findings support the arguments of network governance theory on the role of non-state actors in global governance, demonstrating how they are shaping norms, including normative constraints on state decision-making. The empirical findings of this dissertation highlight the complexity of anti-corruption governance in a competitive global environment. By emphasizing the role of geopolitical interests in shaping responses to corruption, this research counters the prevailing narrative of anti-corruption as an exclusively normative field. These findings have significant implications for policymakers and anti-corruption advocates, calling for a nuanced understanding of state interests and the influence of non-state actors for advancing global anti-corruption efforts in an increasingly competitive international environment. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 03/2026 Y1 - 2026 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-61661 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-6166 N1 - Shelf mark: 2026D003; 2026D003+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - García-Corral, Paulina T1 - Framing attributions: A methodological and conceptual contribution to the study of explanations in political discourse N2 - As humans, we think of the social world in causal terms, seeking to answer questions that help us make sense of what happens around us, predict future outcomes, and address current issues. The way we communicate displays our causal reasoning, as it is through language that we share how we think the world works, and also attempt to control how others perceive who is responsible of social issues and how to fix them. Therefore, analyzing the use of causal expressions in the public sphere is crucial to better understand political discourse and its downstream effects on political opinion, attitudes, and behavior. In this dissertation, I develop a framework to identify and extract expressions of causal attributions from political text, drawing on techniques from computational linguistics. To do this, I design a coding scheme and create a corpus annotated for causal language in the political domain. I test the corpus on a broad range of pre-trained language models on the task of identifying and parsing expressions of causality: from smaller transformer-based models such as Bert, to modern Large Language Models, like GPT-4. Additionally, I introduce an evaluation strategy tailored to test if a model’s causal extraction is done through linguistic parsing or by leveraging causal patterns learned during pre-training. After interpreting experimental results, I develop a framework to parse expressions of causal attributions in text, adapted for political methodology. With this novel measurement tool, I empirically examine the constructions of causality used in the coverage of two international conflicts. I demonstrate the method’s capabilities and ease of use for political science research. With insights from the case study, I conceptualize “non attribution”, and posit it as a unique framing practice, complementary to responsibility framing. With it, I argue that the omission of causal attributions is a distinct frame, and not a neutral absence in news coverage. With this dissertation, I extend the current scholarship on causal language modeling, and show how new text-as-data methods can be used to scale and examine discourse to identify novel concepts, and extend previous work in political communication. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 02/2026 Y1 - 2026 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-61241 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-6124 N1 - Parts of the dissertation have been published: A. Garcia Corral, P., Bechara, H., Zhang, R., & Jankin, S. (2024). PolitiCause: An Annotation Scheme and Corpus for Causality in Political Texts. In N. Calzolari, M.-Y. Kan, V. Hoste, A. Lenci, S. Sakti, & N. Xue (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) (pp. 12836–12845). ELRA and ICCL. https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1124/ B. Garcia-Corral, P., Bechara, H. D., Manohara, K., & Jankin, S. (2025). Causally fooled in the name of being honest? Evaluating causal extraction in LLMs for political text. In C. Wartena & U. Heid (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2025): Workshops (pp. 36–53). HsH Applied Academics. https://aclanthology.org/2025.konvens-2.4/ N1 - Shelf mark: 2026D002, 2026D002+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Tiedemann, Silvana T1 - Essays in empirical energy economics: Real-time electricity pricing, energy saving rewards, and auctions in the energy transition N2 - The transition to a sustainable energy system requires a balance between climate protection, economic efficiency, and energy security. This dissertation contributes to understanding how to achieve these policy goals by evaluating the effect of real-time pricing on demand-side flexibility, financial incentives for energy savings, and auction-based steering of the national capacity mix. The two articles in the first part examine the challenges of estimating the response of electricity demand to real-time pricing. Despite theoretical expectations that dynamic pricing allows for flexible electricity consumption, empirical analyses show that consumers respond little to short-term fluctuations. However, they may systematically adjust consumption, providing a form of demand flexibility that is not captured by some econometric models. Moreover, time dynamics can bias results if not properly addressed. This work therefore advances our understanding of how to isolate different types of responses and how to interpret empirical findings. The article in the second part examines financial incentives for energy savings, focusing on gas saving rewards implemented during the European energy crisis of 2022/23. Analyzing micro-level consumption data, this research employs a matched control group design and the presently developed Double/Debiased Machine Learning estimator to show that direct financial incentives significantly reduce gas consumption. The two articles in the third part evaluate auctions to manage the national capacity mix. An evaluation of Germany’s coal phase-out auctions shows that the mechanism was designed to balance competing policy objectives, resulting in relatively low compensation costs but increasing the carbon intensity of the remaining coal fleet. The study of renewable energy auctions estimates bidders’ true costs and mark-ups, revealing significant heterogeneity in bidding strategies based on firm size and market experience. Overall, this dissertation provides empirical evidence for designing effective policies to advance the energy transition, drawing on econometric and causal methods. The findings underscore the need for tailored incentive structures and market mechanisms that are consistent with policy objectives, consumer behavior, and market dynamics. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 01/2026 Y1 - 2026 N1 - List of publications: Tiedemann, S., & Müller-Hansen, F. (2023). Auctions to phase out coal power: Lessons learned from Germany. Energy Policy, 174, 113387. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113387 Tiedemann, S. (2025). How to estimate and interpret the response of electricity consumers to real-time pricing. SSRN. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5140165 Tiedemann, S., Sgarlato, R., & Hirth, L. (2023). Price elasticity of electricity demand: Using instrumental variable regressions to address endogeneity and autocorrelation of high-frequency time series. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.12863 Lamp, S., Samano, M., & Tiedemann, S. (2025). Firms' bidding behavior in a new market: Evidence from renewable energy auctions. SSRN. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4780866 Amberg, M., Kalkuhl, M., Koch, N., Ockenfels, A., & Tiedemann, S. (2025) Managing an energy crisis: Large-scale evidence of residential natural gas savings through financial rewards. SSRN. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5747645 N1 - Shelf mark: 2026D001, 2026D001+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Gao, Lin T1 - Polyphony in Motion: The Sustained Multivocality of Social Entrepreneurship in China N2 - Sustained multivocality – the coexistence of divergent interpretations of the same phenomenon – is a common yet under-theorized condition in field evolution. This dissertation examines how the multivocality surrounding the concept of social entrepreneurship persists and even deepens in China, despite conditions that typically favor convergence. The study focuses on three key intermediary organizations in China, which interpret social entrepreneurship in increasingly distinct ways, despite all emerging from the field’s early discourse and facing pressure from powerful forces to forge consensus. This study employs a qualitative research design to unpack the processes and mechanisms through which the multivocality not only persists but also deepens over time. The study contributes to our understanding of meaning-making and field evolution in three ways. First, it develops a relational frame typology, identifying four types of frames – elastic, normative, ideological, and pragmatic – each carrying distinct relational implications. It advances the literature by demonstrating that frames are relation-laden constructs and, once enacted, position actors relationally within the field and shape the opportunity space for future meaning-making. Second, building on and extending the insights from the framing and sensemaking literature, it conceptualizes meaning construction as a multifaceted, situated, and relational process in which actors construct meanings through the simultaneous interpretation of the self, the object, and the context. Central to this process is the self-context orientation, which refers to how one perceives and positions oneself in relation to the context. Third, it explains that sustained multivocality emerges from the dynamic interplay between actors’ places in the context, or the situated self, and their choice of frames. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony, it then theorizes sustained interpretive divergence not as a temporary disarray or failure of power to converge, but as a durable and generative form of order. Polyphony, as theorized here, offers a lens for understanding how order can emerge through divergence, moving beyond the consensus-driven paradigm and the power-centric view. The study concludes by inviting a rethinking of consensus, relationality, and organizing in a world characterized by increasing fluidity, ambiguity, and ongoing change. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 16/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-60259 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-6025 ER - TY - THES A1 - Koh, Allison T1 - Platformed Power Plays: Authoritarian Adaptations in Foreign Social Media Spaces N2 - Social media platforms profoundly influence our perception of the world, shaping the way we receive and spread information. They shed light on crucial issues such as political violence and police repression, thereby holding governments accountable for their repressive actions. However, the governments implicated in such cases often attempt to curtail the impact of these digital platforms. They restrict domestic access to international communication channels, impose internet blackouts during political unrest, and intimidate dissidents into silence. Despite these efforts, states persistently grapple with the challenge of controlling the global narratives being spread on foreign social media platforms that lie just beyond their reach. In this cumulative dissertation, I attempt to answer the question of how repressive regimes control information flows in foreign social media spaces, even when they cannot exercise direct provision over these platforms. I argue that states “play by the rules” of the foreign social media spaces that they intend to influence, which often entails producing content that aligns with liberal democratic norms. In doing so, they evade sounding the alarm for foreign governments and the international community to sanction them. In a constantly evolving landscape of transnational social media regulation, states also benefit from foreign platforms that recently became havens for contentious political activity. In the conceptual work of this dissertation, I offer a broad overview of how states deal with diaspora dissent on foreign platforms. To empirically test my expectations on how regime supporters exploit platform governance vulnerabilities, I analyze pro-PRC actors’ responses to Uyghur regime critics in exile on Twitter. To test my expectations on recent shifts in the global regulatory landscape of foreign social media spaces, I leverage a recent change in Twitter’s policies for government and state-affiliated media. Overall, the evidence presented in this dissertation supports the notion that limited information control in foreign social media spaces can pose obstacles for contemporary governments who aim to engage in digital authoritarian practices. However, there remain vulnerabilities in platform governance that make it possible for states and their proxies to target key regime threats and manipulate the global public sphere as part of their foreign policy. Ultimately, this has important ramifications for policies aimed at transnational social media regulation and mitigating the online facets of global authoritarianism. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 15/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-60240 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-6024 N1 - Shelf mark: 2025D015, 2025D015+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Wriedt, Vera T1 - Bordering Belonging: Colonialism, Nationality and Expulsions in the European and African Human Rights Systems N2 - This thesis investigates how the European and African regional human rights systems reproduce or counteract border coloniality in their drafting of norms and subsequent caselaw on matters of nationality and expulsions. Rather than taking the European human rights system as a yardstick to emulate, the analysis critiques its restrictive moves, whilst highlighting transformative contestations of exclusion in the African human rights system. In the European system, the colonial clause built into the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights was further refined in its 1963 Protocol 4 to distinguish between metropolitan and non-metropolitan territories with regard to entry and expulsion. These differentiations reverberate in caselaw that denies the right to nationality and legitimises collective expulsions based on tropes of danger and culpability, whereas judgments upholding the rights of people on the move across borders appear as outliers. In the African system, the anti-colonialism shaping the drafting of the 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights was followed by innovative interpretations reading the right to nationality into the right to recognition of legal status, as well as holistic protection against collective expulsions linked to related rights, but the jurisprudence is limited. Despite epistemic shifts away from the denigration of former colonial subjects crossing borders and moves towards the expansive interpretation of some rights, both systems operate within the limits of codified human rights law, in which many structural elements of border coloniality engrained in statist migration law remain unchallenged and perhaps unchallengeable. By providing the first juxtaposition of these issues in the European and African human rights systems, the thesis contributes to comparative international human rights law, critiques of the coloniality of international law, and border regime studies. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 14/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-60236 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-6023 N1 - Shelf mark : 2025D014; 2025D014+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Groß, Greta Frederike T1 - Narrating for Democratic Resilience: Morality and Future Orientation in Political Communication N2 - This dissertation examines how political communication shapes democratic resilience under conditions of compounding crises. It starts from the premise that liberal democracies confront an external crisis of global threats such as climate change and an internal crisis of democratic legitimacy, expressed through affective polarization and institutional short-termism. Both dynamics constrain democracies’ capacity for problem-solving and raise questions about the role of political communication in shaping public understanding and collective action. The dissertation studies two communicative obstacles to democratic problem-solving: the difficulty of engaging across affectively polarized groups and the challenge of articulating shared future-oriented narratives. Three empirical studies investigate how democratic actors navigate these barriers and how specific narrative strategies may help to overcome them. Chapter 2 compares the moral rhetoric used by Jacinda Ardern and Boris Johnson in their parliamentary communication before and during the COVID-19 crisis. Drawing on the idea that political messages employing a broad moral repertoire may appeal across partisan lines, the chapter develops a scalable measure of moral diversity. Automated content analysis reveals limited differences between both leaders and no substantial increase in moral diversity during the crisis. The findings indicate unexploited potential to build more inclusive and persuasive crisis communication. Chapter 3 uses a survey experiment in Germany to test whether moral reframing—aligning policy messages with recipients’ moral values—can decrease affective polarization. Varying the message framing, issue domain, and messenger characteristics, the study shows that moral reframing increases openness to cross-partisan policy proposals among respondents on both the political left and right. The results inform debates on the effectiveness and limits of depolarizing communication strategies in divided societies. Chapter 4 analyzes temporal narratives in German parliamentary discourse from 1991 to 2024 to assess how often and under which institutional conditions politicians refer to the future. The findings show that future-oriented rhetoric clusters in the early stages of legislative periods and is more prevalent among governing parties, suggesting that electoral incentives contribute to democratic myopia and reduce attention to long-term challenges. Overall, the dissertation advances research on the communicative foundations of democratic resilience by highlighting narrative approaches that may help solving contemporary crises. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 13/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-60199 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-6019 N1 - Shelf mark: 2025D013, 2025D013+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Ramirez-Ruiz, Sebastian T1 - The Evidence Interface: How policymakers encounter, engage with, and make sense of scientific knowledge N2 - While evidence can be a critical input for policymaking, our understanding of how it flows from research and expert communities to elite decision-makers remains remarkably limited. Studying these flows, and the relationships that underpin them, is inherently difficult. They are fragmented, politically mediated, and largely unobservable. This dissertation addresses these challenges by advancing a data-extensive computational social science approach, drawing on alternative (largely unstructured) data sources to systematically observe and characterize elite–evidence interactions. This project consists of four studies, involves the creation of new data infrastructures, and provides a foundation for future research and a proof of concept for investigating these dynamics. The first study analyzes behavioral data from nearly 3,700 legislators across 12 countries to examine how elected officials follow and interact with academic researchers on Twitter, revealing that engagement is rare and shaped by partisanship and educational background, though exogenous shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic can increase attention to medical expertise. The second study maps the evidence cited in 1.2 million policy documents across 185 countries, demonstrating the persistent dominance of research produced in the global North and highlighting systematic epistemic asymmetries in policy-relevant knowledge. The third study introduces the Bundestag Expert Witness Tracker (BEWIT), capturing all public expert hearings in the German Bundestag from 2009 to 2024, and shows how political gatekeeping and transparency reforms shape which experts inform legislative processes. The fourth study develops and validates the INSPIRE instrument, a psychometrically robust measure of scientific evidence consumption literacy for public policy contexts, providing a framework for assessing individuals’ capacity to engage with complex evidence. Together, these studies offer new perspectives on who gets seen and heard, what kinds of expertise gain traction, and how institutional and individual factors can shape evidence use in practice. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 12/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-60150 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-6015 N1 - Parts of this dissertation have been published: I. Ramirez-Ruiz, S. (2025). Politicians from 12 countries rarely engage with researchers on social media, but this can change when expertise gains salience (No. wqbe4_v1). OSF Preprints. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/wqbe4_v1 II. Ramirez-Ruiz, S., & Senninger, R. (2025). Policy documents across 185 countries predominantly rely on evidence from the Global North (No. w8q3y_v1). OSF Preprints. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/w8q3y_v1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Harter, Anina T1 - Essays in Applied Microeconomics: How Shocks and Institutions Shape Policy Preferences and Public Spending N2 - This dissertation in applied microeconomics studies how political institutions and external shocks shape individual policy preferences and public spending. It comprises three self-contained chapters. Chapter 1 investigates the role of legislative institutions in the allocation of public funds. Chapters 2 and 3 analyze the impact of disruptive events on individual preferences for health policies. Chapter 1 studies how legislative institutions shape distributive policy outcomes. Specifically, it examines the allocation of federal grants by the German Bundestag’s budget committee. Using a difference-in-differences design, the analysis shows that gaining a seat on the budget committee doubles the average grant amount allocated to a legislator’s electoral district. This committee benefit in the allocation of grants is driven by internal committee hierarchy, rather than affiliation with the government or incentives from mandate types. Chapter 2 examines how individuals’ previous experience of disruptive events shapes demand for current crisis remedies. Using a model of experience-based learning and micro-level survey data from 19 countries, this chapter finds that individuals who have been exposed to disasters or armed conflict are more willing to get vaccinated against COVID-19. A case study using survey data from Russia reveals that this effect is conditional on trust in government. Chapter 3 analyzes how a single disruptive event can alter individuals’ preferences for abortion policy. It studies the 1976 Seveso chemical disaster which sharply increased perceived risk of industrial toxic exposure, particularly for pregnant women. Using pre-accident data on industrial plant locations and municipality-level voting, this study finds that proximity to hazardous industry reduced support for a restrictive abortion policy. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 11/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-60126 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-6012 N1 - Parts of this dissertation have been published: Chapter 1 Harter, A. (2025). Legislative institutions and distributive politics: Evidence from Germany’s federal budget committee. Berlin School of Economics Discussion Papers; No. 75. https://doi.org/10.48462/OPUS4-5942 Chapter 2 Borisova, E., Gründler, K., Hackenberger, A., Harter, A., Potrafke, N., & Schoors, K. (2023). Crisis experience and the deep roots of COVID-19 vaccination preferences. European Economic Review, 160, Article 104607. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2023 N1 - Shelf mark: 2025D011; 2025D011+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Minetto, Francesca T1 - Shaping Brussels from the outside in: The role of international institutions in EU policymaking N2 - As global governance becomes increasingly complex, interconnected, and contested, this dissertation examines a dimension that remains largely overlooked: the relevance of international institutions on the EU’s legal order. While the EU’s role as an international actor and exporter of norms has received significant scholarly attention, far less is known about how this outward engagement generates feedback effects that shape policymaking within the Union itself. This dissertation shifts the focus from the well-established image of the EU as a global rule-shaper toward a more reciprocal and layered understanding of its embeddedness in international institutional structures. My research foregrounds the EU’s role as a recipient of external policies, standards, and forms of expertise—raising new questions about the implications of this embeddedness for the EU legal order and its internal policymaking dynamics. Theoretically, the dissertation focuses on international institutions as epistemic authorities and standard-setters that feature in EU policymaking and its legislative processes. I draw on insights from policy diffusion, epistemic communities, EU external governance and EU actorness to advance a relational understanding of how external frameworks become internalised in the EU legislative process. Empirically, the dissertation makes three key contributions. First, it demonstrates through large-scale citation analysis that international institutions consistently function as evidence providers in EU policy documents, and that their inputs are not sporadic or symbolic but structurally embedded within EU knowledge practices. Second, it introduces the EUxII database—an original dataset covering over 1,400 legislative files—that enables the systematic mapping of international institutional presence across EU lawmaking. Third, it shows that nearly one in four legislative proposals reflects substantive policy import, meaning external policies stemming from international institutions are incorporated into EU legal texts. The findings reveal clear patterns in when and how policy import occurs: legislative proposals are more likely to draw on external models under conditions of institutional expansion, global alignment pressure, or heightened uncertainty. These dynamics challenge conventional accounts of EU actorness and policy diffusion by demonstrating that the EU is not only a source of global governance innovation but also a structured recipient of transnational expertise. By tracing this underexplored “outside-in” dynamic, my dissertation contributes to broader debates in European integration, EU actorness, inter-organisational influence and policy diffusion. It offers a data-rich, theoretically grounded account of how international institutions shape the EU’s legislative output, and in doing so, repositions the EU as a polity co constituted by its global institutional environment. In a context of contested multilateralism, this entanglement is both functionally significant and normatively consequential. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 10/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-60004 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-6000 N1 - Parts of the dissertation have been published. Paper 3: Minetto, F. (2025). Does the EU ever import its policies? The overlooked role of international institutions. Journal of European Public Policy, 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2025.2570885 N1 - Shelf mark: 2025D010; 2025D010+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Molina, Stefania T1 - The influence of family dynamics on the well-being of adults and children N2 - This cumulative dissertation examines how family dynamics—such as union dissolution, cohabitation, and repartnering—shape the well-being of adults and children in Germany and Colombia. It situates these family changes within broader social transformations across Europe and Latin America, emphasizing how socioeconomic inequality, gender norms, and cultural contexts influence diverse family structures. A distinctive contribution lies in integrating partnership quality and intimate partner violence (IPV) as key dimensions linking family dynamics to individual and child well-being. Drawing on both cross-sectional and longitudinal data, the dissertation presents five empirical analyses. The first study investigates how mothers’ partnership status and experiences of physical IPV during pregnancy are related to infant health in Colombia. Using data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), it finds that cohabiting and separated mothers face higher IPV risks, highlighting IPV as a critical determinant of family and child outcomes. The second study examines women’s economic independence and the risk of IPV during separation in Germany, using data from the German Family Panel (pairfam). Results show that employment and higher education reduce IPV risk, while women with minor children remain particularly vulnerable. The third study employs an intersectional approach to analyse divorce and mental health in Germany. Results show that women are more likely than men to receive a mental health diagnosis following divorce, especially at older ages, and that low income increases the likelihood of mental illness for both men and women. The fourth study explores how partnership quality and separation relate to parental mental health, showing that separation can relieve depression for those leaving low-quality partnerships but may exacerbate it for fathers exiting high-quality ones. The fifth study assesses how family structure and parental partnership quality affect children’s socio-emotional well-being, finding that children in stepfamilies report greater difficulties, although higher parental esteem mitigates some negative effects. Together, these findings underscore the complex interplay between family structures, partnership quality, and well-being. The dissertation calls for policies that promote gender equality, prevent IPV, and support families through transitions to enhance both adult and child well-being. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 09/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-59685 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5968 N1 - Parts of the dissertation have been published: Chapter 2 Molina, S. (2025). Unmarried motherhood and infant health: The role of intimate partner violence in Colombia. Demographic Research, 52, 141–178. https://doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2025.52.6 Chapter 3 Molina, S., Wagner, L., & Kreyenfeld, M. (2025). Women’s economic independence and physical intimate partner violence (IPV) during separation. PLOS ONE, 20(6), e0326529. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0326529 Chapter 4 Molina, S., Alonso-Perez, E., & Kreyenfeld, M. (2025). Divorce and Mental Health: Is Late Divorce Particularly Harmful for Women with Low Earnings? Social Indicators Research. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-025-03721-8 N1 - Shelf mark: 2025D009; 2025D009+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Koranyi, Kinga T1 - The Power of the Weak: Strategic Framing and Selective Compliance in Asymmetric Redistributive Negotiations N2 - This dissertation investigates how weaker actors navigate power asymmetries in political negotiations, challenging conventional expectations that material capabilities determine outcomes. Through three interconnected studies examining different contexts of asymmetric bargaining, I demonstrate how seemingly disadvantaged actors employ sophisticated strategies to secure outcomes that defy power-based predictions. The first paper reveals how fiscally weaker Canadian provinces enhanced their bargaining positions in redistribution negotiations through strategic framing, employing communitarian appeals and coercive tactics despite structural disadvantages. The second paper examines Hungary’s selective compliance with unprecedented EU rule of law sanctions, demonstrating how the government conducted sophisticated cost-benefit analyses balancing economic impacts against political costs. The third paper uncovers Hungary’s dual-level communication strategy toward EU sanctions, revealing stark contrasts between public rhetoric and private negotiation approaches. Together, these studies advance a more nuanced understanding of bargaining power that extends beyond material capabilities to encompass strategic dimensions. Weaker actors systematically enhance their positions through strategic framing, which shapes how negotiations are perceived across multiple audiences, and strategic cost calculations, which identify areas for selective engagement to maximize leverage while minimizing disadvantages. The findings reveal how seemingly disadvantaged actors transform structural weaknesses into bargaining advantages through sophisticated negotiation approaches. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 08/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-59514 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5951 N1 - Parts of the dissertation have been published: Chapter 2 Koranyi, K. (2025). Power of the weak? Framing strategies in fiscal redistribution negotiations. Regional & Federal Studies, 35(4), 511–536. https://doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2023.2295407 Chapter 3 Koranyi, K. (2025). The limits of EU rule of law financial sanctions: How economic and political costs shaped Hungary’s selective compliance strategy. Journal of European Public Policy. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2025.2553752 N1 - Shelf mark: 2025D008; 2025D008+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Finnerty, Joseph T1 - Article 18 of the European Convention on Human Rights: A Conservative Contribution to Responding to Authoritarian Practices through International Human Rights Law N2 - Combining dogmatic legal doctrinal and quasi-critical approaches, this dissertation investigates the role that Article 18 of the European Convention on Human Rights has played in the European Court of Human Rights’ response to authoritarian practices across the Member States of the Council of Europe. Through its examination of 121 Article 18 judgments, the dissertation maintains that the provision has an important role to play in the Court’s response to authoritarian practices. It employs a three-dimensional analytical framework to constructively critique the Article 18 case law in the context of autocratisation across three papers. This framework encompasses the following dimensions of the doctrine: (1) substantive interpretation of Article 18 by the Court (interpretation); (2) the evidentiary approach employed by the Court to determine the existence of ulterior authoritarian purposes under Article 18 (evidence and proof); and (3) the remedies that flow from the identification of ulterior authoritarian purposes under Article 18 (remedies). Each dimension of analysis enables the dissertation to delineate a limiting force, restricting the potential of Article 18 as an effective response mechanism to authoritarian practices. The dissertation further articulates normative recommendations to mitigate or remove these limitations and unlock the full potential of Article 18 in the context of autocratisation. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 07/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-59092 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5909 N1 - Parts of this dissertation have been published: Ch. 2 Finnerty, J., & Çalı, B. (2025). The Travaux Préparatoires and Progressive Treaty Interpretation: Article 18 of the European Convention on Human Rights. European Journal of International Law, chaf029. https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chaf029 Ch. 3 Finnerty, J. (2023). When is a State’s ‘Hidden Agenda’ Proven? The Role of the Merabishvili’s Three-Legged Evidentiary Test in the Article 18 Strasbourg Case Law. European Convention on Human Rights Law Review, 4(4), 447-472. https://doi.org/10.1163/26663236-bja10077 Ch. 4 Finnerty, J. (2024). How Should the European Court of Human Rights Remedy Violations of Article 18 echr? The Case for Remedial Realignment. European Convention on Human Rights Law Review, 5(3), 380-399. https://doi.org/10.1163/26663236-bja10100 N1 - Shelf mark: 2025D007; 2025D007+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Hansum, Romy T1 - Implementation of cohesion policy funds in the EU member states – who gets what, when and how? N2 - This cumulative dissertation investigates which driving forces shape the national distribution of EU cohesion policy funds. Despite the important role that distributive policies play in the EU’s governance framework, drivers beyond administrative and government capacity have been neglected in previous EU implementation research. Consequently, this dissertation aims to contribute to a more detailed understanding of the national implementation phase of EU funds. Adopting a political science perspective, three concepts are tested for EU distributive policies that have so far been primarily applied to domestic funds, namely vote-buying strategies, policy continuity, and non-demand. The three separate analyses explore on the distribution of cohesion policy funds across regions, budgetary priorities, and beneficiaries. Cohesion policy funds are chosen as a relevant and appropriate case due to their important financial volume, their long-standing implementation in all member states, and their interesting variance in implementation during the Covid-19 pandemic. The dissertation draws on qualitative and quantitative methods, spanning from interviews conducted in one region to statistical analyses including all EU member states. The findings are threefold. First, the analysis shows that vote-buying strategies do not explain the allocation of cohesion policy funds across EU regions. Despite the extraordinary discretion of the national governments in the studied Covid-19 recovery programme REACT-EU, electorally opportune regions are not targeted with these cohesion policy funds. Second, policy continuity characterizes the budgetary choices of national governments during the implementation phase. Even though the national political and socioeconomic context changes, national governments largely adhere to past budgetary priorities. Third, a lack of applications from potential beneficiary organisations can be a challenge despite adequate administrative capacity. Non-demand mainly results from unawareness of the offers, a too high administrative burden, and a low need for additional funding. In brief, the findings indicate that even with adequate government and administrative capacities, inherent processes and third parties have a larger impact on the distribution of EU funds than deliberate political actions and strategies. The results of the dissertation provide avenues for future EU implementation research but are also of interest for reforms of the cohesion policy funds and the development of new EU distributive policies. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 06/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-58950 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5895 N1 - Parts of the dissertation have been published: Chapter 2: Hansum, R. (2025). The Role of Electoral Interests in the National Distribution of EU Covid‐19 Funds. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 63(4), 1027–1051. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13711 Chapter 3: Hansum, R. (2025). Continuity amid change: Explaining budgetary choices in the national implementation of EU cohesion policy funds. European Union Politics, 14651165251365553. https://doi.org/10.1177/14651165251365553 Chapter 4: Hansum, R. (2025). 'Why organizations leave money on the table: explaining non-demand for EU funds'. Regional & Federal Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2025.2485052 N1 - Shelf mark: 2025D006; 2025D006+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Garten, Felix T1 - Hierarchical Networks in Finance and Trade: How Do Digital Platforms Shape Foreign Markets? N2 - The digital economy has reached a point where the globalization of trade and finance is increasing, rather than decreasing, power structures between states, as complex interdependence theory suggests. In this cumulative dissertation, I shed more light on digital platforms that have built infrastructures and act as intermediaries between states. I define these platforms as hierarchical networks because they build power structures between states that shape foreign markets. To understand the underlying mechanism, I provide answers to the guiding research question: How do hierarchical networks of digital platforms shape foreign markets? Using a unique network structure approach, I explore new angles in the political economy and international relations literature. I develop four theoretical types that describe varying degrees of market power shaped by economic dependence and the regulatory environment. To further understand the conditions, I use these theoretical types to select suitable cases for the analysis of hierarchical networks. In chapter 2, Nora Kurzdorfer and I show that the EU is an example of the Autonomous Sphere. The EU has a strong regulatory framework that limits the spread of digital hierarchical networks. In chapter 3, I show that Malaysia and Singapore are examples of the Center-Controlled Sphere, where China’s hierarchical network shapes the markets according to the interests of the Chinese government. In chapter 4, I show how countries that are part of the Sovereigntist Sphere, can use the nature of hierarchical networks to shield against Chinese or US-American payment platforms that countries economically depend on. In this dissertation, I use a mixed methods approach. In chapter 2, Nora Kurzdorfer and I build a theoretical framework guiding a case study that explores both quantitative and qualitative data on the eWTP Belgium. In chapters 3 and 4, I use comparative studies to analyze semi-structured interviews and several background conversations with policy makers, regulators and business experts working in the FinTech sector in India, Malaysia and Singapore. I show that hierarchical networks of digital platforms in finance and trade build new market infrastructures that either create dependencies or that shield from dependencies on US-American or Chinese networks. These networks therefore align with the existing order or build an alternative order. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 05/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-58060 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5806 N1 - Shelf mark: 2025D005; 2025D005+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Simstich, Anna T1 - Ministerial policy autonomy in executive policy formulation N2 - Bureaucratic influence on public policies is both necessary and potentially problematic for democratic governance. However, surprisingly little is known about how ministerial bureaucracies exercise their policy autonomy (or influence potential) in executive policymaking. This dissertation investigates under what conditions policy bureaucracies have high policy autonomy in policy formulation. It focuses on the role of lead ministerial departments in policy formulation in parliamentary democracies. From an organizational perspective and in a case-oriented research design, it analyzes two dimensions of ministerial policy autonomy: 1. Under what conditions lead ministries successfully realize their policy preferences in policy proposals and 2. under what conditions these ministerial policy proposals prevail throughout executive coordination. Based on comparative case studies on the design of a technical, low-salience waste policy provision in the French and German environment ministries, this study finds that ministerial drafts do not always reflect the policy position of the lead ministry. Instead, the realization of ministerial policy positions in ministerial drafts depends on their ability to mobilize political support or expertise in favor of their policy proposal. They do so based on their organizational interests in anticipation of opposition from political executives and stakeholders. Second, based on a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of German policy proposals, this dissertation finds that technical and low-salience ministerial policy proposals tend to prevail throughout executive coordination. In contrast, coalition partners hold each other to account in executive coordination on politically salient cross-cutting reforms leading to major edits of ministerial drafts. Overall, the findings indicate a surprisingly moderate ministerial policy autonomy in consensual parliamentary systems of government. The relative policy autonomy of the policy bureaucracy and political executives over policy proposals depends on the type of policy, i.e. their complexity, political salience to the coalition government, and alignment with bureaucratic interests. This points to a functioning democratic control of ministerial bureaucracies in policy formulation. Further research is needed, however, to better understand the substantive policy preferences of policy bureaucracies, how they exercise their organizational role of balancing political preferences, stakeholder interests, and professional expertise and how the organizational structure, politicization and civil service systems of ministerial bureaucracies affect ministerial policy autonomy in practice. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 04/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-57630 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5763 N1 - Shelf mark: 2025D004; 2025D004+1 N1 - List of publications: Simstich, A. (2025). Bureaucratic politics in customized implementation of the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive in France and Germany. Journal of Public Policy, 1–25. doi:10.1017/S0143814X2500011X ER - TY - THES A1 - Goedeking, Matthias T1 - Weak Ties, Strong Threats? Building and Undermining Inter-Ethnic Coalitions in Civil Wars N2 - This dissertation examines how ethnic groups cooperate against the state in civil wars and how the state strategically responds to this threat of multi-ethnic rebellion. Through three papers, I demonstrate that, first, ethnic groups frequently form coalitions in civil wars when structural conditions facilitate trust-building; second, states preemptively co-opt small ethnic groups when they could serve as bridges between potential challenger groups; and third, governments strategically direct economic investments toward excluded groups that occupy central positions in ethnic networks to prevent conflict diffusion. Leveraging group-level data on ethnic power relations, settlement patterns, and economic development at a global scale, I show that rather than being isolated actors, ethnic groups exist in networks of ties that shape both their ability to become part of threatening inter-ethnic rebellions and state responses to this threat. The findings contribute to our understanding of ethnic politics by highlighting the role of inter-ethnic relations in driving minority group behavior and ethnic politics. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 03/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-57464 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5746 N1 - Shelf mark: 2025D003; 2025D003+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Michel, Cynthia L. T1 - Social policy expansion in Latin America amidst limited capacities N2 - . T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 01/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-56813 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5681 N1 - The following paper has been published: III. Unraveling How Intermediary-Beneficiary Interaction Shapes Policy Expansion: The case of Paid Domestic Workers in Mexico • Published as: Michel, C. L. (2024). Unraveling how intermediary-beneficiary interaction shapes policy implementation. Regulation & Governance. https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12592 N1 - shelfmark: 2025D001 + 2025D001+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Kürzdörfer, Nora Marie T1 - The End of the Golden Weather? — Addressing the Geoeconomic Shift in Global Trade Governance N2 - . T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 13/2024 Y1 - 2024 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-56588 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5658 N1 - shelfmark: 2024D013 + 2024D013+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Arend, Tom T1 - Voting With Your Wallet? Essays on Accountability and the Economic Vote N2 - . T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 12/2024 Y1 - 2024 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-56114 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5611 N1 - shelfmark: 2024D012 + 2024D012+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Frank, Emily T1 - Bureaucracy as Borders: Refugees’ Experiences of Citizenship at Government Offices N2 - . T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 11/2024 Y1 - 2024 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-56104 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5610 N1 - shelfmark: 2024D011 + 2024D011+1 N1 - A part of this dissertation has been published: Chapter 2 Frank, E. (2025). “Why It’s Different?”: Hierarchies of (Non-) Belonging in German Refugee Categorizations. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2025.2529497 ER - TY - THES A1 - Ramos, Vincent Jerald R. T1 - Essays on the Causes and Demographic Consequences of Employment Uncertainty N2 - . T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 10/2024 Y1 - 2024 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-55990 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5599 N1 - Parts of the dissertation have been published. Chapter 2: Ramos, V. J. (2024). Extreme Lockdowns and the Gendered Informalization of Employment: Evidence from the Philippines. Work, Employment and Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170241247121 Chapter 4: This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review (when applicable) and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use (https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-science/policies/accepted-manuscript-terms), but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-023-09656-5 Kreyenfeld, M., Konietzka, D., Lambert, P., & Ramos, V. J. (2023). Second Birth Fertility in Germany: Social Class, Gender, and the Role of Economic Uncertainty. European Journal of Population, 39(1), 5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-023-09656-5 N1 - shelfmark: 2024D010 + 2024D010+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Naujoks, Tabea T1 - The division of labor in couples with children: A dyadic analysis in the German context N2 - This cumulative dissertation examines how couples with children in Germany divide paid and unpaid work and identifies several factors related to a more egalitarian division of labor. In the first paper, I focus on the division of paid work in couples with children, comparing female same-sex and different-sex couples, which constitutes an empirical novelty. Discussing the applicability of division of labor theories to same-sex couples, I further exploit the historically shaped gender culture of East and West Germany. Based on the German Microcensus (2010-2019) and using pooled OLS regressions, I show that female same-sex couples divide paid work more equally than different-sex couples. Comparing East and West Germany, I find a similarly equal division of paid work among same-sex and different-sex couples in the East, while different-sex couples in the West specialize more. The analysis highlights the importance of the cultural context and normative explanations of the division of labor. The second paper turns to childcare, the intersection of the paid working life with the father’s contribution to childcare being a key concern of researchers and policymakers. The COVID-19 pandemic and the short-time work scheme provided a “natural experiment” for investigating this nexus. Based on IAB-HOPP data and multinomial logistic regressions, we show that fathers in short-time work take over more care responsibilities than fathers continuously employed with regular working 1 hours. The findings indicate that policies targeting men’s working hours can affect the gendered distribution of childcare within couples. The third paper focuses on the methodological problem of analyzing the division of unpaid work in couples often from one partner’s perspective only. Therefore, I examine the determinants of ‘perception gaps’ (defined as the mismatches between partners’ responses). Based on pairfam data, I analyze respondents’ reports on housework and childcare during the transition to first parenthood and show that a substantial perception gap exists, with 30% regarding housework and 25% concerning childcare. Results of the logistic regressions indicate that perception gaps are lowest among couples where the woman is employed or highly educated. These findings clearly underline the importance of a dyadic perspective on the division of labor in couples. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 09/2024 Y1 - 2024 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-55381 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5538 N1 - Part of this dissertation has been published: Chapter 3 Journal article: Naujoks, T., Kreyenfeld, M., & Dummert, S. (2022). The division of child care during the coronavirus crisis in Germany: How did short-time work affect fathers’ engagement? Journal of Family Research, 34(1), 67-98. https://doi.org/10.20377/jfr-717 Pre-print: Naujoks, T., Kreyenfeld, M., & Dummert, S. (2021). The Coronavirus Crisis, Fathers’ Short-Time Work, and the Division of Child Care in Couples. Working Paper. Hertie School. https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3870 Chapter 4 Naujoks, T. (2024). The division of housework and childcare from a dyadic perspective: Discrepancies between partners’ reports across the transition to parenthood. Demographic Research, 51, 927–964. https://doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2024.51.30 N1 - shelf mark: 2024D009 + 2024D009+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Auz, Juan T1 - Dissecting the Inter-American Human Rights System in the Age of Climate Change N2 - This dissertation examines, from a socio-legal approach, the implications of the climate crisis on the adjudicative functions of the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS). In particular, it focuses on three general aspects of the adjudicative building blocks: access to the climate litigation process, interpretation of the relevant legal norms, and the design and impact of the remedies awarded. To that end, this dissertation comprises six papers addressing one or more of said general aspects. The first paper is about accessing the phenomenon of climate litigation itself. Mapping the legal opportunity structures of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) reveals how human rights-based climate litigation is developing. The multiplication of cases and the inchoate successes are partly explained by the IAHRS’s legal standards in the applicant’s arguments. However, it contrasts such development by laying bare potential barriers arising from the region’s extractivist economies and hyper-presidential constitutional designs. The second and third papers situate the IAHRS in the scholarly descriptions of international human rights and environmental law. It argues that the IAHRS is a relatively progressive space for protecting human rights because of its constant interaction with marginalised communities in LAC. The resultant interpretation of human rights can be crucial in a climate litigation case in the IAHRS. However, filling in the details for the content of the right to a healthy environment and extraterritorial obligations is still pending. The fourth, fifth and sixth papers discuss the tensions between climate litigation and justice in Global South jurisdictions, such as LAC. They explore why climate justice dimensions might be at odds with the results of a successful climate ruling that orders a State to remedy a plaintiff when such a State did not contribute meaningfully to generating and perpetuating the climate crisis in the first place. This tension is transposed to the IAHRS while adding the difficulty of non-compliance with systemic remedial orders. The papers explore how the organs of the IAHRS could address these tensions and reimagine remedies for the climate crisis. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 08/2024 Y1 - 2024 N1 - List of publications: Auz, J. (2022). Human rights-based climate litigation: A Latin American cartography. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2022.01.05 Auz, J. (2021). Situating the Inter-American Human Rights System in the Oscillation of International Law. Journal of Law and Political Economy, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.5070/LP62155395 Auz, J. (2021). ‘So, This Is Permanence’: The Inter-American Human Rights System as a Liminal Space for Climate Justice. Melbourne Journal of International Law, 22(2). https://law.unimelb.edu.au/mjil/issues/issue-archive/volume-222-2021 Auz, J. (2022). Two Reputed Allies: Reconciling Climate Justice and Litigation in the Global South. In C. Rodríguez-Garavito (Ed.), Litigating the Climate Emergency (pp. 145–156). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009106214.009 Auz, J. (2024). The Political Ecology of Climate Remedies in Latin America and the Caribbean: Comparing Compliance between National and Inter-American Litigation. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 16(1), 182–207. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huad057 Auz, J. (2023). Climate Crisis and the Testing of International Human Rights Remedies: Forecasting the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In S. Maljean-Dubois & J. Peel (Eds.), Climate Change and the Testing of International Law / Le droit international au défi des changements climatiques. The Centre for Studies and Research in International Law and International Relations. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/1875-8096_pplcdu_A9789004682399_13 N1 - shelf mark: 2024D008 + 2024D008+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Daub, Sara T1 - External Diaspora Sponsorship to Rebel Organizations. Causes and Consequences N2 - While intrastate conflicts remain the dominant form of armed conflict and migration receives increasing attention, the international dimension of civil wars, particularly non-state sponsorship, has largely been overlooked. This dissertation examines the phenomenon of diasporas as external sponsors in intrastate conflicts. It investigates: (1) Why do diasporas support rebel organizations? (2) Under what conditions is diaspora support more or less likely? (3) How does diaspora sponsorship of rebel organizations impact civilian victimization and rebel governance? To understand the logic of diaspora support, I employ a principal-agent framework. Conflict, rebel group, diaspora, and homeland characteristics are determinants of diaspora sponsorship. I argue that diasporas aim for kin support and changes in the homeland and consequently prefer limited violence against civilians and co-ethnic civilians. Diasporas benefit from delegating the task of combat and limited civilian victimization but risk agency slack. Concurrently, the rebel organization gains additional resources but loses autonomy. I introduce an information-sharing mechanism between co-ethnics in the conflict zone and the diaspora, which enhances the monitoring capability of the diaspora. I employ a mixed-methods approach to answer the research questions. Interviews conducted in the Washington DC area with members of various diasporas and experts provide evidence for the information-sharing between the diaspora and co-ethnics. I produced a unique data set on diaspora support for African and Asian intrastate conflicts between 1989 and 2014. Findings from multiple large-N analyses, utilizing extreme bounds analysis, logistic regression, and negative binomial analyses, serve as the empirical base for examining the causes and consequences of diaspora sponsorship to rebel organizations. I demonstrate that conflict and rebel group characteristics are strong determinants of diaspora sponsorship, while homeland and diaspora characteristics yield mixed results. Diaspora support significantly reduces the number of civilian killings. The impacts on ethnic violence and rebel governance are heterogeneous. Overall, this dissertation enriches our understanding of diasporas’ roles as external actors in conflict dynamics and as non-state sponsors for rebel organizations. It opens further avenues for researching civilian-rebel relationships and host country-homeland dynamics. Policy discussions may follow around monitoring of sponsorship activities and the responsibilities of host countries. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 07/2024 Y1 - 2024 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-54847 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5484 N1 - Shelf mark: 2024D007 + 2024D007+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Lohse, Anna Prisca T1 - Higher Education in an Age of Disruption: Comparing European Internationalisation Policies N2 - This book investigates European higher education internationalisation policies during a period marked by extreme upheaval due to Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. Situating her analysis at the intersection of higher education research and policy studies, the author combines historical and sociological institutionalism to investigate how this time of disruption impacted higher education policies in England, France and Germany. Based on extensive qualitative data derived from expert interviews and document analysis, the study offers timely insights into dynamics of institutional change and stability in higher education governance, as well as implications for the future of cross-border education and internationalisation. The book will appeal to academics and students interested in education policy and the internationalisation of higher education. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 06/2024 Y1 - 2024 SN - 9783031579110 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57912-7 PB - Palgrave Macmillan CY - Cham ER - TY - THES A1 - Jerg, Lukas T1 - New forms of economic risk and political attitudes: Analyzing the influence of technological change and financialization in housing on political attitudes. Examining the effect of personality on the prevalence and persistence of atypical employment. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 05/2024 Y1 - 2024 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-53927 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5392 N1 - Shelf mark: 2024D005 + 2024D005+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Sorg, Alexander T1 - Understanding Foreign Deployed Nuclear Weapons N2 - This dissertation delves into the complex dynamics of U.S. nuclear weapon deployments. Scholarly work on nuclear weapons has predominantly focused on strategic forces. However, many escalation scenarios foresee the use of tactical nuclear weapons as a precursor, which could eventually lead to an all-out nuclear war. These are exactly the weapons that the United States has deployed across the world, and we know little about their strategic causes and consequences. My study addresses this gap in the literature. The first part of this dissertation investigates the causes of U.S. nuclear weapon deployments. It emphasizes the importance of assurance, which has commonly been neglected or subsumed under non-proliferation. Through a comprehensive conceptualization, I distinguish assurance from other strategies of interstate interaction, explaining how the U.S. uses nuclear weapon deployments to assure allies and maintain its sphere of influence. Utilizing an original dataset, I find evidence that largely confirms my assurance hypotheses. With regard to alternative explanations, the power projection hypotheses are supported, but the extended deterrence hypotheses are not. These results contribute to the underdeveloped literature on assurance and provide valuable insights into the strategic considerations underlying U.S. nuclear weapon deployments. The second part, which is co-authored with Julian Wucherpfennig, examines the consequences of U.S. military deployments, both conventional and nuclear. The theory of free-riding in military alliances postulates that member states piggyback on security commitments by guardian states. We argue that free-riding critically implies that foreign military deployments positively affect subjective feelings of security – in other words: that they assure. In contrast, if citizens hold skeptical views of the guardian or do not subscribe to the (extended) deterrence logic, they might experience an increase in threat perception. We investigate how foreign military deployments impact attitudes toward defense policies in host states through an observational data analysis and a survey experiment. While nuclear and conventional troop deployments decrease citizens’ subjective need for defense, they do not necessarily increase their sense of protection, challenging the logic of free-riding. Taken together, my findings suggest a mismatch between objectives and outcomes. While I find evidence that nuclear weapons are deployed to assure allies, this aim does not appear to be effective at the micro-level. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 04/2024 Y1 - 2024 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-50862 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5086 N1 - Shelf mark: 2024D004 + 2024D004+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Stoll, Julius T1 - Three Essays in Applied Microeconomics: A Microeconomic Study of Snacks, Beer, and Real Estate Agents N2 - This dissertation comprises three essays. Although their titles make clear their self-contained nature, all essays share a common motivation: to combine economic theory with modern tools of causal inference to understand applied problems. The first chapter studies honesty when the costs to behave honestly change. Using field data from a snack delivery company that employs an honesty payment system, the chapter presents an event study to analyze how price increases affect pay rates. The honesty payment system expects customers to pay a listed price for each consumed snack. This allows me to measure honesty with the pay rate that compares consumption to payments. The results, which draw on deliveries from several thousand firms, show that price increases that make honest behavior more costly cause more cheating. Price increases of 15% trigger a fall in pay rates of 11%. The second chapter studies a recent legal reform in Germany, which aims to lower commission rates of real estate agents by raising the cost salience of sellers. I find that the reform has backfired and real estate agents have exploited the transition to increase their commission rates. The findings document that in some regions real estate agents increase their commission by up to 2 percentage points, adding over e6,000 in transaction cost to the average home sale. As explicit collusion is unlikely in this setting, I argue that this arbitrary increase points to seller ignorance instead. To verify if and why sellers fail to induce price competition, I run a pre-registered survey experiment with 1,062 real estate agents. Although commission rates should be negotiated independently for each sale, the survey confirms that 85% of sellers do not attempt to negotiate lower commission rates. The randomized experimental questions suggest that real estate agents may cater to the low willingness of sellers to negotiate by providing misleading reference commission rates and shrouding the economic incidence for sellers. The third chapter is co-authored with Christian Traxler and Carsten Burhop and examines the causal effect of beer on crime based on unique panel data from Germany between 1882 and 1913. Using exogenous variation in the yield of spring barley, a key input in beer production, we identify a quantitatively and qualitatively significant effect of beer on violent crimes. This effect is mainly driven by a positive effect on assaults, where our findings suggest that a 1% increase in beer production raises assault rates by the same percentage. These findings are corroborated using a complementary empirical design that exploits a brewing tax reform in Prussia. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 03/2024 Y1 - 2024 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-53268 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5326 N1 - List of publications Stoll, J. (2022). The cost of honesty: Field evidence. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 101, 101943. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2022.101943 Stoll, J. (2023). How not to reduce commission rates of real estate agents: Evidence from Germany. Berlin School of Economics (Discussion Paper No. 26). https://doi.org/10.48462/OPUS4-5077 N1 - Shelf mark: 2024D003 + 2024D003+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Uttenthal, Maria T1 - Trust in democratic societies: A conceptual, methodological, and empirical contribution N2 - This thesis is a comprehensive study of trust. The study rests on the argument that all forms of trust stem from the same universal concept. Once trust has been defined at its core, the concept can be specified within a wide variety of contexts, such as trust in your friends and family, in your fellow citizens, or in different kinds of institutions within your country. Although trust is an increasingly popular topic within the social sciences, a lack of consensus on the true meaning of the concept remains. One the one hand, this can be attributed to diverging conceptualisations in a rich and multidisciplinary conceptual literature. On the other, to empirical studies where quantifiable measures do not spring from a clear conceptual account, but rather take survey responses directly at face value. Based on this fundamental issue, the overarching goal of my thesis is to bridge the gap between the conceptual and empirical literature. I achieve this goal with three contributions. Firstly, I conduct a conceptual analysis of trust, which results in a unifying conceptual framework. The framework acknowledges and combines different conceptual understandings from political science, psychology and sociology, thereby representing a move towards clearer consensus on the meaning of trust within the conceptual literature. Secondly, I develop a new measurement model for trust, which is directly rooted in the conceptual framework. The model reflects an alternative approach to empirical research, where quantitative measures of trust are derived from a conceptual argument on the appropriate structure and dimensionality. Thirdly, I identify a typology of citizens who trust in fundamentally different ways. The typology acts as a complementary perspective on the meaning of trust, studied from the viewpoint of citizens in a heterogeneous population. As a whole, I argue that the thesis represents a new approach to trust research, where conceptual and empirical methods are closely intertwined. In order to advance our understanding of this fundamentally important concept, it is crucial to bring the two strands of the literature closer together. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 02/2024 Y1 - 2024 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-52159 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5215 N1 - Shelf mark: 2024D002 + 2024D002+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Mones, Haytham T1 - Unveiling the Dynamics of Public Value Creation on Social Media: A New Zealand Perspective N2 - In the past decade, social media has revolutionized how governments create public value through online communication and collaboration with citizens. Despite this, academic literature still lacks a comprehensive understanding of how public value is disseminated via social media. This research delves into the process of public value creation on social media in New Zealand, a leading country in leveraging social media for government-to-citizen communication, particularly during crises. The study seeks to answer two questions about creating or eroding public value over social media. The first question investigates the socio-demographic factors correlating with citizens' varying perceptions of public value from social media adoption. The findings suggest that citizens with similar public value perceptions share common socio-demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, education, trust in government, platform usage, and following government accounts. The study also reveals differences in public value perceptions based on the platform type, with platforms like Twitter garnering more positive public value perceptions than Facebook. The second question examines how using social media in government can enhance or diminish public value perceptions among citizens. The research constructs a causal model where specific social media practices during peaceful and crisis times, along with the engagement of external stakeholders, lead to increased perceptions of public value creation. The study also uncovers two causal mechanisms for the erosion of public value. In the first model, government reactions to opposing opinions on social media, such as hiding or removing comments, result in low public value perceptions. The second model shows that over-posting or posting irrelevant information can reduce citizens’ trust in the government, limit government posts' reach, and lower public value perception. This research encourages future studies to replicate the experiment across various platforms and countries to better understand how public value can be created or eroded over social media. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 01/2024 Y1 - 2024 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-52099 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5209 N1 - Shelf mark: 2024D001 + 2024D001+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Lindemann, Korinna O. T1 - The Indelible Past: The Effects of Authoritarianism on Political Behaviour T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 11/2023 Y1 - 2023 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-51975 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5197 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D011 + 2023D011+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Nicolaides, Panayiotis T1 - Essays on the Economics of Taxation T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 10/2023 Y1 - 2023 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-51510 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5151 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D010 + 2023D010+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Sgarlato, Raffaele T1 - Weather-driven electricity systems T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 09/2023 Y1 - 2023 N1 - List of publications: Sgarlato, R., & Ziel, F. (2023). The role of weather predictions in electricity price forecasting beyond the day-ahead horizon. IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 38(3), 2500–2511. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPWRS.2022.3180119 Sgarlato, R. (2023). Statistical electricity price forecasting: A structural approach. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2306.14186 Tiedemann, S., Sgarlato, R., & Hirth, L. (2023). Price elasticity of electricity demand: Using instrumental variable regressions to address endogeneity and autocorrelation of high-frequency time series. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2306.12863 Ruhnau, O., Eicke, A., Sgarlato, R., Tröndle, T., & Hirth, L. (2022). Cost-potential curves of onshore wind energy: The role of disamenity costs. Environmental and Resource Economics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-022-00746-2 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D009 + 2023D009+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Oswald, Lisa T1 - Public Discourse in Online Environments. Contributions to description, measurement and communication behavior change in political online ecosystems N2 - The public discourse is an essential element of democracy. Today, political information consumption is largely mediated through digital technologies and important political discussions have moved to online platforms. This dissertation examines different elements and dynamics of the online public discourse within five research articles. First, a systematic review synthesizes evidence on the broader relationship between digital media and democracy, which highly depends on political context. While most beneficial effects of information access and political participation can be found in autocratic regimes and emerging democracies, there is more reason for concern in established democracies where negative effects on political trust, populism and polarization accumulate. Next, using digital trace data combined with survey data to zoom into the political information ecosystem in Germany, I find that it consists of far more than news media, but that in-depth political discussions also take place in seemingly unpolitical niches of the internet. While the user base of online public broadcasting consists of a comparably narrow audience, most citizens consume political content via mainstream information hubs that can provide a common basis for public discourse. The most predictive variable for selection into political information consumption is political knowledge, not partisanship. However, people who actively write comments online show more extreme political opinions, highlighting differences between active and passive political engagement online. This differential selection pattern is further mirrored in the final project, where high levels of social media activity also relate to stronger comment toxicity. An agenda to reduce online toxicity requires an efficient method to measure the quality of online discussions. Using discussion data from Reddit, I compare simple computational measures to manual content coding and find that an automated toxicity classifier combined with the length of comments corresponds to established indicators of deliberative quality. I then develop a preemptive strategy with the aim to reduce toxicity in political discussions among highly active social media users. Testing various behavioral interventions, I find that simple ‘nudges’ in the user interface do not reduce the toxicity of comments. However, mixed findings on a more complex ‘boosting’ intervention, explaining the role of empathy and perspective taking for political discussions, evince opportunities to open up online public discourse for those who may otherwise be silenced by high levels of toxicity. Especially when combined with established approaches of survey methodology and content analysis, computational social science commands many tools to map elements and dynamics of the online public discourse from a holistic perspective. This does not only bear potential to reconnect theoretical ideals of the public sphere with real life online, but it also enables the generation of evidence for policymakers and civil society to keep up with the pace of the fast moving target of digital media. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 08/2023 Y1 - 2023 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-50666 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5066 N1 - List of publications 1. Lorenz-Spreen, P., Oswald, L., Lewandowsky, S., & Hertwig, R. (2023). A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01460-1 2. Oswald, L. (2022). More than news! Mapping the deliberative potential of a political online ecosystem with digital trace data. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/68udg 3. Oswald, L., Munzert, S., Barberá, P., Guess, A., & Yang, J. (2022). Beyond the tip of the iceberg? Exploring characteristics of the online public with digital trace data. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/yfmzh 4. Oswald, L. (2022). Automating the analysis of online deliberation? A comparison of manual and computational measures applied to climate change discussions. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/qmzwx 5. Oswald, L. (2023). Effects of preemptive empathy interventions on reply toxicity among highly active social media users. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/evdxy N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D008 + 2023D008+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Brüggmann, Daniel T1 - Consequences of Divorce in Germany N2 - This cumulative dissertation investigates the economic consequences of divorce in Germany. It includes a general introduction (Chapter 1), three research papers (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) and one article that validates the data quality (Chapter 5). The analysis is based on register data from the statutory German pension fund. The data provide not only large sample sizes but also detailed earnings, employment and marital histories of the divorcees. On the basis of these data, the (causal) effects of divorce on employment, health and earnings are examined by relying on the propensity score framework. However, because propensity scores are sensible to the estimation strategy and the observed covariates, robustness checks with alternative estimation frameworks are also performed. Finally, to address the issue of hidden bias, estimated results are also challenged by sensitivity analyses. The results may be summarised as follows: Among other strategies, women can cope with economic strain connected with divorce by increasing their labor supply and/or by earning higher incomes (compared to their married counterparts). While the income effect is negligible, the employment effect is very pronounced. I find particularly strong negative employment effects with respect to marginal employment and strong positive effects with respect to regular employment. Furthermore, the lower the labour market attachment before separation, the more pronounced the employment effect. Aside from labour market outcomes, health (measured in days of work disability) also declined considerably around the time of separation. However, I demonstrate that a naïve descriptive investigation would overestimate the effect of divorce on health because there is substantial selection into divorce. Thus, poor health is not only a cause of divorce but also a pathway to divorce. Lastly, the data set allowed me to link former couples and examine their employment and earning trajectories across divorce. Results indicate that women’s earnings increased in the years around divorce, whereas their ex-partner’s earnings declined. Nevertheless, huge gender differences persist. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 07/2023 Y1 - 2023 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-50610 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5061 N1 - Parts of the dissertation have been published: Chapter 2: Women’s employment, income and divorce in West Germany: A causal approach. The version of record of this article, first published in Journal for Labour Market Research, is available online at Publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12651-020-00270-0 Brüggmann, D. (2020). Women’s employment, income and divorce in West Germany: A causal approach. Journal for Labour Market Research, 54(1), 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12651-020-00270-0 Chapter 3: Earnings Trajectories after Divorce: The Legacies of the Earner Model during Marriage. The version of record of this article, first published in Population Research and Policy Review, is available online at Publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-023-09756-4 Brüggmann, D., & Kreyenfeld, M. (2023). Earnings Trajectories After Divorce: The Legacies of the Earner Model During Marriage. Population Research and Policy Review, 42(2), 23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-023-09756-4 Chapter 4: Work disability and divorce. Published in: Brüggmann, D. (2020). Work Disability and Divorce. In M. Kreyenfeld & H. Trappe (Eds.), Parental Life Courses after Separation and Divorce in Europe (pp. 289–308). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44575-1_14 Chapter 5: Statutory Pension Insurance Accounts and divorce: A new scientific use file. The final publication is available at www.degruyter.com. Keck, W., Radenacker, A., Brüggmann, D., Kreyenfeld, M., & Mika, T. (2020). Statutory Pension Insurance Accounts and Divorce: A New Scientific Use File. Jahrbücher Für Nationalökonomie Und Statistik, 240(6), 825–835. https://doi.org/10.1515/jbnst-2019-0064 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D007 + 2023D007+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Darius, Philipp T1 - Are social media platforms accelerators of democratic fragmentation? An inquiry into the relationship of democratic fragmentation and social media platforms in three political arenas: political campaigns, protest movements and democratic institutions N2 - Whilst social media platforms provide global communication environments, these platforms are not primarily designed for political debates. This may have adverse effects on democracy and contribute to democratic fragmentation. This dissertation project investigates the role of social media platforms as potential accelerators of fragmentation in established democracies. The overarching question of this dissertation explores to what extent social media platforms may contribute to fragmentation that may result in the erosion of democracy. This dissertation comprises three articles focusing on three political arenas 1) political campaigns, 2) protest movements, and 3) democratic institutions. The first paper investigates the polarisation of online political behaviour on Twitter in democratic election campaigns. The analysis is based on Twitter data of German political parties and election hashtags during the final week of the 2017 and 2021 German Federal elections. The study’s findings suggest that the far-right party AfD seeks to polarise online discourse as a strategy and that far-right online partisans may influence the public reception of politicians and established parties. The second paper examines the formation of protest movements on Twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. The study monitors two established conspiracy narratives and their communities on Twitter, the anti-vaccination and anti-5G communities, before and during the first UK lockdown. The study finds that, despite content moderation efforts by Twitter, conspiracy groups were able to proliferate their messages and influence broader public discourses on Twitter, such as #Lockdown in the United Kingdom. The findings underline social platforms' potential for protest formation that can result in disinformed social movements. The third paper inspects social platform companies’ mimicking of democratic institutions like Meta’s oversight board for content decisions that may erode existing democratic institutions. The study traces the emergence of the supreme court metaphor for Meta’s oversight board and its use in the US News discourse. The findings emphasise how private organisations and the use of constitutional metaphors can erode the legitimacy of supreme courts and other democratic institutions. The dissertation’s findings imply that social media platforms, besides their democratically desirable function for democratic participation and deliberative potentials, contribute to democratic fragmentation in the inspected arenas of political campaigns, disinformed protest movements and democratic institutions. Thus, extended research data access is key to better understanding the social implications of social media platforms and finding adequate regulations of recommender systems, content moderation, and advertisement-based business models. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 06/2023 Y1 - 2023 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-50557 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5055 N1 - Parts of the dissertation have been published: Chapter 3: Darius P (2022) “Who Polarizes Twitter? Ideological Polarisation, Partisan Groups and Strategic Networked Campaigning on Twitter during the 2017 and 2021 German Federal Elections ‘Bundestagswahlen.’” Social Network Analysis and Mining 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-022-00958-w. The version of record of this article, first published in Social Network Analysis and Mining, is available online at the Publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-022-00958-w Chapter 4: Darius P, Urquhart M (2021) “Disinformed Social Movements: A Large-Scale Mapping of Conspiracy Narratives as Online Harms during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Online Social Networks and Media 26: 100174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.osnem.2021.100174 Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Chapter 5: Cowls J, Darius P, Santistevan D, Schramm M (2022) “Constitutional Metaphors: Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’ and the Legitimation of Platform Governance.” New Media & Society, April 5, 2022, 14614448221085560. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221085559 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D006 + 2023D006+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Schmauk, Sarah T1 - Divorce and economic wellbeing. A life course perspective on the interplay of work-family lives in West Germany and Sweden N2 - This cumulative dissertation investigates the relationship between divorce and economic wellbeing from a life course perspective in West Germany and Sweden. The analyses are based on large-scale register data from the German public pension and the Swedish population registers. The first paper studies mothers’ earnings trajectories from one year before their first childbirth until ten years after in both countries. Separation negatively affects mothers’ earnings trajectories in Sweden, while it positively affects them in West Germany. In Sweden, although the earnings of separated mothers lag behind those of partnered mothers, both groups can surpass their pre-birth earnings, which is not the case for either separated or partnered mothers from western Germany. The second paper investigates how divorce relates to retirement trajectories, defined as the monthly insurance history from age 50 to age 65 of women and men in West Germany. Divorcees are more likely than married to retire through unstable retirement trajectories characterised by receipt of reduced-earnings-capacity pensions and unemployment. Whereas the relationship between divorce and retirement trajectories seems to be overall adverse for men, it is more ambiguous for women. Some divorced women are also more likely than married women to retire through a stable high-income trajectory. The third paper compares the gendered consequences of divorce on public pension income in both countries. Divorced women from West Germany have significantly higher public pension incomes than married women. The German ‘divorce splitting’ mechanism increases women’s and decreases men’s pension incomes, which contributes to equalising their public pension incomes. In Sweden, women show comparable pension incomes across marital status, although divorced women have slightly lower pension incomes, while divorced men receive approximately 26 % less pension income than married men. The dissertation illustrates that family and work life are intertwined, that they unfold gradually across the life course, and that the welfare state context shapes the interrelation of divorce and economic wellbeing: The event of divorce (and separation) not only directly impacts employment biographies of mothers but is, in a long-term perspective, related to retirement trajectories of women and men and their public pension incomes. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 05/2023 Y1 - 2023 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-50499 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5049 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D005 + 2023D005+1 N1 - List of publications Schmauk, S., & Kridahl, L. (2024). Who receives most? Gendered consequences of divorce on public pension income in West Germany and Sweden. Ageing and Society, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X23000703 Schmauk, S. (2024). Pathways to retirement in West Germany: Does divorce matter? Advances in Life Course Research, 60, 100595. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alcr.2024.100595 Schmauk, S., & Nylin, A.-K. (2025). Mothers’ earnings trajectories in Sweden and West Germany: The role of separation, socioeconomic position, and the welfare state. Genus, 81(1), 28. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41118-025-00270-3 ER - TY - THES A1 - Rackwitz, Maike T1 - Understanding the causes, dynamics, and consequences of corporatization: An analysis of local government evidence in England and Germany N2 - This dissertation explores corporatization–the provision of public services by publicly-owned companies–as a specific public management reform that has strongly been endorsed in the last decades. However, despite the significance of corporatization in public administration and the controversy over its viability as a strategy for enhancing public service provision, there is limited empirical research on its trajectory and associated effects. This dissertation fills this important gap in the literature by examining the causes, dynamics, and consequences of corporatization. It challenges the claim that we are witnessing a resurgence of the state in recent years, resulting in a pendulum shift from the private to the public sector. A mixed-methods approach is employed to analyze three original datasets from English and German local government contexts. Theoretical perspectives rooted in rational choice are complemented by those accounting for irrational ambiguity to capture the unique ambidexterity of corporatization. After clarifying the theoretical background in Chapter 1, this exploration unfolds across three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 investigates what drives corporatization. It reveals that ownership structures in corporatization have become increasingly complex and political–rather than economic–incentives may explain shifts toward indirect municipal ownership. Chapter 3 examines what causes corporatization to reverse. It shows that a return of services to the core local government after a company closes is less likely than other forms of service provision, while the type of service is the factor that matters most for termination decisions. Chapter 4 analyzes how local governments experience and cope with reverse corporatization. Local governments and their employees evidently and mutually impact the return process, which can induce private sector-informed change within the bureaucracy, albeit with limited transformative power. Ultimately, this dissertation finds no clear evidence of a pendulum shift toward the local public sector. This conclusion follows from conceptual and empirical differentiation and depends on how corporatization is framed, as well as on the specific country, service type, and dimension of public influence considered. It also suggests that the notion of the pendulum shift needs reevaluation. For practitioners, this holds several implications that encourage optimism about reform, and advise against an arbitrary approach to diversifying costs. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 04/2023 Y1 - 2023 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-50441 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5044 N1 - Parts of the dissertation have been published: Chapter 3. Termination traits of local government corporatization This is an original manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Public Management Review on 26 April 2023, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2023.2204323 Rackwitz, M. (2023). Fraught with tension? A machine-learning approach to termination traits of public corporations in English and German local governments. Public Management Review, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2023.2204323 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D004 + 2023D004+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Abels, Christoph M. T1 - Tinker Tailor Soldier Lie. Investigating Intra- and Extra-Individual Factors of Susceptibility to False Information N2 - At least since the 2016 presidential elections in the United States and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, misinformation has gained increasing prominence in the public discourse. Only four years later, the COVID-19 pandemic emerged and was accompanied by an “Infodemic”, misleading individuals about the origin of the virus, its severity, and the intentions of governments coping with the virus. Misinformation was itself deemed a considerable threat to public health. Although COVID-19 misinformation was widely circulating at that time, and continues to do so, a substantial share of individuals did not believe this misleading information. That begs the question, why do people fall for misinformation? This question is at the heart of this dissertation project, which explores the role of social media, trust, and values in individuals’ susceptibility to false information. Through comparative research, the project investigates how these variables affect the reception of misinformation and attempts to combine multiple levels of analysis and consider different forms of misinformation. The core of this dissertation consists of three chapters, each of which addresses the research question from a different but complementary perspective. Chapter 2 provides the conceptual basis for the subsequent empirical chapters. The chapter investigates how individual, group, and system-level variables contribute to social media’s role as a vector for misinformation. In the third chapter, I employ an experimental research design to assess whether superficial characteristics of different social media platforms affect users’ credibility judgements regarding manufactured news. Contrary to existing literature, the experiment’s results suggest that social media platforms do not differ in their effects on perceived credibility of news. The fourth chapter builds on data from a multinational research project that explored the role of values during the COVID-19 pandemic and their impact on individuals’ propensity to believe in COVID-19-related conspiracy theories. Through a comparative design, using samples from Germany and Poland, the chapter finds considerable differences in the pattern of influential values and trust concepts on the adoption of conspiracy beliefs. Although the findings of this dissertation project come with limitations, the research nevertheless highlights the importance of comparative research designs in the study of misinformation. The dissertation concludes by discussing avenues for further research. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 03/2023 Y1 - 2023 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-50130 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5013 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D003 + 2023D003+1 ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Peitz, Laura Francesca T1 - The Dual Nature of Multilateral Development Banks: Balancing Development and Financial Logics N2 - This Element offers a novel, highly relevant perspective towards Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), which are development and financial organizations at the same time. Based on the elaborate institutional logics perspective borrowed from organizational sociology, it uncovers the complex trade-offs between financial and development pressures faced by MDBs and explains variation in organizational responses thereto across types of MDBs. The argument is tested with an original dataset using Data Envelopment Analysis to explain variation in response patterns across MDBs. The analysis shows that lending to the private sector as well as being predominantly owned by borrowing members increase MDBs' emphasis on the financial at the expense of the development nature. Thereby, this Element provides unique insights into MDBs' responses to their dual nature and significantly advances our understanding of MDB lending operations, drawing attention to the complexities involved in the unique MDB business model. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 02/2023 Y1 - 2023 SN - 9781009392303 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009392297 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D002 + 2023D002+1 PB - Cambridge University Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - THES A1 - Cova, Joshua T1 - The new political economy of wage formation: Party-political preferences, growth models and EU preferences N2 - Wage formation in Europe has undergone considerable changes over the past decades. In particular, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the Eurozone crisis have significantly accelerated and enhanced liberalization reforms in wage bargaining and industrial relations in several European countries. Moreover, decreasing collective bargaining coverage, lower union membership rates, weaker social actors and increasing low-wage employment have allowed the state to play an increasingly important role in the regulation and the stipulation of wage minima. The growing importance of governments in the political economy of wage formation is nowhere clearer to observe than in the politicization of statutory minimum wages: minimum wages have not only progressively become the ‘going rate’ for low-wage employment in a variety of countries displaying different political-economic characteristics, but have also featured prominently in electoral debates. Using state-of-the-art quantitative research methods, I examine this remarkable transition in Chapters 2-3 and provide empirical evidence contextualizing the transformation of Europe’s low-wage policy space. As it is also important to acknowledge the important role played by the EU institutions in structuring member states’ wage-setting systems, I examine in Chapter 4 the growing relevance of the new European economic governance in determining member states’ labour markets and wage bargaining mechanisms. This dissertation is composed of three single-authored chapters and is structured as follows: Chapter 1, serve as this thesis’ introduction. Here, I present the rationale for focusing on minimum wages and wage formation, I describe the main debates in the academic literature and lay out how the papers I have worked on contribute to the topics I address. This is followed by the presentation of the three chapters, which examine the topic of change in the political economy of wage formation and in particular of minimum wages over the last decades in Europe. Chapter 2 offers a first assessment of the political, economic and institutional determinants of minimum wage growth in Europe. By using quantitative text analysis and statistical methods, I show that the electoral salience of minimum wages has increased. Chapter 3 builds upon the increased politicization of minimum wages, which I find empirical evidence for in Chapter 2, by contextualizing the role of minimum wages in different European political economies. By building on new research in the field of European comparative political economy, which has focused on the drivers of aggregate demand, I examine the existence of long-term equilibria between minimum wage growth, taken as proxy for government-determined wage-led growth, and household consumption and exports. As the EU institutions have been found to be important actors in driving change in wage-setting mechanisms, I devote my final paper (Chapter 4) to an assessment of the wage bargaining preferences of the European Commission within the framework of the new European economic governance. In particular, I focus on the drivers of country-specific recommendations (CSRs) in wage bargaining. In this paper, I find that recommendations in the field of wage bargaining are mostly decoupled from time-varying economic indicators and are instead tied to country-specific institutional factors. Finally, I conclude by summarizing my results on change in the European low-wage policy space, my contributions to evolving and still far from resolved debates in the literature of the political economy of advanced European capitalist democracies’ wage formation and point to possible future avenues of research. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 01/2023 Y1 - 2023 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-47056 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4705 N1 - Shelf mark: 2023D001 + 2023D001+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Salazar Morales, Diego Alonso T1 - Patterns towards Effective Policy Implementation in Patrimonialist Bureaucracies N2 - This thesis seeks to respond to the central question of how successful public policies could be obtained in countries whose bureaucracies are predominantly considered as ‘patrimonialist’. To respond to this guiding question, and by departing from existing public administration on bureaucratic professionalism and policy effectiveness, I formulate that the different conjunction of institutional incentives, motivations and abilities of policy actors might structure varied patterns of effective policy delivery in patrimonialist contexts. Drawing on this framework, three arguments are advanced in this dissertation. First, I sustain that in patrimonialist bureaucracies, politicians have powered access to shape the inclusion and promotion of bureaucrats therefore being central for policy delivery. Second, I sustain that because politicians are central for policy delivery, I suggest that ‘reputation building’ underlies the production of effective policy outputs in patrimonialist bureaucracies. Yet, I also stress that this finding comes with the nuance that in patrimonialist settings politicians not only ‘deliver’, but also reconcile good performance in office with rent extraction. Finally, I also document how ‘politicians’ who acquire ‘expert knowledge’ of the administrative functions of their bureaucracies are endowed with unprecedented access to utilise their resources –hence strategically distributing them to aides and supporters, while sabotaging office when they know they will lose the ballots. Overall, my thesis also finds that tenure (prior office experience) mediates performance in office generally rendering seasoned politicians to be more strategic when it comes to extracting and distributing public goods –meaning that they are more careful in selecting and appointing loyal knowledgeable aides in key positions, manoeuvring key aspects of the bureaucracy especially those related to budgeting. Together, these findings configure three important patterns leading to successful policy delivery in contexts plagued with patronage dynamics: (i) that politicians’ positive perspectives of winning office underlie sound policy delivery, (ii) that older politicians tend to deliver better policies, but also are more detrimental to their country’s bureaucratic capacity, and (iii) that politicians’ who acquire ‘expert knowledge’ deliver better policies, but also extract more rents. Such patterns towards leading to implementation also have important repercussions to public administration and political science scholarship. My contributions are therefore threefold: (i) my thesis advances the comprehension of politicians’ careers and their effects on policy success; (ii) it also formulates novel theoretical frameworks to comprehend the role impact of patronage on policy success, and my thesis (iii) advances ‘expert knowledge utilisation’ theory by documenting the long-ignored functions and utilisation of ‘expert knowledge’ by incumbents in office, and how such usage, is mediated by their tenure. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 13/2022 Y1 - 2023 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-46545 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4654 N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D013 + 2022D013+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Khanna, Tarun T1 - Essays on the economics of energy systems transformation: incentives and policies N2 - This thesis discusses the role of the economic incentives and policies required to build energy systems that are compatible with achieving the goal of net-zero carbon emissions. I try to look beyond the techno-centric solutions that focus on new electricity generation technologies to explore how the way we consume and supply energy may be changed to facilitate the energy transition. The first paper of this cumulative thesis identifies packages of demand-side policy interventions in household energy consumption that can deliver an immediate reduction in carbon emissions. The second paper quantifies the relationship between electricity demand and prices in electricity markets using an instrumental variable approach. This relationship can provide the basis for designing policies that use electricity demand as a tool for integrating high shares of renewable energy in the power system. Following the theme of renewable energy integration, the third paper looks at the policies for influencing electricity demand from agricultural consumers in developing countries to increase the share of solar and wind while lowering the associated integration costs. And the last paper focuses on the need for policy instruments that determine the spatial allocation of renewable energy. The four papers together highlight that using the right economic incentives and policies, we can foster flexibility in both energy demand and supply that reduces the reliance on technological innovation and revolution for achieving the transformation to a low carbon energy system. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 12/2022 Y1 - 2022 N1 - List of publications Peer-reviewed 1. Khanna, T. M. Using agricultural demand for reducing costs of renewable energy integration in India. Energy 254, (2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2022.124385 2. Khanna, T. M. et al. A multi-country meta-analysis on the role of behavioural change in reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions in residential buildings. Nature Energy 6, 925–932 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-021-00866-x 3. Eicke, A., Khanna, T. & Hirth, L. Locational Investment Signals: How to Steer the Siting of New Generation Capacity in Power Systems? The Energy Journal 41, (2020). https://doi.org/10.5547/01956574.41.6.aeic Working papers 4. Hirth, L., Khanna, T. M. & Ruhnau, O. The (very) short-term price elasticity of German electricity demand. Econstor (2021). https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/249570. N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D012 + 2022D012+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Schöfer, Till T1 - Trading Places. Rethinking Trade Governance and the Status of Emerging Powers N2 - This dissertation examines recent contestation surrounding the status of emerging economies in international trade politics. In particular, it looks at the ways in which the rise of Brazil, India and China – the BICs – has shaped special rights for developing countries at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The primary focus of the thesis is the WTO’s principle of Special and Differential Treatment (SDT), which provides developing countries with exemptions from certain liberalization commitments, implementation flexibilities, and pledges of technical assistance. At the WTO, access to such special rights is based on individual members’ selfdeclaration as developing countries. However, as the BICs have risen, the ‘North’- ‘South’ binary that underpins SDT has become less clear. The continued use of a legal norm based on the strict bifurcation of WTO members into sets of developed and developing countries has thus been called into question, most notably by the United States. At the outset, the dissertation develops a conceptual framework for delineating the different ideal typical pathways along which special and differential treatment can develop. An overall process of fragmentation is then outlined, characterized by the unmaking of special rights for developing countries, in parallel to the resilience of differential treatment for the smaller sub-group of Least Developed Countries (LDCs). The thesis continues by examining the contestation at the heart of these processes more closely. In doing so, it sets up a novel theoretical framework to analyse the potential adaptation strategies that emerging economies can adopt in response to contestation of their special rights. Significant strategic variation amongst the BICs comes to the fore in a series of case studies, as well as two chapters on China’s strong defence of its developing country status and Brazil’s recalibration of its (previously held) Southern leadership role. The thesis closes with an in-depth case study of negotiations on intellectual property rights. While the divergence of emerging economy positions and the fragmentation of SDT have marked the WTO era, the final chapter shows that in areas where BICs unity is still possible – such as on LDC rights – normative erosion is slowed. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 11/2022 Y1 - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-45041 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4504 N1 - Parts of the dissertation have been published: Chapter Two: The Unmaking of the North-South Distinction in a Multipolar Era. • Published as Weinhardt, C. and Schöfer, T. (2021). ‘Differential Treatment for Developing Countries at the WTO: The Unmaking of the North-South Distinction in a Multipolar World’. Third World Quarterly 43:1, 74-93. Chapter Three: ‘Privileges’ of the Weak – Emerging Powers’ Pursuit of Special Rights for Developing Countries. • Published as Schöfer, T. and Weinhardt, C. (2022). ‘Developing Country Status at the WTO: Brazil, India and China’s Divergent Strategies.’ International Affairs 98:6. Chapter Five: From Southern Leader to Flexible Negotiator: New Directions in Brazilian Trade Policy. • Published as Schöfer T (2023). From Developing Country Leader to Flexible Negotiator: New Directions in Brazilian Trade Strategy. World Trade Review 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474745623000319 N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D011 + 2022D011+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Kleinaltenkamp, Moritz J. T1 - The Future Is Now: Non-Linear Temporality in Blockchain Organizing N2 - This cumulative dissertation advances management scholarship by studying the novel phenomenon of Blockchain organizing. Blockchain is an emerging technology that facilitates the maintenance of data across networks of computers, as opposed to more traditional central servers. These distributed data maintenance capabilities may have wide-ranging consequences. Ever since Blockchain’s inception in 2008, a discourse identifying this technology as an enabler of radically new and decentralized modes of collective and societal coordination has gained traction. “Blockchain organizing” refers to practices in which such Blockchain technology artefacts are being developed, implemented, and/or utilized by organizations. Studying these practices presents a unique opportunity to further management scholarship; particularly subjective time research following the neo-institutional tradition. Blockchain is not only an emerging technology associated with significant future expectations, but further a meta-organizational technology whose very raison d'être is the transformation of entrenched organizational structures. When organizational actors develop, implement, and/or utilize Blockchain technology, bureaucratic ways of organizing that have been established in the past and continue to be legitimized in the present may become reevaluated in light of bold visions for an organizational and societal future that looks radically different. The dissertation at hand utilizes this Blockchain context as an exemplary case to develop theory on how transformative future visions and expectations associated with emerging technologies may become instantiated within the present, and conceptualizes this phenomenon as “present-future convergence”. Developed based on a field-level pilot study that led to an 18-month ethnographic engagement with one Blockchain start-up, the three papers gathered in the dissertation utilize an interpretivist approach to explain how present-future convergence is rooted in conjoined processes of intra- and inter-subjective temporal experience. Furthermore, the papers highlight the counterintuitive consequences that present-future convergence may have for processes of technological, organizational, and societal change. In doing so, the dissertation opens promising research avenues at the intersection of temporality, performativity, and sociomateriality, and contributes to scholarly understanding of Blockchain organizing. Practically speaking, the dissertation helps answer the question of how actors may “pull” the future into the present to realize transformative future visions like those associated with emerging technologies. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 10/2022 Y1 - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-44986 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4498 N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D010 + 2022D010+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Samper Mejia, Cristina T1 - Employment Trajectories of Women with a Migration Background in Germany: A Life Course Perspective N2 - The aim of this dissertation is to study the employment behaviour of women with a migration background from a life course perspective. Data for the analyses come from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the German Microcensus. The first paper studies the entrance into employment of immigrant women who arrived in Germany while childless between 1990 and 2016. The main findings show that women who moved as marriage migrants were highly likely to have a child shortly after their arrival. Having a child before they enter the labour market strongly delays the participation of migrant women in remunerated work. In the German context, marriage migration is most common among women who are third country nationals, and have comparatively low levels of labour market capital upon arrival. The second paper studies the employment trajectories of women who immigrated from Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. By distinguishing the trajectories of women who came from similar female employment contexts, but who arrived through different migration channels (ethnic Germans vs. third country nationals), the paper sheds light on the selection mechanisms of the different legal entry modes, and the post-migration adaptation patterns associated with them. The third paper looks at the early life employment participation trajectories of women of the second migrant generation who were born in Germany. It shows that women who follow early family formation trajectories are also less likely to participate in the labour market early in life. Early family formation is found to be most common among second-generation migrant women with parents of Turkish origin. The three papers together illustrate the strong relationship between migrant women’s (non)-employment behaviour and the onset family formation. From a migration policy perspective, the findings show the selective effects of migration channels. From a social and labour market policy perspective, the results allude to the importance of childcare access, and the need for activation policies tailored to mothers with a migration background. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 09/2022 Y1 - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-44965 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4496 N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D009 + 2022D009+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Eicke, Anselm T1 - Regulation of the power sector in times of the Energy transition. Four contributions on price incentives reflecting the cost of the transmission system N2 - Governments use regulation to affect the behavior of market participants such that welfare is maximized. Good regulation in the electricity sector aims to achieve an affordable, sustainable, and secure supply of electricity. However, the energy transition fundamentally changes the way electrical energy is produced and consumed. Consequently, market rules and regulatory interventions need to be adjusted to cope with these new political targets, technological innovations, and societal trends. This cumulative dissertation contributes to the academic literature on regulatory incentives in the electricity sector with four scientific articles. At the core of this dissertation are incentives for participants of the electricity market that result from the market design and other regulatory interventions. I study how such incentives can be designed to minimize the cost of expanding and operating the transmission network. The transmission system is confronted with several new challenges resulting from the energy transition, including an increasing distance between generators and consumers, power flows that quickly change over time, and declining share of dispatchable generators that complicates frequency stability. The first three articles of this dissertation study incentives for market participants to account for the cost of operating and expanding the transmission network in their investment and dispatch decisions. The first article introduces a conceptual framework for categorizing and analyzing locational signals that result from the market design and from other regulatory interventions. It classifies, quantifies, and discusses locational instruments in twelve jurisdictions. It finds that all reviewed systems apply regulatory locational instruments, and many systems even combine multiple instruments. Only few instruments result in economic incentives that are strong enough to affect investment decisions. The second article focuses on one key market design: nodal pricing. It identifies and assesses the main arguments against the concept of nodal pricing based on the experience made in US power markets. It shows that most of the perceived drawbacks of the concept in the European debate are misconceived and can be sufficiently addressed as it is done in systems that already implemented a nodal market. The third article studies the long-run effects of optimal administratively determined locational signals. To do so, it introduces a complementary power market model. Applying the model to a sample case study reveals characteristics of such signals and highlights their potential welfare gains. The fourth article is dedicated to the balancing mechanism, which maintains the grid frequency by balancing the feed-in of electricity into the network and its withdrawal. This is another source of cost that arise in the transmission system. The article analyses the economic incentives resulting from the design of the balancing mechanism. It quantifies the price response of balancing responsible parties to the imbalance price and finds a significant effect. This finding is politically delicate because such a price responsiveness is forbidden by the regulator. With these four articles, the dissertation provides insights how the regulator can affect the behavior of market participants through economic incentives, which is of interest for researchers and policy makers alike. It adds to the literature by proposing new frameworks and models, and by drawing from experiences in other jurisdictions. Thereby, it contributes to adapting the regulation of the power sector in times of the energy transition. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 08/2022 Y1 - 2022 N1 - All papers have been published and are openly accessible here: Eicke, A., Khanna, T., & Hirth, L. (2020). Locational Investment Signals: How to Steer the Siting of New Generation Capacity in Power Systems? The Energy Journal, 41(6). https://doi.org/10.5547/01956574.41.6.aeic Eicke, A., & Schittekatte, T. (2022). Fighting the wrong battle? A critical assessment of arguments against nodal electricity prices in the European debate. Energy Policy, 170, 113220. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113220 Eicke, A. (2022). Where should generators be built in a zonal electricity market? A numerical analysis of administratively determined investment signals. ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. http://hdl.handle.net/10419/261346 Eicke, A., Ruhnau, O., & Hirth, L. (2021). Electricity balancing as a market equilibrium: An instrument-based estimation of supply and demand for imbalance energy. Energy Economics, 102, 105455. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2021.105455 Print copy of the dissertation is available at the Hertie Library. N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D008 + 2022D008+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Bünder, Tobias T1 - The Pharmaceutical Industry and Access to Health Products. Interrogating the Role of Multinational Companies in Tackling Global Development Challenges N2 - Society increasingly calls on business, in particular multinational companies, to contribute to solving global challenges such as poverty, hunger, or the recent pandemic. Many companies and industries have responded positively to these expectations and use a broad set of efforts to work toward objectives such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. However, research has frequently pointed out that that there is limited evidence for multinational companies being effective to this end, as they have to overcome many internal and external hurdles in tackling such development challenges. Thus, uncertainty remains with regard to how multinational companies can become instrumental in addressing the persistent and global problems we associate with sustainable development. This cumulative dissertation explores this question by studying how the multinational pharmaceutical industry has acted upon the challenge of insufficient access to medicines, vaccines, and other health products in low- and middle-income countries. By analyzing how two companies have tried to integrate access objectives into their business, the first empirical paper brings to surface two types of integration efforts that differently enable companies to make progress on the access challenge. It also highlights the strategizing needed for each type of integration to overcome internal and external challenges. The remaining two papers look at the pharmaceutical industry’s contributions to the Kenyan response to non-communicable diseases as a case of the growing scale and scope of involvement of multinational companies on the local level. One paper shows that local development actors perceive this as a challenging and risky phenomenon and lays out why and how they engage with companies as development agents regardless. By studying the Kenyan case, the final piece looks more closely at how governance structures may help to ensure that industry-led public health initiatives contribute to development objectives. Together, these papers contribute to management research by showcasing different pathways through which companies can become instrumental in making progress on development challenges: an internal pathway of integrating social objectives into the business as well as an external pathway of steering corporate initiatives through local actors and governance structures. Finally, it also informs debates in global health research by adding often neglected firm- and country-level perspectives on the growing role of business in global health. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 07/2022 Y1 - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-44746 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4474 N1 - List of pre-publications Parts of Chapter 2, 3 and 7: Bünder, T., Rathert, N., Mair, J., Understanding firm- and field-level change toward sustainable development: insights from the pharmaceutical industry and access to medicines 1960‒2020. In: George, G., Haas, M.R., Joshi, H., McGahan, A.M. and Tracey, P. Handbook on the Business of Sustainability: The Organization, Implementation, and Practice of Sustainable Growth. Edward Elgar Publishing. Chapter 6: Bünder, T., Karekezi, C., & Wirtz, V.J. (2021). Governing industry involvement in the non-communicable disease response in Kenya. Globalization and Health, 17. doi.org/10.1186/s12992-021-00776-3 N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D007 + 2022D007+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Ruhnau, Oliver T1 - The Economics of Flexible Electricity Demand N2 - In electricity systems, supply traditionally follows demand. Consequently, economists have focused on analyzing supply while assuming perfectly inelastic demand. Demand flexibility, if at all, occurred in deterministic patterns, such as during peak and off-peak periods, incentivized by static time-of-use tariffs. Nowadays, the role of electricity demand is changing fundamentally: growing shares of fluctuating wind and solar energy require flexibility in a larger quantity and on a stochastic basis; increasing loads of electric vehicles, heat pumps, and hydrogen electrolyzers could provide flexibility through battery, thermal, and gas storage; and the introduction of smart meters enables dynamic real-time tariffs and an automated response of distributed loads. This cumulative dissertation contributes to the economic understanding of flexible electricity demand with five scientific articles. Article 1 starts with reviewing the role of electrification in decarbonization scenarios for heating and road transport in Germany. The article finds that decarbonization drives electrification, leading to an increase in electricity demand by a factor of roughly two. Direct and indirect electrification options are contrasted with respect to their distinct flexibility potential. Articles 2 and 3 explore the implications of decentralized electric heat pumps and centralized electrolytic hydrogen, respectively, for the market value of renewables. Both use the same numerical electricity market model. Article 2 finds that the volatility of the heat pump’s electricity demand challenges the electricity system, which becomes apparent in increasing load cost. A flexible operation of heat pumps may reduce this challenge, but potential benefits for the market value of wind energy are minor. By contrast, Article 3 shows that hydrogen electrolyzers have the potential to stabilize renewable market values at high renewable market shares effectively and permanently, because additional renewable supply can trigger investment in additional hydrogen electrolyzers with additional demand. Articles 4 and 5 investigate the flexibility of the current electricity demand using econometric models with instrumental variables. Article 4 reveals that, at an hourly temporal resolution, the aggregated electricity demand in Germany is indeed price-elastic; it decreases by 70 MW for every € 1 per MWh increase in the day-ahead wholesale price. Article 5 finds that demand is also price-responsive in the very short term: the demand for imbalance energy responds to the imbalance price—despite the legal obligation in Germany to minimize imbalances independent of prices. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 06/2022 KW - Centre for Sustainability Y1 - 2022 N1 - Publications: Ruhnau, O., Bannik, S., Otten, S., Praktiknjo, A., Robinius, M., 2019. Direct or indirect electrification? A review of heat generation and road transport decarbonisation scenarios for Germany 2050. Energy 166, 989–999. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2018.10.114 Ruhnau, O., Hirth, L., Praktiknjo, A., 2020. Heating with wind: Economics of heat pumps and variable renewables. Energy Economics 104967. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2020.104967 Ruhnau, O., 2021. How flexible electricity demand stabilizes wind and solar market values: The case of hydrogen electrolyzers. Applied Energy 118194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.118194 Hirth, L., Khanna, T., Ruhnau, O., 2022. The (very) short-term price elasticity of German electricity demand. Working Paper. http://hdl.handle.net/10419/249570 Eicke, A., Ruhnau, O., Hirth, L., 2021. Electricity balancing as a market equilibrium: An instrument-based estimation of supply and demand for imbalance energy. Energy Economics 102, 105455. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2021.105455 N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D006 + 2022D006+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Raiser, Kilian T1 - Post-Paris: Understanding Pledge and Review and its Implications for International Cooperation on Climate Change N2 - This dissertation studies the mechanisms through which the Paris Agreement proposes to limit global greenhouse gas emissions, and the prospects for these mechanisms to succeed in doing so. In particular it focuses on the Paris Agreement’s pledge and review structure, taking a cumulative approach comprising three distinct research papers studying the Agreement from different perspectives. In the first paper I systematically map the literature studying the Agreement and synthesize existing insights on whether or not it will be effective. I find mixed evidence. Potential drivers of effectiveness, such as the Agreement’s transparency provisions, are often qualified by concrete barriers, with the information submitted thus far lacking in quality and comparability. Although the literature provides ample recommendations for overcoming such barriers, the success of the Agreement is found to ultimately depend on national ambition. As such, the Paris Agreement’s most promising features are found to lie in its facilitation of norm-diffusion and learning. In the second paper I use systematic evidence synthesis methods to review existing literature studying five comparable review mechanisms in the human rights, trade, finance and labour regimes. I identify six common factors that influence the performance of these review mechanisms. Using these as benchmarks to assess the Paris Agreement’s review mechanisms I find that the Agreement incorporates many of these features. However, two major shortcomings remain, namely the lack of an assessment of the adequacy of national climate policies, and a lack of capacities to effectively carry out the review process. Combined with existing political constraints, these shortcomings suggest that that the Paris Agreement alone is unlikely to be effective. In the third paper I develop a novel framework for assessing states’ nationally determined contribution formulation process based on the state capacities and policy design literatures. I apply the framework to the cases of Brazil, South Africa, India and China. I find that these countries engage imperfectly with the pledge and review structure of the Paris Agreement. They lack systematic processes for formulating their nationally determined contributions, and their international pledges remain detached from domestic climate policy considerations. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 05/2022 Y1 - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-44070 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4407 N1 - Related publications: Kilian Raiser et al (2020) Is the Paris Agreement effective? A systematic map of the evidence, Environ. Res. Lett. 15 083006, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab865c Kilian Raiser, Başak Çalı & Christian Flachsland (2022) Understanding pledge and review: learning from analogies to the Paris Agreement review mechanisms, Climate Policy, DOI: 10.1080/14693062.2022.2059436 N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D005 + 2022D005+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Pavlova, Marina T1 - Authoritarian Regimes and Financial Crises: Explaining Autocratic Regime Survival and Collapse N2 - The common notion that financial crises pose serious threats to autocratic regime stability has been challenged over the last decades both on theoretical and empirical grounds by the extensive number of authoritarian regimes that seem to be absolutely impervious to financial and economic shocks. So, why do financial crises only sometimes lead to autocratic regime collapse? What mechanisms do (de)stabilize authoritarian regimes during financial crises? And under what conditions is autocratic regime breakdown likely to happen? This dissertation addresses these questions by bringing together insights from the democratization, comparative autocracy, and political economy strands of research. It argues that the relationship between financial crises and autocratic regime breakdown is highly conditional, and depends on a complex interplay of economic and political factors. In three standalone papers, this dissertation scrutinizes the entire process of crises induced autocratic regime instability and regime collapse, and examines the effects of different economic and political factors on the probability of autocratic regime survival and collapse during specific types of financial crises. The key findings of this dissertation demonstrate that the destabilizing effects of financial crises may vary by crisis type, that in response to financial crises, policymakers in autocracies can implement crisis policies that prolong authoritarian rule, and that institutions by which autocracies govern may immunize them from political risks during financial crises, or, by contrast, may precipitate elite defection and regime collapse. Overall, this dissertation provides many new theoretical and empirical insights into the sources of autocratic regime survival and breakdown during financial crises. It also provides one more evidence that economic and political problems do not exist in isolation from one another, rather they are linked together in complex networks of weirdly tangled cause-effects relationships, which we do not yet fully understand. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 04/2022 Y1 - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-43929 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4392 N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D004 + 2022D004+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Deo, Sahil T1 - The Under-appreciated Regulatory Challenges posed by Algorithms in FinTech. Understanding interactions among users, firms, algorithm decision systems & regulators N2 - The rise of automated decision-making systems has been extraordinary in the last few years, both in terms of scale and scope of operation. This is especially true in the field of fintech, where robo financial advisors have gained prominence with their claim to “democratise” finance, with their low operating costs, multi-tasking abilities and potential for mass adoption. This series of three research papers is focused on demystifying algorithmic explainability in the field of fintech, by diving deep into both theoretical and practical aspects of the phenomenon, and contextualising the discussion to India. The first paper explores the trade-off that emerges between performance and explainability for robo financial advisors, through a detailed review of available literature that allowed comparisons between relevant processes adopted around the world, and interviews with various stakeholders within India to understand the evolving domestic situation. The paper finds that it is not quite a question of if ADS will play a significant role in India’s financial services sector but more a question of when that will happen. The second paper operationalises algorithmic explainability in the particular context of risk profiling done by robo financial advisory applications. Here, an approach towards developing a ‘RegTech’ tool is outlined, which can explain the robo advisor’s decision-making, using machine learning models to recognise and reconstruct different levels of explanations. Finally, the third paper evaluates the effectiveness of user-centric explanations in conveying the decision-making logic of complex algorithmic systems in fintech. The paper demonstrates the usefulness of such explanations from the perspectives of both novice and seasoned investors, and goes on to differentiate between white- and black-box explanations. In sum, this three-paper series, using a range of tools and approaches, examines in detail the under-appreciated regulatory and operational challenges that emerge during the use of algorithms in the field of fintech, and explores ways to resolve them. While the first paper looks at the present and future of AI in Indian fintech, the second paper develops a tool to explain a robo advisor’s decisionmaking, and the third finds factors that determine users’ comprehension and confidence in such systems. The results of these three approaches in the three papers become vital when seen in the context of the rapid rise of artificial intelligence across products, services and industries globally. If humans are to work alongside machines in this changing world, explainability becomes an important aspect to consider for companies, regulators and users alike, in order for humans to trust the algorithmic systems in place and improve outcomes — in this case, financial outcomes — for all. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 03/2022 Y1 - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-42887 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4288 N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D003 + 2022D003+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Nagel, Jan T1 - At the table or on the menu? Impact of eurozone membership on negotiations in the Council of the European Union N2 - In 1999, a group of member states of the European Union launched a common currency, the euro. The political weight and institutional set-up of this group have prompted fears that eurozone members might dominate non-members. This thesis studies political dynamics between members and non-members of the eurozone. Specifically, it explores to what extent eurozone membership explains negotiation performance in the Council of the European Union – the core arena for negotiations among member states. To this end, the thesis uses an original dataset of 303 negotiations conducted under the co-decision procedure between 1999 and 2016. The thesis makes a two-fold theoretical argument. First, it is argued that eurozone members have an incentive to build “minimum winning coalitions” under exclusion of non-members, as this increases their gains in Council negotiations. Secondly, this process is enabled by the institutional setup of exclusive eurozone-only bodies, most importantly the Eurogroup. On this basis, it is hypothesized that eurozone members should have a higher probability of inclusion in a winning coalition in the Council (H1), especially in the Economic and Financial Affairs (ECOFIN) Council (H2), but perhaps also in other Council configurations (H3). It is furthermore hypothesized that inclusion of eurozone members in winning coalitions increased during the euro crisis (H4). Contrary to theoretical expectations, the analysis yields four null findings. Eurozone members were not more likely to be included in winning coalitions, independently if a proposal was negotiated in the ECOFIN Council or other Council configurations, and regardless if negotiations took place during the euro crisis. The thesis provides a possible explanation for this puzzling finding. An analysis of coalition patterns reveals that eurozone members were too divided to exercise their collective influence in the Council. Rather than acting as a cohesive bloc, eurozone states were split internally along traditional cleavages structuring conflict in the Council. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 02/2022 Y1 - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-42077 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4207 N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D002 + 2022D002+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Flonk, Daniëlle T1 - Content control contestations: How and why internet governance norms emerge and develop N2 - In the early days of the internet, it was often assumed that the internet would develop into a free and open technology. However, governments have proven to be able to govern the internet, control its content, and develop international content control norms. This dissertation looks at content control from an international norms perspective and asks: How and why do international content control norms emerge and develop? I adopt an analytical eclecticist approach that combines elements from comparative politics and international relations. There are three aspects to this eclectic theory of content control. First, states subscribe to content control norms, which can range from liberal to illiberal norms. States cooperate in the area of content control and promote content control norms. Second, states support content control norms to a different extent because of the democratic or authoritarian values they subscribe to and their internal decision-making procedures, which can lead to conflict. Third, regional and international organizations affect the norm promotion strategies of states. I use both qualitative methods (case studies, content analysis) and quantitative methods (negative binomial hurdle model) to answer the research question. In order to answer the how part of the research question, I analyze two aspects of content control norm development. First, I assess the broader conflicts over norms and institutions in internet governance. I show that these conflicts are dependent on the identities of the actors involved. Second, I analyze the strategies that autocratic states use to push for specific content control norms. I show that institutional structures create opportunities and constraints to their norm promotion strategies. In order to answer the why part of the research question, I zoom in even further by comparing content control practices between democratic and authoritarian regimes. I show that democracies also control content, but mainly security-related content. Hence, content control practices are dependent on the regime type identity of actors and the type of content targeted. This dissertation shows that existing global internet governance models are contested and countermodels are emerging. These developments point towards the beginning of the end of the open and liberal internet order as we know it. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 01/2022 Y1 - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-42030 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4203 N1 - Shelf mark: 2022D001 + 2022D001+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Palaric, Enora T1 - From symbolic politics to policy learning? A comparative case study of policy changes in the context of impact assessment in France, Germany and Italy N2 - This thesis examines the causal process that led to policy change in the field of impact assessment (IA) in France, Germany and Italy since the mid-2000s. I seek to understand whether changes to the goals and/or ends of IA may be explained by symbolic politics or by a domestic learning process. Additionally, I aim to find out how and under which conditions policy learning results in policy change, and how the policy process affects the type of policy change that is adopted. Based on the policy diffusion literature, the policy learning framework and the Multiple Streams Framework, I operationalise three different causal mechanisms: symbolic politics, problem-oriented learning and power-oriented learning. Using document analysis and expert interviews, I trace the causal process that resulted in nine selected cases of policy change. I find that in most cases policy changes resulted from a domestic learning process, whereby domestic entities defined policy problems and/or goals, acquired and diffused knowledge, and adopted measures to implement and enforce the policy change. This shows that France, Germany and Italy have gone beyond the symbolic phase in the implementation of IA. In Germany and Italy, recent policy changes may be explained by problem-oriented learning. Domestic entrepreneurs identified problems in the implementation of IA and aimed at improving the performance of the instrument. In these two countries stable organisations with a mandate to evaluate IA were the main policy entrepreneurs. They facilitated the acquisition of knowledge on IA, acted as learning fora, and largely contributed to disseminating knowledge and setting the policy agenda. With respect to how and under which conditions policy lessons may be translated into policy change, findings show that this depends on the ability of policy entrepreneurs to use windows of opportunities such as changes of government to translate the acquired knowledge into policy change. I find that because the type of causal mechanism affects who learns and what is learnt, problem-oriented learning tends to result in incremental change of the means of IA, while power-oriented learning is more conducive to redefining the ends of IA. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 18/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-42006 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4200 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D018 + 2021D018+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Hackmack, Sinaida T1 - Urban Governance Processes in the Making: The Unfolding of Cycling Policies in London and Berlin N2 - With the growing variety of stakeholders involved and different interests that need to be reconciled, policymaking in the city can be sometimes slow or even run into deadlock. This dissertation addresses this complexity of urban governance with a process view. It strives to investigate how complex urban governance processes unfold and what might enable or impede joint action throughout. Accordingly, it surveys the field of urban transport, which provides a prime example of the struggle of cities to move complex policies forward. This becomes particularly apparent in the redesign of urban streets, which requires careful retrofitting of existing infrastructures and an alignment of previous plans with new political priorities. This struggle has recently been reignited by the renaissance of the bicycle in cities and the related rollout of new cycling infrastructure. The promotion of cycling has moved up the urban political agenda almost universally and become a cross-sectoral priority of transport, public health, and environmental policies. Yet, the creation of space for the safety of cyclists, for instance in the form of separate cycle lanes, has initiated fierce debates with strong supporters and opponents in nearly all major cities. This dissertation explores how, in spite of this controversy, urban stakeholders move ambitious cycling programs forward based on the comparative analysis of cycling policies in London (2012-2016) and Berlin (2016-2021). With a methodological and theoretical approach rooted in network research, this dissertation explores the evolution of the actor-networks and the policy debate of these case studies over time. The analysis draws on a qualitative database that was created for this dissertation and consists of interview data and documents. The findings suggest that next to structural and cultural properties, stylistic features should be taken into account to fully comprehend how complex urban governance processes unfold and, thus, deserve a more prominent position in the urban governance field. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 17/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-41792 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4179 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D017 + 2021D017+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Thompson, Gil T1 - Socialisation into European Professional and Political Communities. An Ethnographic Study of Seconded National Experts Deployed by EASO and Frontex to the Lesvos Migration Hotspot N2 - The European Union (EU), though a treaty between states, is different from previous international organisations in the depth and breadth of its aims. Termed a supranational organisation, it seeks not only to work in the common interest of its 27 member states, but in the general interest of the Union. Scholars of EU studies have long debated the construction of this emergent political community, asking whether it would come to exist the manner needed to legitimise these newfound powers. A subset of these researchers has been particularly interested in European socialisation, a field that studies how time spent working in European institutions leads to effective cooperation and the creation of a common, imagined collective. Reviewing literature dating back to the 1970s, this dissertation finds consistent results showing that inductees’ ages and countries of origin seem to matter consistently for their likelihood of undergoing European socialisation; however, few other results appear consistently and across studies. The theoretical contribution of this work is to argue that beliefs, rather than demographics should be studied. By looking at how novel organisational roles and norms cohere to those learned over time in national communities, the socialisation process can be better understood. Setting the study at the Lesvos migration hotspot, this study uses ethnographic research methods to understand the microprocesses of the socialisation process among Seconded National Experts (SNEs) deployed by the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and the European Border and Coast Guard (Frontex) in support of Greek authorities. On the basis of intensive fieldwork, including formal interviews with 24 SNEs and participant observations, this research finds that beliefs regarding legitimate authority and what constitutes high-quality work, formed during their tenures in national professional communities, help explain the efficaciousness of the socialisation process on Lesvos. Moreover, the work finds that the European professional community built on the Greek island undergirds the formation of an inchoate political one. These results contribute to those early questions asked by scholars of European integration and contain practical lessons for mangers and trainers overseeing diverse European workforces, as well as for policymakers and civil society looking to instil best practices. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 16/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-41785 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4178 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D016 + 2021D016+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Bobzien, Licia T1 - The role of perceived economic inequality in the formation of political preferences N2 - Economic inequality, i.e. income and wealth inequality, varies across time and space. Preferences for and concerns about economic inequality in particular and political preferences in general are remarkably independent of such variation in economic inequality. Empirically, the mechanisms linking economic inequality and political preferences are difficult to study since economic inequality as a macro-level phenomenon can influence individual political preferences in many ways. A typical assumption in theoretically and empirically studying the effects of economic inequality on the formation of political preferences is that individuals have full information about economic inequality. This assumption, while analytically helpful, is conceptually and empirically contested. I study the formation of political preferences under incomplete, potentially biased, information about inequality by considering perceived economic inequality as linking mechanism between economic inequality and political preferences. Chapter 2 studies the relevance of inequality perceptions for the formation of preferences for redistribution and finds that inequality perceptions are strong predictors for preferences for redistribution. I further find that inequality perceptions are independent of actual levels of income inequality but dependent on individual socio-economic and ideological positions. Chapter 3 builds upon this argument but looks at perceptions of tax inequality rather than income inequality and its effects on preferences for taxation. It shows that individuals perceive tax rates for different income groups differently depending on their own income position. Preferred tax rates for different income groups, however, are rather similar across individual income positions. Chapters 2 and 3 indicate that there is heterogeneity in perceived inequalities and that these perceptions are relevant to the formation of political preferences. While these chapters use individual level observational data to study potential mechanisms correlationally, I apply a quasi-experimental design to test whether perceived inequality—modelled as experience of inequality—causally influences political preferences in chapter 4: Studying populist voting in Germany, I find that experiencing regional inequality can affect populist voting. This dissertation presents empirical evidence that considering perceived inequalities can help us to better understand why individual political preferences do not necessarily reflect levels and changes in economic inequality. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 15/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-41778 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4177 N1 - Partly published here: Bobzien L. Polarized perceptions, polarized preferences? Understanding the relationship between inequality and preferences for redistribution. Journal of European Social Policy. 2020;30(2):206-224. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0958928719879282 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D015 + 2021D015+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Hjalmarsson, Ragnar T1 - Transitional Justice after Economic Crisis N2 - This dissertation is about how democracies can respond to economic crises. At its centre is the dilemma that political elites, and societies as a whole, face after such an event –whether to focus exclusively on forward-looking policies that secure a recovery or whether to also address the underlying causes of the crisis, learning the lessons of the past but also weathering the divisiveness and recrimination this exercise is likely to elicit. To engage with this dilemma, this research takes inspiration from the field of transitional justice on how societies can deal with the past, and learn from it. Of special interest are the mechanisms of transitional justice. Truth commissions most prominently, but also prosecutions, reparations, and constitutional reforms. The analysis moves from a cross-country comparison of truth commissions deployed in Iceland, Ireland, and Greece after the Great Recession, to a case study of a comprehensive range of mechanisms deployed in Iceland, to an impact assessment of the most effective of the three truth commission. I will argue that the transitional justice framework brings helpful and practical insights when applied to the study of economic crises in established democracies. It challenges the conventional wisdom that ‘business as usual’ will prevail after an economic crisis; it also yields principles for designing mechanisms that promote learning from the past and building-in better practices in the future. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 14/2021 KW - economic crisis, transitional justice, learning, accountability, truth commissions, prosecutions, reparations, constitutional reform. Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-41409 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4140 N1 - The dissertation’s first chapter has been published here: Kovras, Iosif, Shaun McDaid, and Ragnar Hjalmarsson. “Truth Commissions after Economic Crises: Political Learning or Blame Game?” Political Studies 66, no. 1 (February 2018): 173–91. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717706902 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D014 + 2021D014+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Bois, Julien Raymond Florent T1 - The Uncertain World of the Court of Justice of the European Union. A Multidisciplinary Approach of the Legitimacy of the EU Judiciary in the 21st century N2 - The Court of Justice of the European Union is one of the most contested European Union institutions. It is a non-majoritarian body that wields power beyond the state and imposes its rule to citizens and directly legitimate national governments. Despite numerous bold rulings that went beyond the expectations of member states, added to the alleged global legitimacy crisis suffered by the EU, the CJEU was the most likely candidate to face total disempowerment. Yet the Court’s mandate has been extended as a result of the economic and financial crisis, and its involvement in the control of the new economic recovery fund in the context of the COVID 19 crisis led 2 member states to lift their veto to the most important recovery plan of the century. How is the Court seemingly not suffering a legitimacy crisis in the 21st century? Answers to this paradox require a comprehensive exercise of theory building of the Court’s legitimacy. The latter is a concept traditionally employed to assess the justified right to rule of powerholders within nation-states and was used to describe the whole polity rather than some of its parts. Existing legitimacy concepts must be refined in order to characterize the transnational non-majoritarian body. The thesis thus provides the first comprehensive and multidisciplinary account of the legitimacy of the CJEU, drawing insights from law, political science and sociology. It recalibrates the use of concepts such as the “input-throughput-output” trichotomy to the specificities of the judiciary and combines theories of judicial review developed in legal scholarship with actor-based accounts found in empirical social sciences. The thesis rejects the division between normative and sociological legitimacy and advocates for a recoupling of both sides in order to have a complete picture of the CJEU’s right to rule. The question of the Court’s audience is crucial. Standards of judicial legitimacy are forged according to the social characteristics of the Court’s attentive public. Since the CJEU is a non-majoritarian institution evolving on the transnational scene and exercises an expert activity discriminating legal specialists from other citizens, the Court’s attentive public is (as determined by the analysis of judicial external visits and the properties of the Court’s followers on Twitter) composed by the EU legal profession. Normative standards of judicial legitimacy in the EU must be forged according to the expectations of the Court’s attentive public while respecting broader social dynamics found in all member states. In terms of the Court’s sources of legitimacy, the Court must respect its ii mandate enshrined in the treaties and judges must be outstanding legal professionals and reflect the population of the member states. It must respect due process and associate its attentive public to the interpretation and enforcement of EU law as much as possible. It must also deliver sound results that correspond to its status as the supreme court of the Union. The thesis concludes by claiming that the CJEU is not suffering a legitimacy crisis in the 21st century. The legitimacy deficits that characterize its activities are progressively or remain minor, and do not outweigh the support that judges built with the legal profession over decades. The thesis nonetheless identified several institutional and behavioral shortcomings and includes a series of recommendations to address the mere legitimacy problems faced the Court today. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 13/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-40844 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4084 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D013 + 2021D013+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Hartmann, Till T1 - Corruption as a Development Policy Issue: Tracing the Formulation and Implementation of Theories of Change N2 - Against the backdrop of mounting public demand for action against corruption the world over, the central objective and motivation behind this thesis is to contribute to a better understanding of strategies that can help societies improve their control of corruption. More specifically, it investigates the overarching, policy-relevant research question of how to render donor-supported anti-corruption efforts more effective. Rooted in a cumulative research design, this thesis consists of three papers that approach the research question from different angles. The first paper lays the theoretical groundwork by tracing the historic roots of the widespread view today that corruption is unacceptable and delimits the corruption phenomenon conceptually by comparing it to its opposites. In addition, it places corruption in the context of the grand theories of development and derives the main theories of change from the corruption literature. The second paper connects contemporary corruption research with anti-corruption practice and identifies paradigmatic shifts in donor-supported anti-corruption efforts. It discusses the most frequently adopted anti-corruption instruments and develops typologies of interventions to facilitate a systematic analysis of the fragmented landscape of donor-supported anti-corruption activities. The third paper applies the analytical framework introduced in the second paper to study the case of the World Bank. The paper presents and interprets the first comprehensive inventory of World Bank activities that addressed corruption explicitly between 1996 and 2016. Building on the inventory data and on expert interviews, the paper investigates the impact of factors internal and external to the World Bank on the institution’s anti-corruption programming. Overall, the in-depth analysis of a major donor revealed that organizational-level factors such as those related to the underlying financial model, organizational culture, and policy mandate may constrain the anti-corruption policy formulation process and lead to inapt design and reduced effectiveness of anti-corruption reforms. From this finding follows the practical conclusion for donors that giving greater consideration to internal incentive structures and its impact on development policy design may contribute to improving the effectiveness of interventions. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 12/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-40827 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4082 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D012 + 2021D012+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Martínez Barranco Kukutschka, Roberto T1 - Clearing the anti-corruption roadblocks: Better methods for better policies N2 - This dissertation is an attempt to align the research and policy agendas in the field of anti-corruption. It explores the issue of measurement and looks at the relationship between the widely used “subjective indicators of corruption” (e.g., expert perception-based indicators and popular opinion surveys) and the more recently developed methods of quantifying corruption either through indirect measurements or administrative data. After the validation of the measurement instruments, it dives into some of the most widely cited “theories of change” in the literature to evaluate the effectiveness of the legal and economic approaches to fight corruption, while incorporating more nuanced explanatory models that focus on the interactions between institutional and policy factors rather than assuming that different elements have isolated effects on the societal levels of corruption. The idea of interactions in then taken forward to explore the potential of information communication technologies (ICTs) in creating virtuous cycles to control corruption. The final section summarises the main findings and contributions to the existing anti-corruption literature and advocates in favour of using methods that recognise the complex relationships between the different causes of and constraints against corruption. It calls for more multi-disciplinary approaches to improve our understanding of corruption and support the design of policies to curb it. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 11/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-40789 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4078 N1 - Chapter 1: Can a Civilisation Know its Own Institutional Decline? Published as Mungiu-Pippidi, A. and Martínez Barranco Kukutschka, R. (2018). ‘Can a Civilisation Know its Own Institutional Decline?: A Tale of Indicators‘ in H.K. Anheier, M.H. Haber and M.A. Kayser (eds.). Governance Indicators: Approaches, Progress, Promise. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapter 2: Optimising Anti-Corruption: The Long Arm of the Law vs. the Invisible Hand of the Market? Published as Martínez Barranco Kukutschka, R. (2020). ‘The Long Arm of the Law versus the Invisible Hand of the Market?‘ in A. Mungiu-Pippidi, A. and P.M. Heywood (eds.). A Research Agenda for Studies of Corruption. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Chapter 3: Civil Society and Online Connectivity: Controlling Corruption on the Net? Published as Kossow, N. and Martínez Barranco Kukutschka, R. (2017). ‘Civil Society and Online Connectivity: Controlling Corruption on the Net?‘ Crime, Law and Social Change 68(4): 459-476. N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D011 + 2021D011+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Sieker, Felix T1 - Disruption or continuation? The role of platforms in transforming work N2 - One central manifestation of the digital transformation that has caused profound structural changes to all parts of economic and social life are platform companies. The dissemination of platforms is associated with the restructuring of entire markets, the reorganisation of companies and the restructuring of employment relationships. This dissertation asks to what extent platform companies as a new organisational form and their impact on employment represent a disruption or a continuation of liberalization trends that have been in place for a longer time. Two arguments are advanced in this context. First, it is argued that platform companies are worth to be discussed as a distinct topic, as they differ in important regards from previous organisational forms and have profound effects on the political economy of industrialized countries. Platform companies occupy a central position in the economy and control large parts of the critical infrastructure of the internet. Although platform companies share some similarities with previous firm models such as the vertically integrated firm and the nexus of contracts model, they depart in other regards. In particular, network effects and the control of information converted into data points are key features that give them unprecedented power. Second, the effect of platform companies on employment is moderated by institutions. However, not all institutions are equally important. Whereas the employment contract, for instance, has proven to be a very resilient institution preventing the dissemination of independent contractors as preferred employment model of platform companies, the influence of unions has been limited. Moreover, the largest effect of platform companies on employment may be more of an indirect than a direct nature. Platform companies had only limited success in disseminating their preferred employment model of independent contracting, but rather reinforced existing subcontracting trends. All chapters in this dissertation contribute to these arguments from different perspectives. Moving from a macro-perspective to a micro-perspective, Chapter Two represents a review chapter on key features of platforms and their impact on the political economy of industrialized countries. Chapter Three analyses mechanisms that explain responses in ten major European countries to regulate platform work. Finally, Chapter Four represents a case study on the effect of Amazon logistics on employment in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 10/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-40766 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4076 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D010 + 2021D010+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Haas, Jörg T1 - Economic Policy Coordination and the European Semester N2 - This dissertation asks three interrelated questions about economic policy coordination: (1) Why do we see persistent macroeconomic imbalances that make international coordination necessary? (2) What kind of economic policies does the European Union promote in its member states via its coordination framework, the European Semester? (3) What determines whether governments implement recommendations issued under the Semester? The first paper argues that economic ideas, and their emphasis in media reporting, help secure public support for policies that result in external imbalances. It finds that the dominant interpretations of current account balances in Australia and Germany concur with distinct perspectives: external surpluses are seen as evidence of competitiveness in Germany, while external deficits are interpreted as evidence of attractiveness for investments in Australia. Survey experiments in both countries suggest that exposure to these diverging interpretations of the current account has a causal effect on citizens’ support for their country’s economic strategy. The second and third papers analyse policy recommendations under the European Semester, arguably the most ambitious example of economic policy coordination worldwide. The findings show that the European Union does not use the Semester to promote a single economic model across all member states. Recommendations do not uniformly recommend more reliance on the market or the state. Rather, they tend to suggest fiscal restraint and less protection for labour market insiders, while simultaneously promoting measures that benefit vulnerable groups in society. During the second decade of EMU, recommendations have gradually become more favourable of state intervention. The fourth paper investigates possible reasons for (non-)compliance with the Semester. It argues that recommendations are more likely to be implemented when their policy direction is in line with national governments’ economic ideology. The analysis shows that recommendations advocating less state intervention in the economy are more likely to be implemented under right-wing governments. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 05/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-37946 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3794 N1 - Following papers have been published: D’Erman, V., Haas, J., Schulz, D. F., & Verdun, A. (2019). Measuring economic reform recommendations under the European Semester: ‘One size fits all’ or tailoring to member states? Journal of Contemporary European Research, 15(2), 194–211. https://doi.org/10.30950/jcer.v15i2.999 Haas, J., D’Erman, V., Schulz, D., & Verdun, A. (2020. Economic and fiscal policy coordination after the crisis: Is the European Semester promoting more or less state intervention? Journal of European Integration. https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2020.1730356 Ferrara, Federico M., Haas, Jörg S., Peterson, Andrew. and Sattler, Thomas (2021) ‘Exports vs. investment: How political discourse shapes popular support for external imbalances’, Socio-Economic Review (mwab004), doi: 10.1093/ser/mwab004 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D005 + 2021D005+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Traut, Frederik T1 - Regulatory Corridors. The Reasons Behind Complexity in International and European Banking Regulation Accords N2 - The international banking regulation regime is complex. This complexity leaves room for regulatory arbitrage and boosts administrative burdens, which reduces its mitigating effect on financial instability. This book addresses the question on why states agree on such a potentially inefficient regime. First, it evaluates research on international banking regulation negotiations, which either neglect complexity or offer insufficient functionalist regulatory capture arguments for its emergence. Second, it proposes an economic cost-benefit model that explains complexity in international banking regulation as a function of diverging preferences in multipolar negotiations. This is based on an outcome-based definition of complexity: regimes that yield a set of different potential outcomes for the same banks are complex. The degree of complexity is described by a regulatory corridor whose walls are the boundaries of this set. The larger such a corridor, the more costly are its implications in terms of stability but its boundaries come closer to the preferences of signatories. Based on this assumed trade-off, three main claims are derived: (i) states with diverging preferences will introduce at least some complexity in their multinational regulatory regime, as a regulatory corridors-solution allows at least one of them to come closer to their initial preferences, which is individually welfare-enhancing; (ii) this is not only a collective action problem, as a central planner would also introduce complexity (potentially to a different extent); and (iii) this holds in an intertemporal case with an infinite time-horizon; changing expectations might widen the optimal regulatory corridor. Third, these claims are evaluated in three qualitative case studies on the treatment of operational risk in Basel II, the implementation of Basel III capital requirements in the European Union, and the European bank resolution regime. They find support for propositions (i) and (ii). Other methods might be needed to evaluate (iii). A policy-relevant result of this research is that some degree of complexity can contribute to welfare-enhancement. Complexity that is the result of unmanaged collective action by states could reduce collective welfare while still being individually rational. Regulators should treat complexity as a variable in negotiations to achieve the former and avoid the latter. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 09/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-40743 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4074 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D009 + 2021D009+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Berenberg-Gossler, Paul T1 - Financial Integration and Regulation: Essays in Macroeconomics N2 - This thesis consists of three chapters investigating the interactions between the financial and real sector. It provides new evidence on (i) the correlation between portfolio investment integration and business cycle synchronization, (ii) financial regulation and how it is driven by the business cycle, and (iii) electoral incentives influencing financial regulators. Chapter 1 analyses the correlation between cross-border portfolio investment integration and business cycle synchronization. Using data on 29 advanced economies’ cross-border financial asset holdings, it shows that portfolio investment integration correlates positively with business cycle synchronization when faced with idiosyncratic shocks. However, it correlates negatively when faced with common or global shocks. Chapter 2, coauthored with Gonçalo Pina, employs a text-mining approach to build a new dataset on regulatory actions against the US financial advisor industry. Employing a Bartik shift-share instrument, it provides causal evidence that regulatory actions are driven by the business cycle. Chapter 3, coauthored with Gonçalo Pina, discusses the political economy of regulatory actions against the US financial advisor industry. It shows that regulators consistently delay punishment against firms prior to gubernatorial elections. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 02/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-37189 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D002 + 2021D002+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Linek, Maximilian T1 - Measures to Influence Individual Behavior: Four Essays in Economics N2 - This dissertation in economics studies the effects of changing individuals’ choice environments on their behavior. The choice environment is the setting within which an individual makes her decision. It is widely acknowledged that even inconspicuous changes to this environment can have strong effects on behavior. This notion has spurred large efforts in the public and private sector to design these environments and steer behavior. The dissertation studies four measures that change choice environments to achieve public and private objectives. The first chapter investigates the effects of community meetings on behavior changes that were desired by the central government in Rwanda. It studies these effects with and without performance incentives for local leaders and sheds light on who controls meetings and how they operate. The second chapter studies expected effects of Basic Income on time use, deploying a large-scale survey experiment. The results show intended reallocations that may contribute to foster social cohesion in society. In addition, the chapter suggests its methodology as a new approach to explore policies that are difficult or costly to test. Finally, the third and fourth chapter study the effects of social information and defaults in online donations. The third chapter shows that the empirical regularity of conditional cooperation fails. The fourth and last chapter explores the complex relationship between different numbers and values of donation amount defaults. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 03/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-37255 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3725 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D003 + 2021D003+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Martínez López, Gabriel Tarriba T1 - The roots of ambition: Explaining the immigrant advantage in educational aspirations and choices in Western Europe N2 - In most Western European countries, the children of immigrants generally have a lower educational performance than children of native origin. Yet controlling for performance, they tend to make more ambitious educational choices. While the first phenomenon is largely explained by the disadvantaged socioeconomic situation of most immigrant families, the reasons for the second phenomenon remain unclear. In this doctoral dissertation, I explore some of the mechanisms that could account for the high educational ambitions of the children of immigrants in Western Europe. The dissertation comprises an introductory chapter followed by three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 focuses on the effects of cross-nativity parentage on the likelihood of enrolling in academic upper secondary school in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. Transnational children (those with a first-generation and a second-generation immigrant parent) display the high educational ambition of children with two immigrant parents in most regards. In contrast, mixed children (those with a first-generation immigrant parent and a native-origin parent) closely resemble children with two native parents. In chapter 3, I examine the relationship between children’s sources of information on future education and their realistic educational aspirations. I analyze how this relationship differs between natives and the children of immigrants in England and Sweden. The results indicate that for natives in both countries, and for the children of immigrants in England, information is positively related to realistic educational aspirations. However, information does not seem to affect the aspirations of the children of immigrants in Sweden and, for foreign-born children who immigrated before age 6, the relationship seems to be negative. Finally, in chapter 4, I explore ethnic differences in intergenerational educational mobility in Germany, focusing on the comparison between native-origin youth, Turkish-origin youth and the children of native German immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. I find that immigrant-origin youth are more likely to be upwardly mobile in terms of educational attainment, and that they are less affected by their parents’ educational attainment than natives. Moreover, I find a moderating role of age of immigration. I discuss possible explanations for my findings, including contextual differences in the substantive meaning of educational attainment. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 04/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-37738 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3773 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D004 + 2021D004+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Loschert, Franziska Eva T1 - Business as usual in times of Politicisation? Preferences of member states regarding EU labour migration policies N2 - What drives the positions taken by EU member states in the Council? Liberal Intergovernmentalism most prominently argues that governments enjoy the leeway of a ‘permissive consensus’ to represent the interests of strong domestic producer groups in the Council. Yet, in a Postfunctionalist Union, where citizens are no longer ‘rationally ignorant’ about their governments’ decisions in Brussels, identity politics are expected to override issue-specific business interests. The key mechanism that brings us from Moravcsik’s insulated ‘client politics’ to Postfunctionalist ‘mass politics’ is the phenomenon of politicisation. EU labour migration policies targeting third country nationals is a policy field where both clientelist business interests and politicised mass public interests are likely to surface, clash, and influence policymakers. While business demands liberalised and harmonised labour migration policies, governments under public scrutiny and pressure from right-wing populist parties are concerned that meeting the employers’ demands when legislating in Brussels will be costly in upcoming elections. This dissertation poses the question whether and to what extend politicisation of the EU and of immigration moderates the responsiveness of government to issues-specific interests of employers or mass public interests when negotiating EU labour migration policies. Drawing on a time-consistent quantitative measurement of politicisation of the EU and immigration in four member states, I study the impact of politicisation on the state preferences regarding five draft directives on EU labour migration policies. My research finds that the evidence for a moderating effect of politicisation on the responsiveness of governments is weak. Instead, whether governments respond to business or mass public interests is largely determined by the issue-specific dependence of employers on a common EU policy to attract labour migrants. If dependence is considered high, governments tend to represent employers’ interests and harmonise labour migration policies. Yet, this dissertation shows that identity and sovereignty related concerns matter as well but manifest more strongly in governments’ preferences when issue-specific dependence is low, because unilateral policies are considered more effective. Only against this background of an ‘ignorant or sceptical business’ does politicisation have at times a reinforcing effect upon the responsiveness of governments to the communitarian parts of their electorate. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 08/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-40137 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4013 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D008 + 2021D008+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Engelbrecht, Sandra T1 - From pressure for change to actual change: How class actors’ responses to labour migration shape the trajectories of continuity and change in employment relations institutions N2 - This dissertation uncovers how pressure for change in the European Union (EU) open market is translated into actual change by explaining how employers’ use of migrant labour, and trade unions’ responses thereto, drive institutional developments in three areas central to the governance of work: collective bargaining, job security regulations, and workplace representation. Based on process-tracing case studies of the German manufacturing sector, the German, Norwegian, and Swedish construction and hotel and restaurant sectors, I trace how sectoral differences in the interactions between employers and trade unions trigger distinct causal processes that contribute either to institutional continuity or liberalization. The findings reveal that liberalization in Germany does not follow a single trajectory: while employers’ and trade unions’ responses to migrant labour in the manufacturing sector contribute to dualization, the responses in the construction and hotel and restaurant sectors instead contribute to deregulatory liberalization. I find that the class actors’ responses in the Swedish construction and hotel and restaurant sectors, in turn, contribute to a third variety of liberalization – socially embedded flexibilization, whereas the actors’ responses in the Norwegian construction sector trigger a process of institutional resilience creation, endeavouring to contribute to institutional continuity under high pressure for change. In capturing how individual employers through their use of migrant labour are pursuing non-politically controlled change strategies, this dissertation offers us the insight that employers’ logic of action based on compliance with employment relations rules and practices is explicitly contested by the logic of action stimulated by the increased marketization generated through European integration. Aside from addressing the micro-level drivers of change resulting from the accumulated actions of individual employers, this dissertation also highlights the role of different labour supplies in enabling change processes to take place. It is argued that unless trade unions, as counterpart to employers, and nation states in their enforcement and legislative capacities create conditions that disable employers from noncompliance with existing institutions in their use of migrant labour, employers will follow the logic of action encouraged in the EU open market and use their access to migrant labour in ways that result in liberalization of the employment relations. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 07/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-40048 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-4004 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D007 + 2021D007+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Mejía López, Luis Everdy T1 - Guarding the Guardians of the Regulatory State: Understanding the Role of Judicial Accountability in the Governance of Regulatory Agencies N2 - This doctoral dissertation contributes to the debate on the accountability of the regulatory state by studying the role of judicial controls in the governance of regulatory agencies. The investigation consists of three individual research projects motivated by an overarching research question, which enquires how does judicial review of administrative decisions shapes the democratic accountability of the regulatory state. The research conducted here bridges frameworks and research methods from political science and administrative law to better understand how different governments have addressed the need for judicial controls to supervise regulatory agencies. The empirical evidence used for this research consists of unique information compiled by the author in three original and comprehensive datasets, which allowed to conduct diverse research methods for the examination of the evidence. The theoretical frameworks adapted for this study are designed to contribute with empirical knowledge about the varieties of judicial accountability adopted globally to supervise regulation authorities of two of the most representative industries operating under the ‘independent agency’ oversight governance paradigm: the energy and telecommunications public utilities, which are also supervised by competition regulators. The analysis starts with a global perspective of judicial accountability provisions implemented around the globe to supervise regulatory agencies. I conducted a comparative assessment of the intensity of judicial review that courts of appeal can exercise to supervise the legality of regulatory decisions of 100 authorities. The second investigation performs a closer examination of judicial supervision over regulatory agencies from two countries representative of opposite legal traditions: Spain and the United Kingdom. Finally, a third study enquires about the causes that prevent young regulatory agencies to comply with lawful administrative procedures throughout the enforcement of regulation. This last investigation studies the case of the Mexican Agency for Safety, Energy and Environment (ASEA). The overall outcomes of this study advance our understanding of the challenges to improve democratic mechanisms to hold regulatory agencies accountable, which is not only fundamental for a successful performance of regulatory institutions, but also a necessary condition to legitimize the activity of the state, enhance the trust on our governments and the consolidation of democratic values. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 07/2020 Y1 - 2020 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-37103 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3710 N1 - The first paper has been published in Regulation and Governance: Mejía, L. E. (2020). Judicial review of regulatory decisions: Decoding the contents of appeals against agencies in Spain and the United Kingdom. Regulation & Governance, rego.12302. https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12302 N1 - Shelf mark: 2020D007 + 2020D007+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Niklas, Kossow T1 - Digitizing Collective Action: How Digital Technologies Support Civil Society’s Struggle against Corruption N2 - This dissertation looks at the use of digital technologies in anti-corruption. It thereby responds to the increasing prominence of the fight against corruption as a research topic, and issue to address for activists and politicians around the world, as well as the ever-growing impact of digitalisation on governance. It answers the research question in what way and how effectively information and communication technology contribute to the control of corruption. In its first part, this dissertation provides an overview of the past twenty years of academic publications on the use and the effectiveness of digital technologies in anti-corruption. I structure the available literature according to its level of analysis, looking at theoretical and large-n studies compared to case specific and qualitative work. I also structure it according to the mechanism that is linking different technologies to a better control of corruption, namely e-government access, upward transparency, downward transparency and mobilisation. In doing so, it highlights gaps in the literature and open questions to research. Subsequently, I am zooming in on the role of civil society in its use of digital technologies, arguing that digital technologies are a tool that can support the role of civil society in controlling corruption. This argument builds on anti-corruption theories and thus lays the groundwork for testing it in two different settings. First, I provide evidence from a global, quantitative dataset, using marginal effects analysis to provide evidence for a positive correlation of civil society capacity, access to information and communication technology and better control of corruption. Second, I analyse a case study, looking at the use of e-procurement in Ukraine since 2014. I am testing if different civil society capacities in Ukrainian regions had an impact on corruption risks measured in Ukrainian tenders. While the quantitative data analysis gives clear, positive results concerning the relationship described above, the case study on Ukraine does not offer conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of civil society capacity and ICT access in the fight against corruption. The dissertation concludes by calling for future research into this relationship, especially by using data on public procurement. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 06/2020 Y1 - 2020 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-37029 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3702 N1 - Chapter 2 and chapter 3 of the dissertation are published here: Kossow, Niklas, and Roberto Martínez Barranco Kukutschka. "Civil society and online connectivity: controlling corruption on the net?." Crime, Law and Social Change 68.4 (2017): 459-476. Kossow, Niklas. "Digital anti-corruption: hopes and challenges." In A Research Agenda for Studies of Corruption by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Paul Heywood (eds.). Cheltanham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020. N1 - Shelf mark: 2020D005 + 2020D005+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Obendiek, Anke S. T1 - Data Disputes: Jurisdictional Conflicts and the Common Good in the Field of Data Governance T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 06/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-37960 N1 - Shelf mark: 2021D006 + 2021D006+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Bogoeski, Vladimir T1 - The Aftermath of the Laval Quartet: Emancipating labour (law) from the rationality of the internal market in the field of posting N2 - The Laval Quartet rulings of the CJEU have become an indispensable reference in every discussion on the social dimension of the European integration process over the past decade. Becoming a synonym for the subordination of labour rights and social goals to market freedoms, the rulings have raised different questions, the most pressing one being about the relationship between the economic and the social sphere of the EU as an emerging polity. The dissertation enquires into the question to what extent that relationship has been reconfigured in the aftermath of the Quartet rulings. Starting with the rulings themselves through a law in context approach, the dissertation studied a segment of the aftermath in the period following the rulings (2008-2019). While the aftermath has played out at various levels of EU’s multi-level governance structure, this study focuses on the supranational macro-level, examining the development of the subsequent CJEU case law and the EU-level political responses. The thesis makes the argument that due to the countermovement that the rulings have quickly triggered at EU and Member State level, a political struggle over the social in the EU has emerged, demonstrating the difficulty of conceiving of the EU as a common social space in conditions of diversity, a strong core-periphery division and governance structures dominated by market rationality. Particularly the developments in the field of posting of workers, starting with the Quartet and ending with the Revised Posted Workers Directive, reveal three important insights for the integration process more broadly. First, the existing material inequality and differences in economic development among Member States in enlarged EU, of which the Quartet was an early symptom, have buttressed the European regulatory space as a space of conflict between the core and the peripheries. Second, resolving core-periphery conflicts has distributional consequences, which are particularly visible in the context of labour and social questions. Resolving such conflicts requires an EU common conception of (social) justice, which appears particularly difficult to conceive of in the core-periphery constellation. Third, progressive social solutions mostly remain foreclosed, as in both cases, at the Court as well as in the political realm, these are mostly contested within a framework dominated by market rationality. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 01/2021 Y1 - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-37171 N1 - Copies are available in the Hertie Library. Shelf mark: 2021D001 + 2021D001+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Claassen, Casper Hendrik T1 - Confronting Vulnerability - State-Induced Social Innovation and the Making of South Korea's Social Enterprises N2 - This dissertation delineates the state-induced emergence and mainstreaming of South Korea’s (hereinafter, ‘Korea’) social enterprise sector following the enactment of a social enterprise promotion act in 2007. In particular, this dissertation contextualizes the public sector-led popularization and mobilization of social enterprises and studies the outcomes of this intervention. This dissertation includes analyses of networks, discourse, and geographic agglomerations, and it highlights the pressures, mechanisms, institutions, and organizations that have been integral to this process of state-induced innovation. It contributes to the literature on interactions between the state and social economy organizations, such as social enterprises. The relationship between the state and social economy organizations has been subject to much academic scrutiny, and the Korean case contributes to this literature by illustrating how the state has induced the emergence and scaling of social enterprises as a private organizational form and also by showing where social enterprises have flourished. The Korean case contrasts with the North American and European cases in that in Korea the state purposively popularized social enterprise, as opposed to the North American and European traditions where the origins of social enterprise are more closely linked to civil society. This has implications for how states can induce the founding of private organizational forms that serve their interests. Korea is an especially intriguing case study given that ‘social enterprise’ as an organizational form was almost entirely absent from Korean society prior to 2007, yet has now become embedded into society in the sense that social enterprises are found in nearly every industry and municipal district. There are now thousands of social enterprises in Korea a little more than a decade after the enactment of social enterprise promotion legislation. Civil society has, evidently, accepted social enterprises as a valid organizational form. This dissertation seeks to establish an empirical platform and a theoretical framework which can be utilized for a more theoretical analysis of social enterprise and other social economy organizations in Korea in future studies. Nevertheless, this dissertation does reveal how actors can manipulate the path dependencies imposed by history, and the capabilities bequeathed by it, to forge new possibilities in novel and strategic ways. The Korean state’s ability to induce social innovation is a tangible illustration of such. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 03/2020 Y1 - 2020 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-35687 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3568 N1 - Shelf mark: 2020D003 + 2020D003+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Cordes, Anne Christine T1 - Fiscal Consolidation Following a Sovereign Default. The Burden of Monetary Union Membership and the Role of the International Monetary Fund N2 - The global financial crisis has reignited the debate about the costs of sovereign default and the drawbacks of monetary union membership. Historically, several members of monetary unions defaulted on their debt and thereafter had to consolidate their finances. However, following a default, do members of a monetary union actually have to rely on fiscal consolidation to a greater extent than do other countries? This dissertation provides the first comprehensive comparison of sovereign defaults in a monetary union. In the period from 1990 to 2010, four monetary union members defaulted on their debt: Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Gabon, and Grenada. Their fiscal policy responses following these defaults are compared with those of four similar small middle income countries: Jamaica, Seychelles, Belize, and Suriname. This dissertation analyses the size, type, and timing of fiscal consolidation based on several hundred primary sources, from appropriation acts to budget plans and government speeches. The comparison shows that all countries had to consolidate following a default – irrespective of their membership of a monetary union. The four countries with an independent monetary policy tried to ease the burden of adjustment by devaluing their currencies, lowering refinancing rates, putting pressure on domestic banks, or resorting to direct central bank financing. However, in turn, foreign currency debt increased due to the resulting depreciation of the exchange rate. That is, countries outside of a monetary union have also had to consolidate. However, monetary union members still faced a greater burden of adjustment as they had to cut nominal expenditure to achieve the necessary internal devaluation inside the monetary union and could not let inflation do the work. This dissertation also highlights the central role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in explaining the type and timing of fiscal consolidation following a sovereign default. Six of the eight countries turned to the IMF at some point. Once they had signed up to an IMF programme, they consolidated more, especially on the expenditure side. Despite these differences in the type and timing of fiscal consolidation due to monetary union membership and the involvement of the IMF, none of the eight countries could avoid consolidating its finances following the sovereign default. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 02/2020 Y1 - 2020 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-35645 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3564 N1 - Shelf mark: 2020D008 + 2020D008+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Bossdorf, Jessica Breaugh T1 - Moving beyond public service motivation. Exploring the link between work motivations and employee attitudes in public sector organisations N2 - This dissertation examines employee work motivations, attitudes, and outcomes within the public sector drawing upon quantitative cross-country survey data. It challenges the dominant idea that public service motivation (PSM) is the only form of work motivation that matters for public servants by examining PSM against traditional intrinsic and extrinsic work motivation based on the framework of self-determination theory (SDT). It links these motivation types to different employee outcomes such as job satisfaction, ethics, and employee engagement while also taking into consideration stress in the workplace. It then shifts focus to examine interpersonal relationships at the organisational level through the concept of organizational social capital (OSC) and how management instruments support or impede OSC. This is relevant as it introduces conceptual and empirical differentiation between PSM and SDT, which is limited, or conflated, in PSM research. Additionally, understanding how management tools are linked to social capital provides a new angle for assessing management interventions and how they support or hinder the values, trust, and support within organisations. This research analyses civil service perceptions and attitudes across Europe and is presented in the form of four distinct papers. Overall findings show that PSM and SDT work motivation are different based on temporal focus, motivation needs, and measurement strategies and their individual utility differs depending on what type of attitude and outcome is measured. SDT appears to be more strongly related to job-related outcomes, while PSM is more strongly related to attitudes associated with job purpose. However, more nuanced findings suggest that different motivations may compensate for the failings of another and that they behave differently in different contexts and different stressors. Results also show that management tools focusing on interpersonal interactions are associated with positive social capital and can deter the impact of political interference. This dissertation contributes to the theoretical and empirical differentiation between PSM and SDT work motivation, providing evidence to support the fact that motivation types are context-specific and different motivations matter in evoking specific attitudes and behaviours. Consequently, future research should identify which motivations are most appropriate for which line of study and management actions should take this into consideration when designing institutional policies and interventions. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 04/2020 Y1 - 2020 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-35901 UR - https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2017.1400580 UR - https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2018.1561929 UR - https://doi.org/10.1177/0091026020912516 N1 - Shelf mark: 2020D004 + 2020D004+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Jugl, Marlene T1 - Country Size and State Performance: How Size Affects Politics, Administration and Governance N2 - This dissertation addresses the question how the size of a country affects the performance of ist political and administrative system. It advances the literature on small states by explicitly theorizing large states and empirically comparing countries of different sizes. Country size, operationalized as population size, is expected to be related to three clusters of country characteristics: First, a perception of vulnerability in small states vs. a lack of awareness for external threats in large states; second, social homogeneity and proximity in small states vs. heterogeneity and distance in large states; third, institutional centralization and concentration of power in small states vs. specialization and de-centralization in large states. The effect of country size and these three characteristic features on different aspects of procedural state performance is analyzed in three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 develops the argument that small country size favors the stability of political regimes, namely authoritarian monarchies. It iterates between theoretical reflections and the empirical analysis of different data: statistical data on population size and monarchic regime durability between 1946 and 2008; two most similar comparative cases of monarchic regimes, Egypt and Jordan; and supposedly deviant cases. Chapter 3 investigates the effect of population size on the effectiveness of national bureaucracies and expects a trade-off between economies and diseconomies of scale. It estimates multivariate OLS regression models and within-between random effects models for more than 150 countries. The analysis supports the hypothesized inverse U-shaped relation and finds that administrative effectiveness is highest, ceteris paribus, at medium levels of population size. Chapter 4 consists of a comparative case study of Germany and Luxembourg and investigates whether country size affected how the two states prepared for and reacted to the 2015 migration crisis. The analysis builds on newspaper articles and 20 expert interviews. It shows that Luxembourg’s small size favored identities and structures that allowed early crisis recognition and preparation as well as swift communication and coordination, whereas Germany’s large size led to attention biases that inhibited a quick reaction. In sum, the findings show that country size affects several aspects of state performance, which has important normative and practical implications. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 05/2020 Y1 - 2020 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-36808 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3680 N1 - List of individual papers and pre-publications This cumulative dissertation consists of an envelope (chapters 1 and 5) and three stand-alone research papers (chapters 2, 3 and 4). All three papers are single-authored. Chapter 2 has been published with minor changes as: Jugl, Marlene. 2020. “Country Size and the Survival of Authoritarian Monarchies: Developing a New Argument.” Democratization 27 (2): 283-301. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2019.1689960 Chapter 3 has been published as: Jugl, Marlene. 2019. “Finding the Golden Mean: Country Size and the Performance of National Bureaucracies.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 29 (1): 118–32. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muy044 N1 - Shelf mark: 2020D006 + 2020D006+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - König, Franca T1 - EU Police Cooperation (1976 - 2016). State Preferences in the Context of Differentiated Integration N2 - European internal security has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Various incidents across EU Member States have demonstrated the transnationalisation of terrorism and organised crime as well as the need to work together to safeguard security in a progressively borderless Europe. Governments and citizens have consistently called for a growing role of the EU and coordinating at this level. In this light, it appears striking that different cooperation initiatives continue to mushroom inside and outside the EU framework. Their parallel emergence duplicates efforts at best but can also obstruct information exchange and produce security failures. This dissertation sets out to investigate why Member States acknowledge the benefits of integration, yet advance differentiation as well. Concretely, it studies the formation of state preferences in the still largely intergovernmental field of EU police cooperation. It asks which factors shape government positions and how they drive Member States to favour integration. In particular, the influence of cross-country interdependencies, politicisation and policy entrepreneurship might help explain processes of integration and differentiation in this policy area. Their relative importance as drivers of state preferences is studied across the institutional development of EU police cooperation between 1976 and 2016. The analysis is organised around four ‘milestones’ in the integration of this field: 1) the 1976 intergovernmental Trevi Group; 2) the 1995 Europol Convention establishing the European Police Office (Europol); (3) the 2009 Europol Council Decision establishing Europol as official EU agency; and (4) the 2016 Europol Regulation. This dissertation finds that interdependencies in the fight against common threats mattered most as driver of state integration preferences in the early stages of European police cooperation. More recently, supranational policy entrepreneurship has emerged as key influence of pro-integration attitudes among Member States and can be expected to grow in importance. Politicisation, against it, provides windows of opportunity to this end and acts rather as amplifier of integration pressure from interdependencies and policy entrepreneurs. In sum, the asymmetrical effects of all three drivers explains the formation of diverging governmental attitudes towards integration and can thus help account for the persistence of parallel processes of differentiation and integration. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 07/2019 Y1 - 2019 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-31074 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3107 N1 - Please contact the Hertie library team (library@hertie-school.org) for access. N1 - Shelf mark: 2019D013 + 2019D013+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Pardo, Nicolas T1 - Essays in Behavioral Public Economics N2 - This dissertation uses detailed micro data to shed light on issues affecting decision making in the administration of public resources. By helping to understand these dynamics, it informs the design of more effective policies, which ultimately translates into an increase in social welfare. In particular, it studies the role of cognitive limitations and social dynamics on the collection and use of public resources. The analysis of this question is carried out in three separate chapters, using administrative data at the sub-national level in a variety of settings. The first chapter analyzes the presence of interactions between economic agents on the expenditure side of public finances. Specially, it studies the presence of fiscal interactions on the expenditure decisions of local governments in Colombia. The next two chapters focus on the revenue side of public finances, and analyze the role of social norms and cognitive limitations on individual compliance in two different settings. The second chapter studies the role of intergenerational transmission of social norms on property tax compliance in Argentina. Finally, the third chapter investigates the effect of salience and information simplification on timely compliance for the payment of speeding tickets in the Czech Republic. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 06/2019 Y1 - 2019 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-31034 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3103 N1 - Shelf mark: 2019D012 + 2019D012+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Seidel, Sebastian T1 - Organizational Imprints under Pressure: The Role of Value Systems in Engaging with External Institutional Demands N2 - Organizations are under constant pressure from changing institutions (such as laws, public opinion, or societal norms) to react and perform in certain ways. However, these external institutional demands can sometimes run contrary to the organization’s declared value system. Between 1949 and 2016, successive changes in Germany’s social sector transformed the institutional external environment for German welfare associations, calling into question the legitimacy of their dominance in civil society in general and especially in the context of welfare provision. This comparative case study traces the development of the respective value systems of two of the main German welfare associations during that period. The two cases – Deutscher Caritas-verband (Caritas) and Deutscher Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband Gesamtverband (the Paritätischer) – were selected for their contrasting value systems within the spectrum of German welfare associations. For the purposes of this study, value systems are understood as consistent imprinted perceptual frameworks that normatively shape and influence behavior, and external institutional demands are defined as implicit or explicit requests made from outside an organization towards the organizations by integrated systems of formal and informal rules and patterns, which structure social interactions and constitute the social environment an organization operates in. The analysis explores how such seemingly persistent value systems change over time, and how the demands made by external institutions increase or diminish explicit reference to that value system. Drawing on the membership magazines and newspapers (or “corpus”) of the two selected associations, the analysis indicates that the value system of Catholicism initially shielded Caritas from external institutional demands until the observed level of Catholic and religious language diminished and the organization became more ex-posed to episodic change within the sector. In contrast, pluralism enabled the Paritätischer to engage more readily with the four episodes of self-help, German reunification, privatization, and social innovation, from the beginning of the study period. In tracing how the two associations engaged with these episodes, the findings con-firm that the language associated with an organization’s imprinted value system changes over time. Here, two distinct types of imprinted value system – resisting and diaphanous – respectively shielded or enabled engagement with external institutional demands, and a framework is proposed to model the consequences of these differences. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 01/2020 Y1 - 2020 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-31105 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3110 N1 - Shelf mark: 2020D001 + 2020D001+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Rehmert, Jochen T1 - Selecting the Right Type of Personnel BT - The Role of Party Membership in Shaping the Behavior of Candidates and Members of Parliament N2 - Party membership seems to lose importance for political careers. In the wake of political dealignment and dwindling numbers in party membership, an increasing number of parties have started to recruit candidates without prior party membership. What are the implications of this trend in elite recruitment for candidate loyalty, party unity and legislators' activity in parliament? This thesis empirically addresses these questions by making use of several novel and self-collected quantitative data-sets. First, the thesis explores the formal eligibility criteria within parties that aspirants for candidacies have to fulfill. By using data based on roughly 500 self-collected (historical) party constitutions, data on parties' parliamentary voting records and candidate survey data, this thesis finds that candidacy eligibility criteria that presume a minimum length of prior party membership are associated with greater party unity and candidate loyalty. Secondly, I explore how prior party membership affects to behavior of legislators. Expectations generated from social identity theory are put to empirical tests using data on all Member of Parliament of the German Bundestag from 1953 to 2013, and their voting behavior on unwhipped votes. Longer spells of prior and active party membership are associated with greater coherence, theorized to be the product of socialization processes into parties' norms and values. Finally, the consequences of long-term party membership respective the lack thereof are investigated by taking advantage of the Japanese case. I explore the behavioral differences of candidates nominated through open recruitment and those nominated through traditional channels, as has been practiced by major Japanese parties. I _nd that those candidates nominated under open recruitment, oftentimes lacking prior party membership and political experience, are ill-prepared for legislative office at the national level. Compared to their more traditional colleagues, these candidates are less active in parliament. In conclusion, this thesis finds that party membership matters on such dimensions as party unity and legislative activity, and that it is (enforced) intra-party socialization processes that help prepare the individual candidate for the responsibilities of legislative office. Thus, this thesis contributes to the literature of candidate selection – by looking at eligibility criteria – and legislative studies – by assessing the former's consequentiality. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 04/2019 Y1 - 2019 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-30249 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3024 N1 - Chapter 2 has also been published as "Candidacy Eligibility Criteria and Party Unity" in Comparative Political Studies, https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019897700 Chapter 4 has also been published as "Behavioral Consequences of Open Candidate Recruitment" in Legislative Studies Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12283 N1 - Shelf mark: 2019D005 + 2019D005+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Zuber, Julian T1 - Rawls for Realists: An Empirical Investigation of the Relationship between National Attachment and Social Justice N2 - Researchers have long inquired about the “positive” (or “good”) effects of national attachment on in-group solidarity, and its potential “negative” (or “bad”) effects on outgroup derogation. Put simply, there is a concern that while national attachment may foster solidarity and trust, it could also increase out-group derogation through nationalism or anti-immigrant sentiments. In Chapter 2, I discuss the political theory of John Rawls and introduce a realist critique of his ideal theory of social justice. I argue that national attachment and how it operates in the real world are a potential factual constraint on Rawls’ theory. This theoretical prelude frames the empirical chapters of this dissertation (Chapters 3-5), all of which study the effects of national attachment on social justice preferences. I describe this empirical perspective on national attachment and social justice as “Rawls for Realists.” In Chapter 3, I use observational data to investigate the relationship between national attachment and support of social justice principles. I show that national attachment increases support for redistribution, but only among individuals with lower levels of “Openness to Experience” (a core personality trait). To the best of my knowledge, this is the first study to combine datasets on personality, national attachment, and redistribution. In Chapter 4, I use observational data to investigate the relationship between national pride and anti-immigrant sentiments. I show that, counter to common perceptions, national pride does not increase and may, in fact, even decrease anti-immigrant sentiments among nativists, the social group most opposed to immigration. I explain this by arguing that nativists perceive immigrants as a symbolic threat to their values and norms, and not as an economic threat. As national pride increases group esteem among nativists, it reduce the perception of symbolic threats. In Chapter 5, I analyse original experimental data from a survey experiment to explore the relationship between in-group commitment and out-group derogation. A first video treatment primes only national attachment; a second treatment primes national attachment and perception of threat. I show that only the second treatment increases anti-immigrant sentiments and nationalism, suggesting the centrality of perceived threat for out-group derogation. This perceived threat treatment also increases respondents’ belief in democracy but does not affect preferences for social justice. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 05/2019 Y1 - 2019 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-30300 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3030 N1 - Shelf mark: 2019D008 + 2019D008+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Gilroy, Patrick T1 - EU Think Tanks: Innovation, Independence and Impact N2 - Think tanks have become taken-for-granted actors in contemporary governance, both inside but also beyond nation-states. This dissertation tackles the research puzzles of innovativeness, independence and impact for policy institutes operating at EU level. It argues that EU think tanks such as Bruegel or Centre for European Policy Studies inhabit a transnational organizational field, clustered in Brussels but extended beyond. What is the novelty behind their organizational forms and practices? Which leeway of action do they have in practice, given their funding and human resource situations? And what is the significance of EU think tanks, of their networks and hybrid experts? Against the backdrop of existing studies, these questions are empirically explored in a multi-method research effort: a primary databases on 85 EU think tanks; in-depth data on 39 Brussels-based institutes’ financial, human and symbolic resources; 80 semi-structured expert interviews with EU think tank leaders and core constituencies; network analysis based on biographical data from 2,080 EU think tank professionals; and standardized survey results from 671 randomly sampled European Commission officials asked how they use EU think tanks (24 percent response rate) are presented. EU think tanks, I show, are prime study sites for organizational institutionalist theory. After mapping the present field, its historical emergence and expansion is retraced to discover why and how transnational think tanks organize and behave as they do. At the crossroads of academia, politics, business and media, Brussels institutes’ resource dependencies and think tankers’ backgrounds are scrutinized, as are their sectoral and organizational ties, their roles and professional identity. In filling these empirical and knowledge gaps, conceptual and methodological frontiers of think tank research are pushed, namely on their originality, networks or socio-structural effects - reviving the research agenda on transnational think tanks, upgrading previous accounts of EU think tanks, aligning EU- with the latest advances in US scholarship, and linking the struggle of think tanks – as knowledge-intensive civil society actors in complex task environments – for survival, for legitimacy and impact to institutionalist perspectives. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 02/2019 KW - Think tanks; European Union; organizational field; institutionalism; network analysis; institutional logics; non-profit management; knowledge society; global civil society Y1 - 2019 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-29152 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-2915 N1 - Shelf mark: 2019D006 + 2019D006+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Rabe, Wiebke T1 - Interests, Institutions and Provincial outward FDI in China N2 - This dissertation presents a comparative qualitative analysis on the determinants of provincial outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in China. During the last decade, China’s OFDI turned into a provincial phenomenon. In 2015, 97 percent of Chinese investors came from provinces and municipalities with only ten provinces and municipalities accounting for more than 60 percent of China’s total OFDI flow. These provincial investors tend to be private companies, often of small and medium size, accounting sometimes for more than 70 percent of the officially approved investment projects of a province in a given year. While mainstream theory of OFDI suggests, that foreign investors need certain advantages when they engage in overseas projects, these provincial investors are often distinct; unlike large central state-owned enterprises (SOEs), they are often confronted with financial constraints, difficulties to access relevant information, and lack international experience. However, they are able to invest in distant regions that lack political stability and good infrastructure as well as in regions that have strong international competitors. This dissertation asks: Why do some Chinese provinces have such high OFDI, despite their investors often facing multiple impediments? Whereas previous research considered the determinants for Chinese OFDI mostly through a firm-level lens of motivations enriching it with institutional theory, few studies step up to the provincial level. This research argues that a combination of provincial path dependencies, provincial institutional configurations and multiple actors’ interests can explain the phenomenon at hand. While path dependencies offer insights into conducive initial conditions that provide a basis for provincial OFDI patterns and growth, provincial formal and informal institutional configurations can explain how enterprises are able to reduce their additional costs and risks associated with foreign investment activities. Finally, provincial interests by bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic actors explain the emergence of these institutional configurations. These have developed due to strategic-alignment of OFDI policies with provincial economic conditions, and as a side effect of other revenue-seeking non-political and foreign actors, who are present in these provinces. Designed as an inductive endeavour, this dissertation bases results on fieldwork with 66 interviews in two provinces, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, as well as Chinese primary sources. It addresses a gap in and offers an alternative perspective to the literature on the determinants of Chinese OFDI. It also contributes to the literature on spatial variation and provincial policy-making and implementation in China, which has not studied the case of OFDI so far. In theoretical terms, it discusses the limitations of the distinction between and the blurriness of formal and informal institutional configurations at the given case. On most abstract terms, this research contends that China’s global integration into the world economy is far from being an overall trend. Instead, it should be understood as a spatially uneven phenomenon with some provinces and regions being not only more integrated than others, but being a major force behind this process. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 01/2019 Y1 - 2019 N1 - Shelf mark: 2019D004 + 2019D004+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Metz, Ashley T1 - Valuation Beyond the Market: Power, concepts and categories N2 - This thesis takes the core concept of valuation beyond the market and looks at it from three different angles: (1) a field-level study that investigates how domination becomes naturalized and thus, the role of systemic power in determining how practices, beliefs and attitudes become the dominant or valued way of working in an emerging field, (2) a literature review that organizes concepts from valuation studies by approaches to generate non-economic value and raises questions about the relationship between organizations and the value they create, and (3) an organization-level study that investigates how categorization, a valuation process, can be a way to scale social impact and create institutional change. The first paper is called “Systemic Power in the Field of Impact Investing: Pathways to domination and emerging field ideologies”. It is an equal authored paper with Lisa Hehenberger and Johanna Mair. It is an empirical study of the emerging field of impact investing in Europe. In it, we investigate the power dynamics that mark the trajectory of a field in an emergent stage and identify the process of suppression and three modes by which field ideologies take shape. We ask: How is domination naturalized? How can we surface underlying sets of ideas held by groups of actors in emerging fields of practice in order to study the process of domination? The study traces the emergence of a field ideology that values certain ideals, for example, scaling over local solutions and measuring impact vs. telling stories. We introduce the concept of field ideologies and aim to contribute to organizational theory discussions of domination and institutional theory more broadly. The second paper is called “The Vocabulary of Valuation: Tools for investigating the changing nature of social purpose organizing”. It structures and relates valuation studies concepts to non-market settings and develops the concept of the born-rational organization and a research agenda for what valuation does to organizations and what valuation can mean for this type of organization. In it, I ask: What areas of future research emerge from an integration of valuation literature with management work on socially- and environmentally-driven organizations? The paper establishes the need for empirical research that investigates valuation topics at social purpose organizations. It aims to contribute to organizational research on non-market value creation and highlights the need to investigate value- or impact- creation strategies. Lastly, the third paper is called “Categories as Impact Drivers: How a social-purpose organization enables the emergence of a new category as a means to scale and as a mode of institutional change”. It is an empirical study of a national nonprofit organization in the United States and how it seeks to maximize its impact. In it, I ask: How does an organization create a category as an impact driver? The study investigates how a ‘born rational’ organization acts and organizes and ultimately, how it adopts a unique approach to scaling and change through a category. I develop a process model of category creation for impact that involves two interlinked processes: impact reactivity and category impact work. The study aims to contribute to organizational theory discussions of approaches to social challenges, scaling and change. It also calls for attention to categories in non-market strategy. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 9/2018 Y1 - 2020 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-32053 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-3205 N1 - Cumulative Dissertation. Published article: Metz, A. (2019): The Assembly of a Field Ideology: An Idea-Centric Perspective on Systemic Power in Impact Investing, in: Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 62, No. 6, 1672–1704. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2017.1402 N1 - Shelf mark: 2020D002 + 2020D002+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Kreilinger, Valentin T1 - National parliaments in Europe’s post-crisis economic governance N2 - This dissertation provides a comprehensive account of the role of national parliaments in Europe’s post-crisis economic governance. It examines national parliaments in the European Semester, in relation to the European Stability Mechanism and the Interparliamentary Conference on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance and challenges the view that the Euro crisis has only reduced the influence of national parliaments. The analysis moves beyond prerogatives and institutional capacities to actual parliamentary involvement. Scrutinising the different stages of the European Semester remains a challenge for many national parliaments that have been marginalised by this multilevel coordination and surveillance process. In case of the third rescue package for Greece, the overall involvement by national parliaments exceeded what legal provisions would have demanded. But both economic governance domains suffer from asymmetries between those national parliaments that are willing and able to become actually involved and those that are not. One possible remedy against these asymmetries would be to involve national parliaments into economic governance collectively. The provision of Article 13 TSCG and the Interparliamentary Conference established on this basis, however, fall short of collective involvement or joint scrutiny and the experience of negotiating the institutional design of the new Conference even suggests that any kind of joint parliamentary body for the Euro area would be very difficult to realise. As a general overhaul of the Economic and Monetary Union seems indispensable to make the common currency weather-proof, a more symmetric involvement of national parliaments is necessary to strengthen the legitimacy that they supply. In the European Semester this could be achieved via minimum standards for parliamentary involvement, but the tangled web of procedures for ESM rescue packages is likely to persist and interparliamentary cooperation can only be developed incrementally. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 08/2018 Y1 - 2019 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-27309 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-2730 N1 - Shelf mark: 2019D001 + 2019D001+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Markgraf, Jonas T1 - Politicians as Bankers. The Mechanisms and Consequences of Politically Influenced Banking N2 - Linkages between politics and banks are prevalent in developing and advanced countries and take various shapes. Among the more overt forms of political interference is direct political control over individual banks. Yet, the channels through which politicians exert control over banks and how they benefit from ties to banks is not entirely clear. This dissertation uses granular panel data from politically influenced and publicly owned banks in Germany and Spain and conducts a systematic, quantitatively rigorous analysis of the mechanisms and political consequences of political control over banks. The cumulative dissertation addresses three related questions: chapter 2 asks whether appointments to banks are politically motivated and considers its potential implications for bank managers’ career incentives. It looks at appointment patterns of bank managers in formally independent Spanish savings banks and finds that banks’ managers face an increased turnover risk shortly after elections and under new governments. Coalition partners and banks’ institutional architecture, however, constrain politicians’ ability to replace bank managers. The findings reveal political patronage in independent banks and show that politicians wield considerable influence even in banks that are not publicly owned. In chapter 3, the dissertation examines how politics within banks’ boards influences banks’ loan provision before elections and focuses on the role of politicians in boards of German savings banks. Using detailed information about political representation in bank boards and loan data, I show that election-induced lending is pronounced (i) when the chairperson of the bank holds a political office, (ii) when the board consists of many politicians, and (iii) when political board members come from the same party. The effect is driven by savings banks with political chairpersons from counties and from the conservative party. Finally, chapter 4 is concerned with the electoral consequences of politics-bank linkages and asks whether politicians benefit from those ties. I consider the case of German savings banks to assess whether board seats in banks give local politicians a leg up in elections. I find that mayors with a savings bank seat have higher odds of winning reelection than mayors without a seat and show that, in particular, conservative mayors benefit from bank connections. The dissertation, hence, presents empirical evidence about the politics of politically influenced banking unveiling the channels through which politicians control banks and how they benefit electorally from it. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 07/2018 Y1 - 2018 N1 - Shelf mark: 2019D002 + 2019D002+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Mangold, Janina T1 - Philanthropic Foundations in Higher Education – Comparative Perspectives from the United States and Germany N2 - To what extent do regime classifications help us understand higher education funding by foundations vis-à-vis the state? This dissertation investigates the explanatory value of three prominent regime classifications – Varieties of Capitalism, Three Worlds of Welfare, and Social Origins theory – for understanding higher education foundations in two regime types: the liberal United States as well as corporatist Germany. The analysis shows that the classifications do indeed provide a good starting point since they enable us to draw conclusions about the country and activity field level. However, the analysis also shows that they meet their limits when philanthropic foundations are added to the picture since the classifications are not specific enough to correctly predict foundation behavior. The typology proposed in this study suggests that foundations can be placed on a continuum between funding through higher education to reach other aims and funding of higher education for its own sake. The place of foundations on the continuum is different in the sense that the rather market-oriented, liberal US foundations are more likely to support other aims through higher education, while the rather stateoriented, corporatist-conservative German foundations more often want to support higher education for its own sake. This study draws upon a range of both quantitative and qualitative data: German and American data sets including university funding statistics, 40 qualitative foundation vignettes, a representative survey of 1,004 German foundations, one focus group, and 49 semi-structured expert interviews conducted on-site. One of the study’s major contributions is that it refines the regime classifications by considering the understudied role of independent, philanthropic foundations supporting the advancement of higher education. Furthermore, it establishes the first link between regime types and higher education literature by way of philanthropic foundations. As there is growing discussion in Germany and the US about private engagement versus public funding in higher education, the results ultimately have contemporary relevance for understanding the topic in a comparative manner. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 06/2018 Y1 - 2019 SN - 978-3-658-27386-6 SN - 978-3-658-27387-3 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27387-3 N1 - Published by Springer VS. The book is available in the Hertie School library. N1 - Shelf mark: 2019D009 + 2019D009+1 PB - Springer VS CY - Wiesbaden ER - TY - THES A1 - Terzi, Alessio T1 - Essays on economic growth: institutions and policies N2 - This dissertation is on general principles of growth, comprising of three chapters and a short introduction. Chapter 1 analyses the macroeconomic adjustment experienced in IMF/EU-programme countries during the Eurozone crisis by creating counterfactuals based on comparable historical or contemporaneous episodes worldwide. It therefore shows how crisis management and the institutional framework in which it operates have important implications for the depth of the recession. In particular, an incomplete Eurozone institutional setup contributed to aggravate the crisis through higher uncertainty. The first general principle that can be drawn is that sustained growth rests not only in preventing booms but also in designing institutions that well-manage busts. When growth slows down, calls for deep structural reforms multiply. However, estimations of the short- and medium-term impact of these reforms on GDP growth remain methodologically problematic and still highly controversial. As such, Chapter 2 estimates the impact of 23 wide-reaching structural reform packages (including both real and financial sector measures) rolled out in 22 countries between 1961 and 2000. It therefore illustrates how large reform packages tend to have on average a positive medium-term impact on growth, but these effects were highly heterogeneous across countries. The second general principle that can be drawn is that deep economic reforms are no growth silver bullet per se, and rather require careful design, tailored to local conditions. Finally, Chapter 3 explores factors behind the largest growth acceleration episodes that took place worldwide between 1962 and 2002 and identifies general principles that should underlie a successful growth strategy. In particular, it shows how accelerationstend to be preceded by a deep recession and major economic policy changes. Once this information is combined with a set of counterfactual analyses, it finds that acceleration strategies should not contain off-the-shelf approaches or necessarily all-encompassing ‘shock therapy’solutions. Despite standard growth determinants doing a fairly good job at characterising successful accelerations, the quest for take-offs remains elusive, as they seemextremely hard to engineer with a high degree of certainty. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 05/2018 Y1 - 2018 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-27087 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-2708 N1 - Shelf mark: 2018D005 + 2018D005+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Förster, Sarah T1 - Philanthropic Foundations and Social Welfare. A Comparative Study of Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom (England) N2 - This dissertation project investigates philanthropic foundations as organizational form in the social welfare field with a special focus on its institutional embedding in different European welfare systems. To do so, it draws on literature from political economy that provides different regime type classifications: Three especially fruitful approaches can be found in the »Varieties of Capitalism« (VoC) approach based on Hall and Soskice (7889), the »Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism« by Esping-Andersen (9::8), and – specifically with regard to the third sector – the »Social Origins Theory« as originally described by Salamon and Anheier (9::<). The existing welfare regime literature clusters countries according to certain main drivers and identifies differences in welfare state systems. This dissertation asks, can we learn something on the organizational level about the embedding of philanthropic foundations in the field of social welfare? Foundation literature is dominated by an anglophile perspective which mainly focuses on grant-making foundations. However, these represent only one type of foundation; other varieties exist alongside them. Operating foundations are widely neglected in social science research but play an important role, especially in the history of social welfare provision in European countries. In particular, one type of operating foundation, the carrier foundation, mainly functions as a service provider in the field and thus plays a significant role in any understanding of the foundation landscape in the social welfare field. This investigation is based on the comparative insights from three country cases of Germany, Sweden and the UK (England). Guided by propositions from the theoretical research, comparative explorative case studies based on interview data and secondary sources give insights into the field and the embedding of philanthropic social welfare foundations in the three different welfare state systems. Investigating the range of foundations in social welfare permits a differentiated view of the different types of foundations. Each has different levels of independence from external constraints and are embedded to different degrees according to the propositions from welfare regime theory. These differences hold further implications for the investigation of foundations as a special organizational form. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 04/2018 Y1 - 2018 N1 - Printed copies available in the Hertie School library. Dissertation also published by Springer VG Print ISBN 978-3-658-28498-5 Online ISBN 978-3-658-28499-2 N1 - Shelf mark: 2019D011 + 2019D011+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Lill, Felix T1 - Conflict or solidarity? Intergenerational relations in the face of population ageing. A comparison of Germany and Japan. N2 - Summary This dissertation investigates whether population ageing is associated with a distribution-based intergenerational conflict. While comparing two pioneers of ageing, Germany and Japan, the analysis attempts to show tendencies that are relevant for a wider set of countries amid their own demographic developmental paths. Studying intergenerational relations on both the societal and the family level, this analysis is more nuanced than previous studies. A two-dimensional typology is proposed to define four ideal scenarios of intergenerational relations, of which intergenerational conflict is one case (consisting of weak solidarity on both the societal and the family level). Narrowing down the scope of analysis from the aggregate to the family and individual level, intergenerational solidarity is first presented based on National Transfer Accounts data. This discussion shows how public and private (financial) transfers secure the lives of individuals over the life cycle with elderly persons being net receivers of public transfers and net donors of private transfers. Onwards, the evolution of intergenerational solidarity is discussed in the context of political, economic and institutional factors, such as family. On the societal level, this study draws on the literature of labour market dualisation, Rueda’s insideroutsider model, and Mannheim’s concept of political generations. Based on data from the International Social Survey Programme, spanning over 20 years (1996-2016), policy preferences regarding government expenditure on old-age are found to differ with regard to age, cohort and employment status. Results show that intergenerational societal solidarity has remained strong in Germany but has vanished in Japan. On the family level, intergenerational relations are studied based on theories of saving and transfer giving, together with the concepts of social care and de-familialisation policies. Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement, covering 11 (2004-2015) and 6 years (2007-2013) respectively, financial and non-financial transfer giving between generations is scrutinised. Results show strong solidarity within families for both countries. In comparison, Germany appears to find itself in a more favourable position to sustain its unwritten contract of intergenerational sharing consisting of the public and private sector. In Japan, signs of a political generation are emerging, whose interests differ significantly from those of older generations regarding the role of the welfare state. Developments in Japan may have repercussions for the design of the welfare state in years to come. [...] T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 03/2018 Y1 - 2018 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-25231 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-2523 N1 - Shelf mark: 2018D002 + 2018D002+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Brumm, Elias Franziskus T1 - Essays on the Political Economy of Crisis and Reform N2 - The severe political and economic repercussions of the "euro crisis" during the last decade have revealed the necessity for an improved understanding of both the determinants of sovereign debt crises and the political economy of structural reforms. This dissertation, which consists of three self-contained papers, contributes to these research areas. In the first paper, we investigate the interaction of fiscal federalism and sovereign default risk. Numerous countries with chronic external debt problems are characterized by inefficient federal fiscal structures. However, the impact of a country's federal design on sovereign default risk has barely been studied in previous work. This paper aims to address this gap. We develop a stylized model of a federation in which regions borrow individually from international lenders while the central government decides whether to default on aggregate sovereign debt. We show that decentralized borrowing leads to higher debt levels, at higher bond yields, an increased default probability and lower welfare compared to a benchmark scenario of centralized borrowing. Moreover, differing regional default costs further increase aggregate welfare losses through distorted regional borrowing incentives. Case studies of Argentina and the euro area illustrate the channels described in the model. The second paper analyzes how domestic distributional incentives influence sovereign default on debt held by foreign creditors. In a simple political economy model, we show that external default can serve as a redistributive policy similar to distortionary income taxation. The channel we derive builds on recent evidence which suggests that the output costs of default are mainly incurred by high-income households, whereas relatively poor ones benefit due to smaller public spending cuts. Although the potentially important role of income heterogeneity among domestic agents has attracted comparatively little attention in previous work, historical evidence is in line with our argument. In the third paper (with Johannes Brumm), we argue that an important determinant of voters' support for economic reform is the strength of family ties. While the "crisis hypothesis" predicts that crises facilitate reform, we show in a political economy model that this relation can break down, and even reverse, when agents take into account the effect of reform on their family members. Applied to southern European countries with strong family ties, the model rationalizes why the extremely high (youth) unemployment following the Great Recession has not led to more substantial labor market reforms. In such countries austerity might block rather than foster additional structural reforms. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 02/2018 KW - Sovereign debt KW - Fiscal federalism KW - Income inequality KW - Structural reforms KW - Youth unemployment Y1 - 2018 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-25065 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-2506 N1 - Shelf mark: 2018D001 + 2018D001+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Freudlsperger, Christian T1 - More voice, less exit. Sub-federal Resistance to International Procurement Liberalisation in the European Union, the United States and Canada N2 - Via an agenda of “deep trade”, global trade governance has increasingly intruded into domestic regulatory space. This is all the more relevant in federally-organised polities in which competencies now subjected to international rule-setting are constituent units’ prerogatives. In many federations, the field of public procurement is a case in point. At the same time, sub-federal executives’ resistance to international procurement liberalisation has varied vastly across federations. While EU member states’ resistance has remained low, US states’ resistance has persisted and increased in recent years. The Canadian provinces, in turn, have only recently begun to open their procurement markets to foreign suppliers. In an attempt to explain this puzzling variance in sub-federal resistance, this Dissertation argues that federations’ domestic institutional and procedural foundations bear an influence on policy outcomes in trade liberalisation. Relying on the concepts of “exit” and “voice” (Hirschman 1970), it posits that sub-federal executives’ voice is inversely related to their reliance on exit. The more voice sub-federal executives are equipped with, the less they dispose of an incentive to exit from a system-wide policy or international commitment. Voice hinges, firstly, on a federation’s institutional configuration. Council federalism, providing constituent units with a direct representation in federation-wide policy-making, endows sub-federal executives with more voice than senate federalism which relies on indirect forms of territorial representation. It depends, secondly, on the nature of vertical relations between both orders of government. Constituent units enjoy more voice when their relations with the federal level are collaborative, marked by formalised patterns of joint policy-making, rather than competitive, pursuing a delineation of federal and subfederal spheres of competence. In case studies of the United States, Canada and the European Union, the Dissertation finds that the posited inverse relationship between sub-federal voice and exit holds and that resistance among sub-federal executives has indeed evolved systematically. In the US senate federation, effective means of joint policy-making have not evolved in the noncoercive field of procurement. In the Canadian case, increasing vertical collaboration has compensated provinces for senate federalism’s low voice. In comparison, the EU case proves peculiar for constituent units’ decisive role in its second chamber federalism and the dense regime of trusting vertical collaboration it accommodates. Member states’ low resistance is a manifestation of the EU trade regime’s comparatively effective workings. Eventually, the dissertation’s findings hint at an appropriate institutional and procedural design for international rule-setting in multi-level settings. If federal executives seek to subject sub-federal prerogatives to international constraints, they should allow for constituent units’ continuous, systematic and collaborative inclusion. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 01/2018 Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-2529 N1 - Shelf mark: 2019D003 + 2019D003+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Ioan, Alexandra T1 - Strategizing in highly institutionalized environments. Social enterprises in Germany N2 - The dissertation focuses on the strategizing activities of new-style social enterprises in the highly institutionalized German social service provision sector. More specifically, it focuses on understanding and highlighting the characteristics of highly institutionalized environments taking the case of Germany, and then examines how smaller new entrants strategize in these environments in order to achieve their goals. This is important because there is more limited understanding of how small new entrants operate in highly institutionalized contexts, which is likely to differ from other types of contexts. The study is built upon a qualitative research design with three in-depth case studies of social enterprises at its core, which were investigated through semi-structured interviews, organizational observation, and secondary data analysis. The inductive analytical process resulted in the following findings. Firstly, a highly institutionalized field is characterized by stability and density of institutional conditions that manifest through four characteristics: a high regulatory degree, strongly embedded established social service providers, strong and stable financial resource flows and high stability of cognitive schemes regarding social service provision. Secondly, the strategizing activities of smaller new entrants highlight the important balance between compliance to, and divergence from, institutional prescriptions and expectations that organizations experience. In order to achieve their organizational goals in this environment, social enterprises develop four strategizing areas in order to manage divergence: problem specification, interaction with established providers, mobilizing financial resources and mobilizing symbolic resources. The findings contribute to previous research in three ways. Firstly, they contribute to a better specification of highly institutionalized fields based on the perceptions of organizations operating in these environments. Secondly, the findings contribute to the understanding of simultaneous compliant and divergent organizational behavior and its connection to concrete institutions. Thirdly, the findings provide a more fine-grained understanding of the strategizing areas available to and used by new entrants in highly institutional fields in order to cope with the institutional forces that they encounter. This sheds light on the importance of differentiating between types of organizations and types of fields in order to understand the dynamics and the interplay between institutions and the capacity for action of organizations. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 09/2017 Y1 - 2018 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-25303 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-2530 N1 - Shelf mark: 2018D003 + 2018D003+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Falkenhain, Mariella T1 - Institutional gaps and the governance dilemma in hybrid regimes N2 - Are formal institutions always the rules of the game? In hybrid regimes, the surprising answer is no. Formal institutions regularly fail to shape actor expectations and guide behavior. As a result, gaps between formal rules and their actual implementation or longer term effects are a typical feature of these regimes in the gray area between democracy and authoritarianism. Such gaps occur and persist depending largely on the level of government control, the strength of the institutional environment, and the existence of informal institutions. They affect various actors and can present important governance dilemmas for NGOs and the state. This study draws on extensive field work, semistructured interviews, document retrieval, and participant observation to explain the sources and implications of gaps by comparing the two policy fields of social protection and criminal justice in post-Soviet Armenia and Georgia. The arguments resulting from the systematic analysis of the four in-depth case studies are extended by a comparison of gaps across regime types, and a discussion of gap varieties in hybrid regimes as diverse as Malaysia, Kenya, and Russia. By proposing a middle-range theory on institutional gaps in hybrid regimes, this research advances institutional theory by counterbalancing the empirical emphasis on advanced capitalist democracies with insights from hybrid regimes. It also contributes to NGO research by suggesting a context-sensitive approach to organizational behavior and extends a nascent research agenda on the day-to-day governance of hybrid regimes. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 08/2017 Y1 - 2017 N1 - Published as "Falkenhain, Mariella (2020): Weak Institutions and the Governance Dilemma: Gaps as Traps." https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-hsog/frontdoor/index/index/start/0/rows/10/sortfield/score/sortorder/desc/searchtype/simple/query/falkenhain/docId/3444 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39742-5 N1 - Shelf mark: 2017D010 + 2017D010+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Schneidemesser, von, Dirk T1 - Intermedia Mobility in the Public Sphere. Framing Bikesharing in Mass Media and Social Media across Three Cultures N2 - Accompanying developments in communication technologies and practices, new possibilities emerge for actors to participate in public debate on political issues. While the influence of traditional mass media on public opinion formation processes in the public sphere has been firmly established, the rise of digital media adds complexity to communication processes that are only beginning to be understood. This research aims to add to the understanding of how social media contributes to the normative goals of the public sphere. Much of the research at the nexus of digital media and the public sphere focuses on extraordinary issues or events such as revolutions or electoral politics, leaving a gap as to how everyday political issues are discussed and debated in a hybrid media context. This research addresses that gap by examining a non-sensational policy issue – bikesharing – in two public sphere arenas. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses of print media and Twitter texts are applied to compare and contrast these two mediums across three cases. This comparative approach using the German, North American, and Spanish cases offers insight into the role of social media in different traditional media systems. The findings indicate that while framing of the issue of bikesharing in print media is commonly reflected on Twitter, the reverse is seldom the case. Frame and issue spill-over from Twitter to print media was only found in the North American case, where the meaning of bikesharing represents the largest departure from the status-quo. Political and cultural contextual factors led print media frames to go unchallenged on Twitter in the Spanish case and the debate was channeled through a stronger political logic in the German case. There was an observed preference for obtrusive issue attributes when legitimizing positions for or against bikesharing on Twitter, suggesting a bias for experience-based rationale on that medium. Social media does not have a unified effect on the legitimacy and efficacy of the public sphere, rather political and cultural factors influence the role of social media in public debate as well as the efficacy of social media to help impact political decisions. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 07/2017 Y1 - 2017 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-25278 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-2527 N1 - Printed version with the title: The Public Sphere is Dead, Long Live the Public Sphere! Framing Bikesharing in Mass Media and Social Media across Three Cultures N1 - Shelf mark: 2017D009 + 2017D009+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Scherer, Nikolas T1 - Insuring against climate change : The global career of regional index insurance instruments N2 - One of the most prominent policy instruments currently put forward in a variety of climate change-related initiatives are ‘regional index insurance instruments’. These instruments are generically designed to protect states from a region from the economic consequences of natural disasters and allow quick access to capital in the case of a major catastrophe. What unites these insurances is that it is not the actual financial loss which triggers a payment, as in more traditional forms of insurance, but the occurrence of a pre-defined weather event (e.g. hurricane, drought, tsunami). The performance of one a pool of variables is thereby used as a proxy for the actual loss. Another characteristic is that the provision of the insurance cover is often supported through financial market instruments such as weather derivatives, catastrophe bonds or catastrophe swaps. That means, financial market investors operate as ‘insurer of last resort’. (...) T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 06/2017 Y1 - 2017 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-23053 N1 - See also: Scherer, Nikolas (2020): Insuring against climate change: The Emergence of Regional Catastrophe Risk Pools, Routledge, Abingdon/New York. Copies available at the Hertie School Library. N1 - Shelf mark: 2017D004 + 2017D004+1 ER - TY - THES A1 - Timeus, Krista T1 - Approach with care? A study on risk behaviour and innovation in the public sector N2 - The main aim of this dissertation is to explore how public professionals‘ risk behaviours affect the management of innovation processes. It addresses a gap in the literature because although risk is inseparable form innovation processes, there is very little literature focusing directly on the question of how risk affects innovation in the public sector context. The dissertation analyses this question in three main chapters: Chapter 2 asks ‗what types of risk do innovation managers perceive?‘ Through a qualitative analysis of interviews with ‗innovation managers‘ in Copenhagen municipality, the chapter finds that public managers and professionals working on public service innovation perceive different types of risk related to innovation depending on their position in the administrative hierarchy and on their proximity to service users. The analysis also showed that there is hardly any communication across hierarchical levels or policy divisions about risk. This can lead to intra-organisational conflicts that block innovation processes, and to blind spots in attempts to manage the risks of innovation. Chapter 3 focuses on whether blame and credit expectations impact support for innovation. This question is examined through a quasi-experimental research design consisting of an ‗experimental vignette survey‘ where respondents were assigned to different treatment groups and the effect of being promised blame or credit for innovation outcomes was analysed. The findings show that contrary to common expectations, how much respondents thought the innovation was beneficial was a much stronger predictor of whether they would support it than the expectation of blame or credit. At the very least, this questions the assumption that blame aversion is a primary behavioural barrier to innovation.(...) T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 05/2017 Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-2304 N1 - Shelf mark: 2017D001 + 2017D001+1 ER -