Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School
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01/2024
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.
02/2024
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.
03/2024
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.
08/2023
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.
07/2023
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.
13/2022
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.
04/2023
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.