Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Doctoral Thesis (89)
- Book (1)
Keywords
- Deutschland (2)
- Europäische Union (2)
- Finanzkrise (2)
- Analytical Eclecticism (1)
- Bank (1)
- Bankenkrise (1)
- Centre for Sustainability (1)
- Comparative Regionalism (1)
- Comparative analysis (1)
- Disaster Risk Reduction (1)
01/2012
Natural disasters pervade the certainty of social life. In a globalized world this truism increasingly calls for transnational solutions to prevent, prepare, and respond to these deadly disruptions. Regional Disaster Risk Management (DRM) has recently emerged to meet this concern. However, a number of observations question the expected motivation that compels states to cooperate in this important issue area.
First, there has been only a moderate increase in the relative estimated economic costs from natural disasters in a majority of regional organizations, and the number
of deaths related to natural disasters has consistently decreased. Second, after a tranquil period of cooperation from the mid 1970s, regional DRM rapidly developed and
spread across the globe. This sudden rise in DRM cooperation seems difficult to explain if the costs from natural disasters have not considerably changed. Third, remarkable similarities appear in the goals and wording of regional DRM agreements despite the varied political, historical and cultural contexts that typify regional organizations. These empirical observations go against conventional expectations and question the core motivation of the state’s protection of its citizens. (...)
05/2017
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.(...)
06/2023
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.
02/2022
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.
04/2022
Authoritarian Regimes and Financial Crises: Explaining Autocratic Regime Survival and Collapse
(2022)
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.
08/2021
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.
11/2021
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.
03/2018
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. [...]
03/2020
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.
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.