Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School
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02/2019
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.
08/2018
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.
04/2019
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.
05/2019
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.
06/2019
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.