Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School
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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.
03/2023
At least since the 2016 presidential elections in the United States and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, misinformation has gained increasing prominence in the public discourse. Only four years later, the COVID-19 pandemic emerged and was accompanied by an “Infodemic”, misleading individuals about the origin of the virus, its severity, and the intentions of governments coping with the virus. Misinformation was itself deemed a considerable threat to public health. Although COVID-19 misinformation was widely circulating at that time, and continues to do so, a substantial share of individuals did not believe this misleading information. That begs the question, why do people fall for misinformation?
This question is at the heart of this dissertation project, which explores the role of social media, trust, and values in individuals’ susceptibility to false information. Through comparative research, the project investigates how these variables affect the reception of misinformation and attempts to combine multiple levels of analysis and consider different forms of misinformation.
The core of this dissertation consists of three chapters, each of which addresses the research question from a different but complementary perspective. Chapter 2 provides the conceptual basis for the subsequent empirical chapters. The chapter investigates how individual, group, and system-level variables contribute to social media’s role as a vector for misinformation. In the third chapter, I employ an experimental research design to assess whether superficial characteristics of different social media platforms affect users’ credibility judgements regarding manufactured news. Contrary to existing literature, the experiment’s results suggest that social media platforms do not differ in their effects on perceived credibility of news. The fourth chapter builds on data from a multinational research project that explored the role of values during the COVID-19 pandemic and their impact on individuals’ propensity to believe in COVID-19-related conspiracy theories. Through a comparative design, using samples from Germany and Poland, the chapter finds considerable differences in the pattern of influential values and trust concepts on the adoption of conspiracy beliefs.
Although the findings of this dissertation project come with limitations, the research nevertheless highlights the importance of comparative research designs in the study of misinformation. The dissertation concludes by discussing avenues for further research.
02/2023
The Dual Nature of Multilateral Development Banks: Balancing Development and Financial Logics
(2023)
This Element offers a novel, highly relevant perspective towards Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), which are development and financial organizations at the same time. Based on the elaborate institutional logics perspective borrowed from organizational sociology, it uncovers the complex trade-offs between financial and development pressures faced by MDBs and explains variation in organizational responses thereto across types of MDBs. The argument is tested with an original dataset using Data Envelopment Analysis to explain variation in response patterns across MDBs. The analysis shows that lending to the private sector as well as being predominantly owned by borrowing members increase MDBs' emphasis on the financial at the expense of the development nature. Thereby, this Element provides unique insights into MDBs' responses to their dual nature and significantly advances our understanding of MDB lending operations, drawing attention to the complexities involved in the unique MDB business model.
01/2023
Wage formation in Europe has undergone considerable changes over the past decades. In particular, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the Eurozone crisis have significantly accelerated and enhanced liberalization reforms in wage bargaining and industrial relations in several European countries. Moreover, decreasing collective bargaining coverage, lower union membership rates, weaker social actors and increasing low-wage employment have allowed the state to play an increasingly important role in the regulation and the stipulation of wage minima. The growing importance of governments in the political economy of wage formation is nowhere clearer to observe than in the politicization of statutory minimum wages: minimum wages have not only progressively become the ‘going rate’ for low-wage employment in a variety of countries displaying different political-economic characteristics, but have also featured prominently in electoral debates. Using state-of-the-art quantitative research methods, I examine this remarkable transition in Chapters 2-3 and provide empirical evidence contextualizing the transformation of Europe’s low-wage policy space. As it is also important to acknowledge the important role played by the EU institutions in structuring member states’ wage-setting systems, I examine in Chapter 4 the growing relevance of the new European economic governance in determining member states’ labour markets and wage bargaining mechanisms.
This dissertation is composed of three single-authored chapters and is structured as follows: Chapter 1, serve as this thesis’ introduction. Here, I present the rationale for focusing on minimum wages and wage formation, I describe the main debates in the academic literature and lay out how the papers I have worked on contribute to the topics I address. This is followed by the presentation of the three chapters, which examine the topic of change in the political economy of wage formation and in particular of minimum wages over the last decades in Europe. Chapter 2 offers a first assessment of the political, economic and institutional determinants of minimum wage growth in Europe. By using quantitative text analysis and statistical methods, I show that the electoral salience of minimum wages has increased. Chapter 3 builds upon the increased politicization of minimum wages, which I find empirical evidence for in Chapter 2, by contextualizing the role of minimum wages in different European political economies. By building on new research in the field of European comparative political economy, which has focused on the drivers of aggregate demand, I examine the existence of long-term equilibria between minimum wage growth, taken as proxy for government-determined wage-led growth, and household consumption and exports. As the EU institutions have been found to be important actors in driving change in wage-setting mechanisms, I devote my final paper (Chapter 4) to an assessment of the wage bargaining preferences of the European Commission within the framework of the new European economic governance. In particular, I focus on the drivers of country-specific recommendations (CSRs) in wage bargaining. In this paper, I find that recommendations in the field of wage bargaining are mostly decoupled from time-varying economic indicators and are instead tied to country-specific institutional factors. Finally, I conclude by summarizing my results on change in the European low-wage policy space, my contributions to evolving and still far from resolved debates in the literature of the political economy of advanced European capitalist democracies’ wage formation and point to possible future avenues of research.
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.
12/2022
This thesis discusses the role of the economic incentives and policies required to build energy systems that are compatible with achieving the goal of net-zero carbon emissions. I try to look beyond the techno-centric solutions that focus on new electricity generation technologies to explore how the way we consume and supply energy may be changed to facilitate the energy transition. The first paper of this cumulative thesis identifies packages of demand-side policy interventions in household energy consumption that can deliver an immediate reduction in carbon emissions. The second paper quantifies the relationship between electricity demand and prices in electricity markets using an instrumental variable approach. This relationship can provide the basis for designing policies that use electricity demand as a tool for integrating high shares of renewable energy in the power system. Following the theme of renewable energy integration, the third paper looks at the policies for influencing electricity demand from agricultural consumers in developing countries to increase the share of solar and wind while lowering the associated integration costs. And the last paper focuses on the need for policy instruments that determine the spatial allocation of renewable energy. The four papers together highlight that using the right economic incentives and policies, we can foster flexibility in both energy demand and supply that reduces the reliance on technological innovation and revolution for achieving the transformation to a low carbon energy system.
11/2022
This dissertation examines recent contestation surrounding the status of emerging economies in international trade politics. In particular, it looks at the ways in which the rise of Brazil, India and China – the BICs – has shaped special rights for developing countries at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The primary focus of the thesis is the WTO’s principle of Special and Differential Treatment (SDT), which provides developing countries with exemptions from certain liberalization commitments, implementation flexibilities, and pledges of technical assistance. At the WTO, access to such special rights is based on individual members’ selfdeclaration as developing countries. However, as the BICs have risen, the ‘North’- ‘South’ binary that underpins SDT has become less clear. The continued use of a legal norm based on the strict bifurcation of WTO members into sets of developed and developing countries has thus been called into question, most notably by the United States.
At the outset, the dissertation develops a conceptual framework for delineating the different ideal typical pathways along which special and differential treatment can develop. An overall process of fragmentation is then outlined, characterized by the unmaking of special rights for developing countries, in parallel to the resilience of differential treatment for the smaller sub-group of Least Developed Countries (LDCs). The thesis continues by examining the contestation at the heart of these processes more closely. In doing so, it sets up a novel theoretical framework to analyse the potential adaptation strategies that emerging economies can adopt in response to contestation of their special rights. Significant strategic variation amongst the BICs comes to the fore in a series of case studies, as well as two chapters on China’s strong defence of its developing country status and Brazil’s recalibration of its (previously held) Southern leadership role. The thesis closes with an in-depth case study of negotiations on intellectual property rights. While the divergence of emerging economy positions and the fragmentation of SDT have marked the WTO era, the final chapter shows that in areas where BICs unity is still possible – such as on LDC rights – normative erosion is slowed.
10/2022
This cumulative dissertation advances management scholarship by studying the novel phenomenon of Blockchain organizing. Blockchain is an emerging technology that facilitates the maintenance of data across networks of computers, as opposed to more traditional central servers. These distributed data maintenance capabilities may have wide-ranging consequences. Ever since Blockchain’s inception in 2008, a discourse identifying this technology as an enabler of radically new and decentralized modes of collective and societal coordination has gained traction. “Blockchain organizing” refers to practices in which such Blockchain technology artefacts are being developed, implemented, and/or utilized by organizations.
Studying these practices presents a unique opportunity to further management scholarship; particularly subjective time research following the neo-institutional tradition. Blockchain is not only an emerging technology associated with significant future expectations, but further a meta-organizational technology whose very raison d'être is the transformation of entrenched organizational structures. When organizational actors develop, implement, and/or utilize Blockchain technology, bureaucratic ways of organizing that have been established in the past and continue to be legitimized in the present may become reevaluated in light of bold visions for an organizational and societal future that looks radically different.
The dissertation at hand utilizes this Blockchain context as an exemplary case to develop theory on how transformative future visions and expectations associated with emerging technologies may become instantiated within the present, and conceptualizes this phenomenon as “present-future convergence”. Developed based on a field-level pilot study that led to an 18-month ethnographic engagement with one Blockchain start-up, the three papers gathered in the dissertation utilize an interpretivist approach to explain how present-future convergence is rooted in conjoined processes of intra- and inter-subjective temporal experience. Furthermore, the papers highlight the counterintuitive consequences that present-future convergence may have for processes of technological, organizational, and societal change. In doing so, the dissertation opens promising research avenues at the intersection of temporality, performativity, and sociomateriality, and contributes to scholarly understanding of Blockchain organizing.
Practically speaking, the dissertation helps answer the question of how actors may “pull” the future into the present to realize transformative future visions like those associated with emerging technologies.
09/2022
Employment Trajectories of Women with a Migration Background in Germany: A Life Course Perspective
(2022)
The aim of this dissertation is to study the employment behaviour of women with a migration background from a life course perspective. Data for the analyses come from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the German Microcensus. The first paper studies the entrance into employment of immigrant women who arrived in Germany while childless between 1990 and 2016. The main findings show that women who moved as marriage migrants were highly likely to have a child shortly after their arrival. Having a child before they enter the labour market strongly delays the participation of migrant women in remunerated work. In the German context, marriage migration is most common among women who are third country nationals, and have comparatively low levels of labour market capital upon arrival. The second paper studies the employment trajectories of women who immigrated from Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain. By distinguishing the trajectories of women who came from similar female employment contexts, but who arrived through different migration channels (ethnic Germans vs. third country nationals), the paper sheds light on the selection mechanisms of the different legal entry modes, and the post-migration adaptation patterns associated with them. The third paper looks at the early life employment participation trajectories of women of the second migrant generation who were born in Germany. It shows that women who follow early family formation trajectories are also less likely to participate in the labour market early in life. Early family formation is found to be most common among second-generation migrant women with parents of Turkish origin. The three papers together illustrate the strong relationship between migrant women’s (non)-employment behaviour and the onset family formation. From a migration policy perspective, the findings show the selective effects of migration channels. From a social and labour market policy perspective, the results allude to the importance of childcare access, and the need for activation policies tailored to mothers with a migration background.
08/2022
Governments use regulation to affect the behavior of market participants such that welfare is maximized. Good regulation in the electricity sector aims to achieve an affordable, sustainable, and secure supply of electricity. However, the energy transition fundamentally changes the way electrical energy is produced and consumed. Consequently, market rules and regulatory interventions need to be adjusted to cope with these new political targets, technological innovations, and societal trends.
This cumulative dissertation contributes to the academic literature on regulatory incentives in the electricity sector with four scientific articles. At the core of this dissertation are incentives for participants of the electricity market that result from the market design and other regulatory interventions. I study how such incentives can be designed to minimize the cost of expanding and operating the transmission network. The transmission system is confronted with several new challenges resulting from the energy transition, including an increasing distance between generators and consumers, power flows that quickly change over time, and declining share of dispatchable generators that complicates frequency stability.
The first three articles of this dissertation study incentives for market participants to account for the cost of operating and expanding the transmission network in their investment and dispatch decisions. The first article introduces a conceptual framework for categorizing and analyzing locational signals that result from the market design and from other regulatory interventions. It classifies, quantifies, and discusses locational instruments in twelve jurisdictions. It finds that all reviewed systems apply regulatory locational instruments, and many systems even combine multiple instruments. Only few instruments result in economic incentives that are strong enough to affect investment decisions. The second article focuses on one key market design: nodal pricing. It identifies and assesses the main arguments against the concept of nodal pricing based on the experience made in US power markets. It shows that most of the perceived drawbacks of the concept in the European debate are misconceived and can be sufficiently addressed as it is done in systems that already implemented a nodal market. The third article studies the long-run effects of optimal administratively determined locational signals. To do so, it introduces a complementary power market model. Applying the model to a sample case study reveals characteristics of such signals and highlights their potential welfare gains.
The fourth article is dedicated to the balancing mechanism, which maintains the grid frequency by balancing the feed-in of electricity into the network and its withdrawal. This is another source of cost that arise in the transmission system. The article analyses the economic incentives resulting from the design of the balancing mechanism. It quantifies the price response of balancing responsible parties to the imbalance price and finds a significant effect. This finding is politically delicate because such a price responsiveness is forbidden by the regulator.
With these four articles, the dissertation provides insights how the regulator can affect the behavior of market participants through economic incentives, which is of interest for researchers and policy makers alike. It adds to the literature by proposing new frameworks and models, and by drawing from experiences in other jurisdictions. Thereby, it contributes to adapting the regulation of the power sector in times of the energy transition.