Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School
08/2017
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.
07/2017
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.
06/2017
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’. (...)
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.(...)
04/2017
Democracy is discussed in the comparative empirical literature as an important determinant of corruption. Several studies show that not only are democracies less corrupt than authoritarian regimes, but also that there is great variation in corruption levels across democratic regimes. This dissertation is concerned with examining the reasons behind this pattern. It begins by arguing that the study of democracy’s impact on corruption requires a stronger focus on the causal mechanisms linking these two phenomena. Based on a review of causal arguments raised in the literature, a discussion of different dimensions of accountability–electoral, social and horizontal–is introduced as a useful framework for this purpose.
This sets the ground for the two main empirical contributions of the dissertation. In both cases, the study relies on original corruption data collected from over 600 audit reports on municipalities randomly selected through a federal audit program implemented in Brazil. First, a panel data set with 130 municipalities that have faced multiple audits between 2003 and 2013 is used to examine whether those three dimensions of accountability exert a deterrent effect on corruption over time. Second, a cross-section of 383 municipalities is the basis for analyzing the factors explaining when accountability effectively occurs, focusing on conditioning factors of electoral accountability against corrupt politicians.(...)
03/2017
What drives a systematic human rights management? : a multi-method study of large German companies
(2017)
Under which conditions do multinational enterprises systematically manage human rights risks with a view to preventing human rights abuses across their operations? Using a multi-method research design combining qualitative comparative analysis (QCA)and process tracing case studies (PT-CS), this study of the 30 largest German companies finds that it is neither institutional forces nor stakeholder pressures alone, but their combined effect that leads to a systematic human rights management at the firm-level: That is, stakeholders (e.g. NGOs) as more proximate actors act on and transmit existing institutional pressures (e.g. social expectations) to firms, while institutions provide stakeholders with the legitimacy necessary to successfully influence corporate behaviour. This conjunctional effect implies that a systematic approach to human rights is more likely to be found among firms with consumer proximity. Why? It is a firm’s position in the value chain that determines the concrete configuration of institutional and stakeholder pressures for a company: Downstream the value chain in the B2C business, where institutional and stakeholder pressures are generally high due to greater public exposure, most companies systematically address human rights issues: These B2C firms are exposed to an institutional environment, where firms are not only socialised into newly-emerging CSR-topics like human rights through institutional learning in CSR initiatives like the UNGC, but also constantly monitored by civil society actors like NGOs whether they walk the talk (i.e. 1st path to a systematic human rights management). (...)
01/2017
Direct democracy, an addition to representative democracy allowing citizens to directly vote on substantive issues parliaments usually vote on, has an intuitive appeal in appearing to be the most obvious institutionalization of democracy itself. Increased institutionalization and usage of direct democracy has heightened interest in the topic in political science. In the three papers which make up this dissertation I explore different aspects of the political effects of direct democracy with an aim to provide insights how it affects citizens' representation as well as their behavior and attitudes.
In a first paper I test the claim that referendums are unrepresentative because turnout in referendums is usually lower than in parliamentary elections and tends to be skewed towards citizens of high socio-economic status. The analysis is made possible by a unique feature of Swiss post-referendum surveys which also asked non-voters about their opinion on the referendum's subject. Comparing opinion majorities in the surveys against actual referendum outcomes we show that representativeness increases slightly in turnout as well as over time. On balance we find more representative than unrepresentative outcomes implying that direct democracy, at least in Switzerland, seems to improve representation.
In a second paper I focus on citizens' attitudes towards and actual participation in referendums. Using data from the European Social Survey I find that voting, other forms of political activity and political interest are positively associated with support for direct democracy. Analyzing post-referendum surveys I find the same pattern to hold for actual participation in referendums. Hence, direct democracy, despite its widespread popularity, appears insuffcient to bring the politically disengaged back into democratic politics.
In a third and final paper, I investigate whether direct democracy increases citizens' satisfaction with democracy. After all, they give citizens participatory opportunities and promise to offer them more control over policy. Combining aggregate data on satisfaction with democracy from semi-annual Eurobarometer surveys from 1973 to 2013 with data on all national referendums in the same period, I find no evidence for an (average) effect of referendums on democratic satisfaction. While an analysis of individual time-series suggests that referendums may have an effect under certain circumstances, significant positive estimates obtain for two countries, my empirical investigation of possible mechanisms remains inconclusive.
04/2016
How can we drive atomic renegades – states that run illegal nuclear weapons programs – into disarmament with the help of negotiations? This question, which puts the design of negotiation strategies at the focus of attention, has puzzled foreign policy makers for decades. It has, thus far, lost nothing of its relevance. But despite its importance, bargaining dynamics with atomic renegade states – so-called Nuclear Reversal Negotiations (NRN) – were largely omitted in International Relations (IR) literature. A systematic and theoretically grounded analysis on NRN is still missing.[...]