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This article investigates how the practice of European human rights, organised around the European Convention on Human Rights, can be brought into conversation with the practice conception of human rights advanced by Charles Beitz in the Idea of Human Rights. The article argues that this is a challenging task. Following Beitz’s construction of the human rights practice composed of (a) a global practice, (b) political discursive practice, (c) triggering a range of international action for corrective concern, (d) when states fail to protect urgent individual interests, the article identifies two main challenges: (1) the regional and legal-political character of the European human rights practice and (2) the lack of fit between the heuristic of urgency of individual interests and the European human rights practice. Having identified these challenges, however, I conclude that putting European human rights practice and the practice conception into a conversation reveals new knowledge at the intersection of moral and legal accounts of human rights. A closer engagement with the practice conception enables a better understanding of the key abstract features of European human rights practice. A closer engagement with this practice accentuates the normative case for making sense of predominantly legal and regional practices of human rights.
This paper explores the refugee recognition regime in Egypt, a major host of refugees in the Middle East and North Africa region and one of UNHCR’s largest refugee status determination operations. Although the situation of refugees in Egypt has been the subject of significant study, this paper seeks to address, through a desk-based study, the nature and performance of the refugee recognition regime in Egypt, in particular the norms, institutions, modes of recognition, quality of recognition processes and quality of protection that is available to refugees in Egypt. The main findings are detailed in this executive summary.
Do gender attitudes influence interactions with female judges in US circuit courts? In this paper, we propose a judge-specific measure of gender attitudes based on use of gender-stereotyped language in the judge's authored opinions. Exploiting quasi-random assignment of judges to cases and conditioning on judges' characteristics, we validate the measure showing that higher-slant judges vote more conservatively in gender-related cases. Higher-slant judges interact differently with female colleagues: they are more likely to reverse lower court decisions if the lower court judge is a woman than a man, are less likely to assign opinions to female judges, and cite fewer female-authored opinions.
The 2024 European elections could mark a turning point in EU politics: The European Parliament has traditionally been a progressive force in EU policymaking, often pushing for more far-reaching, European solutions than the Council. This dynamic could fundamentally change after the 2024 elections, with the current power balance expected to shift in favour of more right-wing forces. But even without a turn towards a Eurosceptic majority, the outcome will determine the direction of policies decided by the Parliament and shape EU politics over the next five years. This policy brief offers an overview of the need-to-know for this election year. First, it details the institutional timeline until the end of the current legislative cycle. Second, it provides an overview of how European political parties are approaching the election campaign. Third, it discusses election day, possible new majorities in Parliament and inevitable institutional haggling over key positions. Finally, it describes the missed reform opportunities since the 2019 elections and how this may undermine the integrity of the June poll.
Machine learning is commonly used to estimate the heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) in randomized experiments. Using large-scale randomized experiments on the Facebook and Criteo platforms, we observe substantial discrepancies between machine learning-based treatment effect estimates and difference-in-means estimates directly from the randomized experiment. This paper provides a two-step framework for practitioners and researchers to diagnose and rectify this discrepancy. We first introduce a diagnostic tool to assess whether bias exists in the model-based estimates from machine learning. If bias exists, we then offer a model-agnostic method to calibrate any HTE estimates to known, unbiased, subgroup difference-in-means estimates, ensuring that the sign and magnitude of the subgroup estimates approximate the model-free benchmarks. This calibration method requires no additional data and can be scaled for large data sets. To highlight potential sources of bias, we theoretically show that this bias can result from regularization and further use synthetic simulation to show biases result from misspecification and high-dimensional features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our calibration method using extensive synthetic simulations and two real-world randomized experiments. We further demonstrate the practical value of this calibration in three typical policy-making settings: a prescriptive, budget-constrained optimization framework; a setting seeking to maximize multiple performance indicators; and a multitreatment uplift modeling setting.
This policy brief delves into the potential of regular migration across diverse skill levels to alleviate labour shortages in the EU. It contends that the EU faces a policy dilemma by attempting to curtail certain migration forms, as seen in the recent Common European Asylum System (CEAS) reform, while concurrently encouraging others through initiatives like the EU Talent Pool. The inconsistent approach to third-country migration poses significant trade-offs, necessitating a comprehensive resolution. The brief advocates for a multi-faceted strategy encompassing (a) diversification, (b) integration, and (c) de-bureaucratization at both EU and member state levels. Addressing potential pitfalls such as brain drains and heightened competition among member states, the brief concludes by highlighting three essential criteria for enhancing talent attraction and mitigating EU labour shortages through both high- and low-skilled migration.
Why do local governments create and reform public service companies, given their uncertain economic benefits and potential damage to accountability and service transparency? Taking an extended transaction cost perspective, we argue that corporatization—the provision of public services by publicly owned companies—is a function of fiscal hardship, the decision maker’s economic orientation and the level of operator transparency. Using a two-way fixed effects regression, we test this expectation on 680 investment reports of 34 German cities from 1998 to 2017, representing 11,062 year-corporatized entity combinations. We show that the drivers of corporatization are sensitive to the depth of local ownership analyzed. In doing so, we highlight the theoretical need and potential for conceptual differentiation between ownership levels along a corporation’s lineage. Exploiting the data’s panel structure, we also find that the intensity of corporatization has heightened since the late 1990s, largely due to increasingly complex corporate structures of indirect ownership.
An ideological shift in the European competition policy in early 2000s inspired by the US Chicago School of economics led to new rules adopted in 2004. The implementation of the new rules was accompanied by lower intervention rates on average. This period has become problematic as it has coincided with large digital mergers that paved the way for the dominance of Big Tech companies.
Open forms of organising innovation bear great potential to address societal challenges, such as the climate crisis. Existing approaches to open social innovation (OSI) draw on a corporate and organisation- centric open innovation model as a blueprint for addressing social and ecological problems. However, such problems are ‘wicked’ and ‘com-plex’ in nature and thus require concerted efforts from a diverse set of stakeholders, including businesses, government agencies, non-profits and communities. Based on a review of the open-, user- and social- innovation literature, this essay traces the evolution from an organisa-tion-centric view (OSI 1.0) to a multi-stakeholder, cross- sectoral perspective (OSI 2.0). More specifically, we understand OSI as a concerted effort undertaken by multiple stakeholders from various sectors throughout the social innovation process, from diagnosing societal challenges, to developing ideas for how to solve problems, creating solutions, effectively scaling solutions and generating impact. We sharpen the terminology for OSI 2.0 and specify design dimensions for the effective orchestration of collaboration and coordination, and outline key areas for future research. Our objective is to foster dialogue between open- and user-innovation and social-innovation research.
We analyse the rhetoric and reality of EU digital sovereignty by looking at content control. The control of online content is central to sovereignty because it relates to fundamental freedoms and democratic competition. Our main data source is the unique International Organizations in Global Internet Governance (IO-GIG) dataset which contains internet policy output documents across international institutions and issue areas between 1995 and 2021. By assessing policy output, we show structural trends in content control output in volume, bindingness, and orientation. By analysing policy discourse, we show the evolution of frames on content control over time. We find evidence for a comprehensive but still ongoing trend towards digital sovereignty in policy output and a shift from prioritising free access to the public order in discourse.
Does social recognition motivate prosocial individuals? We run large-scale experiments at Italy’s main blood donors association, evaluating social recognition through social media and peer groups against a simple ask to donate. Across several studies, we find that the simple ask is at least as effective as offering social recognition. In a survey experiment with blood donors we show that socially recognized donations signal not only altruism but also image-seeking. This can lead to social recognition being less effective, or even counterproductive, when offered to those who are already perceived as good citizens.
Organizational studies have long built a ‘business case’ for diversity, which today includes innovation capacity among the benefits of diverse workforces. Diversity’s impact on innovation has been tested in private firms, yet few systematic studies exist in public management. We address this challenge using a two-step dynamic panel data analysis via generalized methods of moment estimation in 36 European countries. The findings confirm that higher public workforce diversity leads to higher public service innovation. This effect, however, is mediated by the administrative ecosystem, where greater uniformity in managerial practices makes diversity more salient, an obstacle to unleash its innovative potential.
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.