Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School
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04/2021
In most Western European countries, the children of immigrants generally have a lower educational performance than children of native origin. Yet controlling for performance, they tend to make more ambitious educational choices. While the first phenomenon is largely explained by the disadvantaged socioeconomic situation of most immigrant families, the reasons for the second phenomenon remain unclear. In this doctoral dissertation, I explore some of the mechanisms that could account for the high educational ambitions of the children of immigrants in Western Europe. The dissertation comprises an introductory chapter followed by three empirical chapters.
Chapter 2 focuses on the effects of cross-nativity parentage on the likelihood of enrolling in academic upper secondary school in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. Transnational children (those with a first-generation and a second-generation immigrant parent) display the high educational ambition of children with two immigrant parents in most regards. In contrast, mixed children (those with a first-generation immigrant parent and a native-origin parent) closely resemble children with two native parents.
In chapter 3, I examine the relationship between children’s sources of information on future education and their realistic educational aspirations. I analyze how this relationship differs between natives and the children of immigrants in England and Sweden. The results indicate that for natives in both countries, and for the children of immigrants in England, information is positively related to realistic educational aspirations. However, information does not seem to affect the aspirations of the children of immigrants in Sweden and, for foreign-born children who immigrated before age 6, the relationship seems to be negative.
Finally, in chapter 4, I explore ethnic differences in intergenerational educational mobility in Germany, focusing on the comparison between native-origin youth, Turkish-origin youth and the children of native German immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. I find that immigrant-origin youth are more likely to be upwardly mobile in terms of educational attainment, and that they are less affected by their parents’ educational attainment than natives. Moreover, I find a moderating role of age of immigration. I discuss possible explanations for my findings, including contextual differences in the substantive meaning of educational attainment.
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.
07/2021
This dissertation uncovers how pressure for change in the European Union (EU) open market is translated into actual change by explaining how employers’ use of migrant labour, and trade unions’ responses thereto, drive institutional developments in three areas central to the governance of work: collective bargaining, job security regulations, and workplace representation. Based on process-tracing case studies of the German manufacturing sector, the German, Norwegian, and Swedish construction and hotel and restaurant sectors, I trace how sectoral differences in the interactions between employers and trade unions trigger distinct causal processes that contribute either to institutional continuity or liberalization. The findings reveal that liberalization in Germany does not follow a single trajectory: while employers’ and trade unions’ responses to migrant labour in the manufacturing sector contribute to dualization, the responses in the construction and hotel and restaurant sectors instead contribute to deregulatory liberalization. I find that the class actors’ responses in the Swedish construction and hotel and restaurant sectors, in turn, contribute to a third variety of liberalization – socially embedded flexibilization, whereas the actors’ responses in the Norwegian construction sector trigger a process of institutional resilience creation, endeavouring to contribute to institutional continuity under high pressure for change. In capturing how individual employers through their use of migrant labour are pursuing non-politically controlled change strategies, this dissertation offers us the insight that employers’ logic of action based on compliance with employment relations rules and practices is explicitly contested by the logic of action stimulated by the increased marketization generated through European integration. Aside from addressing the micro-level drivers of change resulting from the accumulated actions of individual employers, this dissertation also highlights the role of different labour supplies in enabling change processes to take place. It is argued that unless trade unions, as counterpart to employers, and nation states in their enforcement and legislative capacities create conditions that disable employers from noncompliance with existing institutions in their use of migrant labour, employers will follow the logic of action encouraged in the EU open market and use their access to migrant labour in ways that result in liberalization of the employment relations.
07/2020
This doctoral dissertation contributes to the debate on the accountability of the regulatory state by studying the role of judicial controls in the governance of regulatory agencies. The investigation consists of three individual research projects motivated by an overarching research question, which enquires how does judicial review of administrative decisions shapes the democratic accountability of the regulatory state. The research conducted here bridges frameworks and research methods from political science and administrative law to better understand how different governments have addressed the need for judicial controls to supervise regulatory agencies. The empirical evidence used for this research consists of unique information compiled by the author in three original and comprehensive datasets, which allowed to conduct diverse research methods for the examination of the evidence. The theoretical frameworks adapted for this study are designed to contribute with empirical knowledge about the varieties of judicial accountability adopted globally to supervise regulation authorities of two of the most representative industries operating under the ‘independent agency’ oversight governance paradigm: the energy and telecommunications public utilities, which are also supervised by competition regulators. The analysis starts with a global perspective of judicial accountability provisions implemented around the globe to supervise regulatory agencies. I conducted a comparative assessment of the intensity of judicial review that courts of appeal can exercise to supervise the legality of regulatory decisions of 100 authorities. The second investigation performs a closer examination of judicial supervision over regulatory agencies from two countries representative of opposite legal traditions: Spain and the United Kingdom. Finally, a third study enquires about the causes that prevent young regulatory agencies to comply with lawful administrative procedures throughout the enforcement of regulation. This last investigation studies the case of the Mexican Agency for Safety, Energy and Environment (ASEA). The overall outcomes of this study advance our understanding of the challenges to improve democratic mechanisms to hold regulatory agencies accountable, which is not only fundamental for a successful performance of regulatory institutions, but also a necessary condition to legitimize the activity of the state, enhance the trust on our governments and the consolidation of democratic values.
06/2020
This dissertation looks at the use of digital technologies in anti-corruption. It thereby responds to the increasing prominence of the fight against corruption as a research topic, and issue to address for activists and politicians around the world, as well as the ever-growing impact of digitalisation on governance. It answers the research question in what way and how effectively information and communication technology contribute to the control of corruption.
In its first part, this dissertation provides an overview of the past twenty years of academic publications on the use and the effectiveness of digital technologies in anti-corruption. I structure the available literature according to its level of analysis, looking at theoretical and large-n studies compared to case specific and qualitative work. I also structure it according to the mechanism that is linking different technologies to a better control of corruption, namely e-government access, upward transparency, downward transparency and mobilisation. In doing so, it highlights gaps in the literature and open questions to research. Subsequently, I am zooming in on the role of civil society in its use of digital technologies, arguing that digital technologies are a tool that can support the role of civil society in controlling corruption. This argument builds on anti-corruption theories and thus lays the groundwork for testing it in two different settings.
First, I provide evidence from a global, quantitative dataset, using marginal effects analysis to provide evidence for a positive correlation of civil society capacity, access to information and communication technology and better control of corruption. Second, I analyse a case study, looking at the use of e-procurement in Ukraine since 2014. I am testing if different civil society capacities in Ukrainian regions had an impact on corruption risks measured in Ukrainian tenders. While the quantitative data analysis gives clear, positive results concerning the relationship described above, the case study on Ukraine does not offer conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of civil society capacity and ICT access in the fight against corruption. The dissertation concludes by calling for future research into this relationship, especially by using data on public procurement.
06/2021
01/2021
The Laval Quartet rulings of the CJEU have become an indispensable reference in every discussion on the social dimension of the European integration process over the past decade. Becoming a synonym for the subordination of labour rights and social goals to market freedoms, the rulings have raised different questions, the most pressing one being about the relationship between the economic and the social sphere of the EU as an emerging polity. The dissertation enquires into the question to what extent that relationship has been reconfigured in the aftermath of the Quartet rulings.
Starting with the rulings themselves through a law in context approach, the dissertation studied a segment of the aftermath in the period following the rulings (2008-2019). While the aftermath has played out at various levels of EU’s multi-level governance structure, this study focuses on the supranational macro-level, examining the development of the subsequent CJEU case law and the EU-level political responses.
The thesis makes the argument that due to the countermovement that the rulings have quickly triggered at EU and Member State level, a political struggle over the social in the EU has emerged, demonstrating the difficulty of conceiving of the EU as a common social space in conditions of diversity, a strong core-periphery division and governance structures dominated by market rationality.
Particularly the developments in the field of posting of workers, starting with the Quartet and ending with the Revised Posted Workers Directive, reveal three important insights for the integration process more broadly. First, the existing material inequality and differences in economic development among Member States in enlarged EU, of which the Quartet was an early symptom, have buttressed the European regulatory space as a space of conflict between the core and the peripheries. Second, resolving core-periphery conflicts has distributional consequences, which are particularly visible in the context of labour and social questions. Resolving such conflicts requires an EU common conception of (social) justice, which appears particularly difficult to conceive of in the core-periphery constellation. Third, progressive social solutions mostly remain foreclosed, as in both cases, at the Court as well as in the political realm, these are mostly contested within a framework dominated by market rationality.
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.
02/2020
The global financial crisis has reignited the debate about the costs of sovereign default and the drawbacks of monetary union membership. Historically, several members of monetary unions defaulted on their debt and thereafter had to consolidate their finances. However, following a default, do members of a monetary union actually have to rely on fiscal consolidation to a greater extent than do other countries?
This dissertation provides the first comprehensive comparison of sovereign defaults in a monetary union. In the period from 1990 to 2010, four monetary union members defaulted on their debt: Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Gabon, and Grenada. Their fiscal policy responses following these defaults are compared with those of four similar small middle income countries: Jamaica, Seychelles, Belize, and Suriname. This dissertation analyses the size, type, and timing of fiscal consolidation based on several hundred primary sources, from appropriation acts to budget plans and government speeches.
The comparison shows that all countries had to consolidate following a default – irrespective of their membership of a monetary union. The four countries with an independent monetary policy tried to ease the burden of adjustment by devaluing their currencies, lowering refinancing rates, putting pressure on domestic banks, or resorting to direct central bank financing. However, in turn, foreign currency debt increased due to the resulting depreciation of the exchange rate. That is, countries outside of a monetary union have also had to consolidate. However, monetary union members still faced a greater burden of adjustment as they had to cut nominal expenditure to achieve the necessary internal devaluation inside the monetary union and could not let inflation do the work.
This dissertation also highlights the central role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in explaining the type and timing of fiscal consolidation following a sovereign default. Six of the eight countries turned to the IMF at some point. Once they had signed up to an IMF programme, they consolidated more, especially on the expenditure side.
Despite these differences in the type and timing of fiscal consolidation due to monetary union membership and the involvement of the IMF, none of the eight countries could avoid consolidating its finances following the sovereign default.
04/2020
This dissertation examines employee work motivations, attitudes, and outcomes within the public sector drawing upon quantitative cross-country survey data. It challenges the dominant idea that public service motivation (PSM) is the only form of work motivation that matters for public servants by examining PSM against traditional intrinsic and extrinsic work motivation based on the framework of self-determination theory (SDT). It links these motivation types to different employee outcomes such as job satisfaction, ethics, and employee engagement while also taking into consideration stress in the workplace. It then shifts focus to examine interpersonal relationships at the organisational level through the concept of organizational social capital (OSC) and how management instruments support or impede OSC. This is relevant as it introduces conceptual and empirical differentiation between PSM and SDT, which is limited, or conflated, in PSM research. Additionally, understanding how management tools are linked to social capital provides a new angle for assessing management interventions and how they support or hinder the values, trust, and support within organisations. This research analyses civil service perceptions and attitudes across Europe and is presented in the form of four distinct papers. Overall findings show that PSM and SDT work motivation are different based on temporal focus, motivation needs, and measurement strategies and their individual utility differs depending on what type of attitude and outcome is measured. SDT appears to be more strongly related to job-related outcomes, while PSM is more strongly related to attitudes associated with job purpose. However, more nuanced findings suggest that different motivations may compensate for the failings of another and that they behave differently in different contexts and different stressors. Results also show that management tools focusing on interpersonal interactions are associated with positive social capital and can deter the impact of political interference. This dissertation contributes to the theoretical and empirical differentiation between PSM and SDT work motivation, providing evidence to support the fact that motivation types are context-specific and different motivations matter in evoking specific attitudes and behaviours. Consequently, future research should identify which motivations are most appropriate for which line of study and management actions should take this into consideration when designing institutional policies and interventions.
05/2020
This dissertation addresses the question how the size of a country affects the performance of ist political and administrative system. It advances the literature on small states by explicitly theorizing large states and empirically comparing countries of different sizes. Country size, operationalized as population size, is expected to be related to three clusters of country characteristics: First, a perception of vulnerability in small states vs. a lack of awareness for external threats in large states; second, social homogeneity and proximity in small states vs. heterogeneity and distance in large states; third, institutional centralization and concentration of power in small states vs. specialization and de-centralization in large states. The effect of country size and these three characteristic features on different aspects of procedural state performance is analyzed in three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 develops the argument that small country size favors the stability of political regimes, namely authoritarian monarchies. It iterates between theoretical reflections and the empirical analysis of different data: statistical data on population size and monarchic regime durability between 1946 and 2008; two most similar comparative cases of monarchic regimes, Egypt and Jordan; and supposedly deviant cases. Chapter 3 investigates the effect of population size on the effectiveness of national bureaucracies and expects a trade-off between economies and diseconomies of scale. It estimates multivariate OLS regression models and within-between random effects models for more than 150 countries. The analysis supports the hypothesized inverse U-shaped relation and finds that administrative effectiveness is highest, ceteris paribus, at medium levels of population size. Chapter 4 consists of a comparative case study of Germany and Luxembourg and investigates whether country size affected how the two states prepared for and reacted to the 2015 migration crisis. The analysis builds on newspaper articles and 20 expert interviews. It shows that Luxembourg’s small size favored identities and structures that allowed early crisis recognition and preparation as well as swift communication and coordination, whereas Germany’s large size led to attention biases that inhibited a quick reaction. In sum, the findings show that country size affects several aspects of state performance, which has important normative and practical implications.
07/2019
EU Police Cooperation (1976 - 2016). State Preferences in the Context of Differentiated Integration
(2019)
European internal security has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Various incidents across EU Member States have demonstrated the transnationalisation of terrorism and organised crime as well as the need to work together to safeguard security in a progressively borderless Europe. Governments and citizens have consistently called for a growing role of the EU and coordinating at this level. In this light, it appears striking that different cooperation initiatives continue to mushroom inside and outside the EU framework. Their parallel emergence duplicates efforts at best but can also obstruct information exchange and produce security failures. This dissertation sets out to investigate why Member States acknowledge the benefits of integration, yet advance differentiation as well.
Concretely, it studies the formation of state preferences in the still largely intergovernmental field of EU police cooperation. It asks which factors shape government positions and how they drive Member States to favour integration. In particular, the influence of cross-country interdependencies, politicisation and policy entrepreneurship might help explain processes of integration and differentiation in this policy area. Their relative importance as drivers of state preferences is studied across the institutional development of EU police cooperation between 1976 and 2016. The analysis is organised around four ‘milestones’ in the integration of this field: 1) the 1976 intergovernmental Trevi Group; 2) the 1995 Europol Convention establishing the European Police Office (Europol); (3) the 2009 Europol Council Decision establishing Europol as official EU agency; and (4) the 2016 Europol Regulation.
This dissertation finds that interdependencies in the fight against common threats mattered most as driver of state integration preferences in the early stages of European police cooperation. More recently, supranational policy entrepreneurship has emerged as key influence of pro-integration attitudes among Member States and can be expected to grow in importance. Politicisation, against it, provides windows of opportunity to this end and acts rather as amplifier of integration pressure from interdependencies and policy entrepreneurs. In sum, the asymmetrical effects of all three drivers explains the formation of diverging governmental attitudes towards integration and can thus help account for the persistence of parallel processes of differentiation and integration.
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.
01/2020
Organizations are under constant pressure from changing institutions (such as laws, public opinion, or societal norms) to react and perform in certain ways. However, these external institutional demands can sometimes run contrary to the organization’s declared value system. Between 1949 and 2016, successive changes in Germany’s social sector transformed the institutional external environment for German welfare associations, calling into question the legitimacy of their dominance in civil society in general and especially in the context of welfare provision. This comparative case study traces the development of the respective value systems of two of the main German welfare associations during that period. The two cases – Deutscher Caritas-verband (Caritas) and Deutscher Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband Gesamtverband (the Paritätischer) – were selected for their contrasting value systems within the spectrum of German welfare associations.
For the purposes of this study, value systems are understood as consistent imprinted perceptual frameworks that normatively shape and influence behavior, and external institutional demands are defined as implicit or explicit requests made from outside an organization towards the organizations by integrated systems of formal and informal rules and patterns, which structure social interactions and constitute the social environment an organization operates in. The analysis explores how such seemingly persistent value systems change over time, and how the demands made by external institutions increase or diminish explicit reference to that value system.
Drawing on the membership magazines and newspapers (or “corpus”) of the two selected associations, the analysis indicates that the value system of Catholicism initially shielded Caritas from external institutional demands until the observed level of Catholic and religious language diminished and the organization became more ex-posed to episodic change within the sector. In contrast, pluralism enabled the Paritätischer to engage more readily with the four episodes of self-help, German reunification, privatization, and social innovation, from the beginning of the study period.
In tracing how the two associations engaged with these episodes, the findings con-firm that the language associated with an organization’s imprinted value system changes over time. Here, two distinct types of imprinted value system – resisting and diaphanous – respectively shielded or enabled engagement with external institutional demands, and a framework is proposed to model the consequences of these differences.
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.
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.
01/2019
This dissertation presents a comparative qualitative analysis on the determinants of provincial outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in China. During the last decade, China’s OFDI turned into a provincial phenomenon. In 2015, 97 percent of Chinese investors came from provinces and municipalities with only ten provinces and municipalities accounting for more than 60 percent of China’s total OFDI flow. These provincial investors tend to be private companies, often of small and medium size, accounting sometimes for more than 70 percent of the officially approved investment projects of a province in a given year. While mainstream theory of OFDI suggests, that foreign investors need certain advantages when they engage in overseas projects, these provincial investors are often distinct; unlike large central state-owned enterprises (SOEs), they are often confronted with financial constraints, difficulties to access relevant information, and lack international experience. However, they are able to invest in distant regions that lack political stability and good infrastructure as well as in regions that have strong international competitors. This dissertation asks: Why do some Chinese provinces have such high OFDI, despite their investors often facing multiple impediments?
Whereas previous research considered the determinants for Chinese OFDI mostly through a firm-level lens of motivations enriching it with institutional theory, few studies step up to the provincial level. This research argues that a combination of provincial path dependencies, provincial institutional configurations and multiple actors’ interests can explain the phenomenon at hand. While path dependencies offer insights into conducive initial conditions that provide a basis for provincial OFDI patterns and growth, provincial formal and informal institutional configurations can explain how enterprises are able to reduce their additional costs and risks associated with foreign investment activities. Finally, provincial interests by bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic actors explain the emergence of these institutional configurations. These have developed due to strategic-alignment of OFDI policies with provincial economic conditions, and as a side effect of other revenue-seeking non-political and foreign actors, who are present in these provinces.
Designed as an inductive endeavour, this dissertation bases results on fieldwork with 66 interviews in two provinces, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, as well as Chinese primary sources. It addresses a gap in and offers an alternative perspective to the literature on the determinants of Chinese OFDI. It also contributes to the literature on spatial variation and provincial policy-making and implementation in China, which has not studied the case of OFDI so far. In theoretical terms, it discusses the limitations of the distinction between and the blurriness of formal and informal institutional configurations at the given case. On most abstract terms, this research contends that China’s global integration into the world economy is far from being an overall trend. Instead, it should be understood as a spatially uneven phenomenon with some provinces and regions being not only more integrated than others, but being a major force behind this process.
9/2018
This thesis takes the core concept of valuation beyond the market and looks at it from three different angles: (1) a field-level study that investigates how domination becomes naturalized and thus, the role of systemic power in determining how practices, beliefs and attitudes become the dominant or valued way of working in an emerging field, (2) a literature review that organizes concepts from valuation studies by approaches to generate non-economic value and raises questions about the relationship between organizations and the value they create, and (3) an organization-level study that investigates how categorization, a valuation process, can be a way to scale social impact and create institutional change.
The first paper is called “Systemic Power in the Field of Impact Investing: Pathways to domination and emerging field ideologies”. It is an equal authored paper with Lisa Hehenberger and Johanna Mair. It is an empirical study of the emerging field of impact investing in Europe. In it, we investigate the power dynamics that mark the trajectory of a field in an emergent stage and identify the process of suppression and three modes by which field ideologies take shape. We ask: How is domination naturalized? How can we surface underlying sets of ideas held by groups of actors in emerging fields of practice in order to study the process of domination? The study traces the emergence of a field ideology that values certain ideals, for example, scaling over local solutions and measuring impact vs. telling stories. We introduce the concept of field ideologies and aim to contribute to organizational theory discussions of domination and institutional theory more broadly.
The second paper is called “The Vocabulary of Valuation: Tools for investigating the changing nature of social purpose organizing”. It structures and relates valuation studies concepts to non-market settings and develops the concept of the born-rational organization and a research agenda for what valuation does to organizations and what valuation can mean for this type of organization. In it, I ask: What areas of future research emerge from an integration of valuation literature with management work on socially- and environmentally-driven organizations? The paper establishes the need for empirical research that investigates valuation topics at social purpose organizations. It aims to contribute to organizational research on non-market value creation and highlights the need to investigate value- or impact- creation strategies.
Lastly, the third paper is called “Categories as Impact Drivers: How a social-purpose organization enables the emergence of a new category as a means to scale and as a mode of institutional change”. It is an empirical study of a national nonprofit organization in the United States and how it seeks to maximize its impact. In it, I ask: How does an organization create a category as an impact driver? The study investigates how a ‘born rational’ organization acts and organizes and ultimately, how it adopts a unique approach to scaling and change through a category. I develop a process model of category creation for impact that involves two interlinked processes: impact reactivity and category impact work. The study aims to contribute to organizational theory discussions of approaches to social challenges, scaling and change. It also calls for attention to categories in non-market strategy.
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.
07/2018
Linkages between politics and banks are prevalent in developing and advanced countries and take various shapes. Among the more overt forms of political interference is direct political control over individual banks. Yet, the channels through which politicians exert control over banks and how they benefit from ties to banks is not entirely clear. This dissertation uses granular panel data from politically influenced and publicly owned banks in Germany and Spain and conducts a systematic, quantitatively rigorous analysis of the mechanisms and political consequences of political control over banks.
The cumulative dissertation addresses three related questions: chapter 2 asks whether appointments to banks are politically motivated and considers its potential implications for bank managers’ career incentives. It looks at appointment patterns of bank managers in formally independent Spanish savings banks and finds that banks’ managers face an increased turnover risk shortly after elections and under new governments.
Coalition partners and banks’ institutional architecture, however, constrain politicians’ ability to replace bank managers. The findings reveal political patronage in independent banks and show that politicians wield considerable influence even in banks that are not publicly owned.
In chapter 3, the dissertation examines how politics within banks’ boards influences banks’ loan provision before elections and focuses on the role of politicians in boards of German savings banks. Using detailed information about political representation in bank boards and loan data, I show that election-induced lending is pronounced (i) when the chairperson of the bank holds a political office, (ii) when the board consists of many politicians, and (iii) when political board members come from the same party. The effect is driven by savings banks with political chairpersons from counties and from the conservative party.
Finally, chapter 4 is concerned with the electoral consequences of politics-bank linkages and asks whether politicians benefit from those ties. I consider the case of German savings banks to assess whether board seats in banks give local politicians a leg up in elections. I find that mayors with a savings bank seat have higher odds of winning reelection than mayors without a seat and show that, in particular, conservative mayors benefit from bank connections.
The dissertation, hence, presents empirical evidence about the politics of politically influenced banking unveiling the channels through which politicians control banks and how they benefit electorally from it.
06/2018
To what extent do regime classifications help us understand higher education funding by foundations vis-à-vis the state? This dissertation investigates the explanatory value of three prominent regime classifications – Varieties of Capitalism, Three Worlds of Welfare, and Social Origins theory – for understanding higher education foundations in two regime types: the liberal
United States as well as corporatist Germany. The analysis shows that the classifications do indeed provide a good starting point since they enable us to draw conclusions about the country and activity field level. However, the analysis also shows that they meet their limits when philanthropic foundations are added to the picture since the classifications are not specific enough to correctly predict foundation behavior. The typology proposed in this study suggests that foundations can be placed on a continuum between funding through higher education to reach other aims and funding of higher education for its own sake. The place of foundations on the continuum is different in the sense that the rather market-oriented, liberal US foundations are more likely to support other aims through higher education, while the rather stateoriented,
corporatist-conservative German foundations more often want to support higher education for its own sake.
This study draws upon a range of both quantitative and qualitative data: German and American data sets including university funding statistics, 40 qualitative foundation vignettes, a representative survey of 1,004 German foundations, one focus group, and 49 semi-structured expert interviews conducted on-site.
One of the study’s major contributions is that it refines the regime classifications by considering the understudied role of independent, philanthropic foundations supporting the advancement of higher education. Furthermore, it establishes the first link between regime types and higher education literature by way of philanthropic foundations. As there is growing discussion in Germany and the US about private engagement versus public funding in higher education, the results ultimately have contemporary relevance for understanding the topic in a comparative manner.
05/2018
This dissertation is on general principles of growth, comprising of three chapters and a short introduction. Chapter 1 analyses the macroeconomic adjustment experienced in IMF/EU-programme countries during the Eurozone crisis by creating counterfactuals based on comparable historical or contemporaneous episodes worldwide. It therefore shows
how crisis management and the institutional framework in which it operates have important implications for the depth of the recession. In particular, an incomplete Eurozone institutional setup contributed to aggravate the crisis through higher uncertainty. The first general principle that can be drawn is that sustained growth rests not only in preventing booms but also in designing institutions that well-manage busts. When growth slows down, calls for deep structural reforms multiply. However, estimations of the short- and medium-term impact of these reforms on GDP growth remain methodologically problematic and still highly controversial. As such, Chapter 2 estimates the impact of 23 wide-reaching
structural reform packages (including both real and financial sector measures) rolled out in 22 countries between 1961 and 2000. It therefore illustrates how large reform packages tend to have on average a positive medium-term impact on growth, but these effects were highly heterogeneous across countries. The second general principle that can be drawn is
that deep economic reforms are no growth silver bullet per se, and rather require careful design, tailored to local conditions.
Finally, Chapter 3 explores factors behind the largest growth acceleration episodes that took place worldwide between 1962 and 2002 and identifies general principles that should underlie a successful growth strategy. In particular, it shows how accelerationstend to be preceded by a deep recession and major economic policy changes. Once this information
is combined with a set of counterfactual analyses, it finds that acceleration strategies should not contain off-the-shelf approaches or necessarily all-encompassing ‘shock therapy’solutions. Despite standard growth determinants doing a fairly
good job at characterising successful accelerations, the quest for take-offs remains elusive, as they seemextremely hard to engineer with a high degree of certainty.
04/2018
This dissertation project investigates philanthropic foundations as organizational form in the social welfare field with a special focus on its institutional embedding in different European welfare systems. To do so, it draws on literature from political economy that provides different regime type classifications: Three especially fruitful approaches can be found in the »Varieties of Capitalism« (VoC) approach based on Hall and Soskice (7889), the »Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism« by Esping-Andersen (9::8), and – specifically with regard to the third sector – the »Social Origins Theory« as originally described by Salamon and Anheier (9::<). The existing welfare regime literature clusters countries according to certain main drivers and identifies differences in welfare state systems. This dissertation asks, can we learn something on the organizational level about the embedding of philanthropic foundations in the field of social welfare?
Foundation literature is dominated by an anglophile perspective which mainly focuses on grant-making foundations. However, these represent only one type of foundation; other varieties exist alongside them. Operating foundations are widely neglected in social science research but play an important role, especially in the history of social welfare provision in European countries. In particular, one type of operating foundation, the carrier foundation, mainly functions as a service provider in the field and thus plays a significant role in any understanding of the foundation landscape in the social welfare field. This investigation is based on the comparative insights from three country cases of Germany, Sweden and the UK (England). Guided by propositions from the theoretical research, comparative explorative case studies based on interview data and secondary sources give insights into the field and the embedding of philanthropic social welfare foundations in the three different welfare state systems.
Investigating the range of foundations in social welfare permits a differentiated view of the different types of foundations. Each has different levels of independence from external constraints and are embedded to different degrees according to the propositions from welfare regime theory. These differences hold further implications for the investigation of foundations as a special organizational form.
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. [...]
02/2018
The severe political and economic repercussions of the "euro crisis" during the last decade have revealed the necessity for an improved understanding of both the determinants of sovereign debt crises and the political economy of structural reforms. This dissertation, which consists of three self-contained papers, contributes to these research areas.
In the first paper, we investigate the interaction of fiscal federalism and sovereign default risk. Numerous countries with chronic external debt problems are characterized by inefficient federal fiscal structures. However, the impact of a country's federal design on sovereign default risk has barely been studied in previous work. This paper aims to address this gap. We develop a stylized model of a federation in which regions borrow individually from international lenders while the central government decides whether to default on aggregate sovereign debt. We show that decentralized borrowing leads to higher debt levels, at higher bond yields, an increased default probability and lower welfare compared to a benchmark scenario of centralized borrowing. Moreover, differing regional default costs further increase aggregate welfare losses through distorted regional borrowing incentives. Case studies of Argentina and the euro area illustrate the channels described in the model.
The second paper analyzes how domestic distributional incentives influence sovereign default on debt held by foreign creditors. In a simple political economy model, we show that external default can serve as a redistributive policy similar to distortionary income taxation. The channel we derive builds on recent evidence which suggests that the output costs of default are mainly incurred by high-income households, whereas relatively poor ones benefit due to smaller public spending cuts. Although the potentially important role of income heterogeneity among domestic agents has attracted comparatively little attention in previous work, historical evidence is in line with our argument.
In the third paper (with Johannes Brumm), we argue that an important determinant of voters' support for economic reform is the strength of family ties. While the "crisis hypothesis" predicts that crises facilitate reform, we show in a political economy model that this relation can break down, and even reverse, when agents take into account the effect of reform on their family members. Applied to southern European countries with strong family ties, the model rationalizes why the extremely high (youth) unemployment following the Great Recession has not led to more substantial labor market reforms. In such countries austerity might block rather than foster additional structural reforms.
01/2018
Via an agenda of “deep trade”, global trade governance has increasingly intruded into domestic regulatory space. This is all the more relevant in federally-organised polities in which competencies now subjected to international rule-setting are constituent units’ prerogatives. In many federations, the field of public procurement is a case in point. At the same time, sub-federal executives’ resistance to international procurement liberalisation has varied vastly across federations. While EU member states’ resistance has remained low, US states’ resistance has persisted and increased in recent years. The Canadian provinces, in turn, have only recently begun to open their procurement markets to foreign suppliers. In an attempt to explain this puzzling variance in sub-federal resistance, this Dissertation argues that federations’ domestic institutional and procedural foundations bear an influence on policy outcomes in trade liberalisation. Relying on the concepts of “exit” and “voice” (Hirschman 1970), it posits that sub-federal executives’ voice is inversely related to their reliance on exit. The more voice sub-federal executives are equipped with, the less they dispose of an incentive to exit from a system-wide policy or international commitment. Voice hinges, firstly, on a federation’s institutional configuration. Council federalism, providing constituent units with a direct representation in federation-wide policy-making, endows sub-federal executives with more voice than senate federalism which relies on indirect forms of territorial representation. It depends, secondly, on the nature of vertical relations between both orders of government. Constituent units enjoy more voice when their relations with the federal level are collaborative, marked by formalised patterns of joint policy-making, rather than competitive, pursuing a delineation of federal and subfederal spheres of competence. In case studies of the United States, Canada and the European Union, the Dissertation finds that the posited inverse relationship between sub-federal voice and exit holds and that resistance among sub-federal executives has indeed evolved systematically. In the US senate federation, effective means of joint policy-making have not evolved in the noncoercive field of procurement. In the Canadian case, increasing vertical collaboration has compensated provinces for senate federalism’s low voice. In comparison, the EU case proves peculiar for constituent units’ decisive role in its second chamber federalism and the dense regime of trusting vertical collaboration it accommodates. Member states’ low resistance is a manifestation of the EU trade regime’s comparatively effective workings. Eventually, the dissertation’s findings hint at an appropriate institutional and procedural design for international rule-setting in multi-level settings. If federal executives seek to subject sub-federal prerogatives to international constraints, they should allow for constituent units’ continuous, systematic and collaborative inclusion.
09/2017
The dissertation focuses on the strategizing activities of new-style social enterprises in the highly institutionalized German social service provision sector. More specifically, it focuses on understanding and highlighting the characteristics of highly institutionalized environments taking the case of Germany, and then examines how smaller new entrants strategize in these environments in order to achieve their goals. This is important because there is more limited understanding of how small new entrants operate in highly institutionalized contexts, which is likely to differ from other types of contexts.
The study is built upon a qualitative research design with three in-depth case studies of social enterprises at its core, which were investigated through semi-structured interviews, organizational observation, and secondary data analysis.
The inductive analytical process resulted in the following findings. Firstly, a highly institutionalized field is characterized by stability and density of institutional conditions that manifest through four characteristics: a high regulatory degree, strongly embedded established social service providers, strong and stable financial resource flows and high stability of cognitive schemes regarding social service provision.
Secondly, the strategizing activities of smaller new entrants highlight the important balance between compliance to, and divergence from, institutional prescriptions and expectations that organizations experience. In order to achieve their organizational goals
in this environment, social enterprises develop four strategizing areas in order to manage divergence: problem specification, interaction with established providers, mobilizing financial resources and mobilizing symbolic resources.
The findings contribute to previous research in three ways. Firstly, they contribute to a better specification of highly institutionalized fields based on the perceptions of organizations operating in these environments. Secondly, the findings contribute to the understanding of simultaneous compliant and divergent organizational behavior and its connection to concrete institutions. Thirdly, the findings provide a more fine-grained understanding of the strategizing areas available to and used by new entrants in highly institutional fields in order to cope with the institutional forces that they encounter. This sheds light on the importance of differentiating between types of organizations and types of fields in order to understand the dynamics and the interplay between institutions and the capacity for action of organizations.
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). (...)
02/2017
The knowledge of the distribution of assets and liabilities as well as the key determinants of the distributions of private wealth represent an important basis for decision-making for social and political action like levying taxes. In the three papers, which make up this dissertation, I contribute to these aspects for several European countries.
In the first paper (with M.M. Grabka) the data quality of the Household Finance and Consump-tion Survey (HFCS) is investigated. The survey provides information and enables comparison of assets and liabilities held by households in the Euro area. We investigate potential methodo-logical constraints regarding cross-country comparability and evaluate their impact on the surveyed net wealth (assets minus liabilities). In addition, we investigate item non-response patterns, a serious issue in wealth surveys. We find that the surveyed net wealth in Finland, the Netherlands, Italy and Slovakia is most likely not comparable with the other countries.(...)
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.
05/2016
Developing countries are far more successful in increasing tax pressure on the poor than on the wealthy. To explain this difference, I argue that taxing the wealthy is more prominently a problem of credibility than of coercion. The poor can be forced to pay taxes. Given weak administrative capacities and de facto political power distributions, governments in many developing countries cannot force the wealthy to the same degree.
In this line, I examine the conditions under which wealthy taxpayers consent to taxation in developing countries from different methodological angles. The second chapter analyses the Peruvian and the Colombian tax history between 1970 and 2010 using a comparative case study framework. The analysis provides evidence suggesting that stable party systems and strong business organizations increase the capacity of collective action between political actors and wealthy taxpayers. Thereby these factors also enable the definition of fiscal contracts involving higher tax contributions by the latter group.
The third chapter examines the effect of institutional trust on the support for progressive taxation using public opinion data from the Latin American Opinion Project (LAPOP). The results show that trust in political institutions strongly mitigates the opposition of wealthy taxpayers to progressive taxation.
The fourth chapter four uses panel data for over 90 countries to explore the relationship between party system institutionalisation and reliance on the personal income tax. The analysis indicates that administrative capacity mitigates the effect of party system institutionalization: where the level of administrative capacity is low, party system institutionalisation has a positive and highly significant effect. At high levels of administrative capacity this effect disappears.
Overall, the findings support the notion that especially in developing countries taxing the wealthy is best understood as a political challenge. The good news is that contrary to what is commonly assumed, wealthy taxpayers are not a priori opposed to higher taxes on them. There is scope for wealthy taxpayers to support taxation but this demands reliable political and institutional systems that are able to credibly commit to not misusing the tax contributions. The analysis has major implications for development cooperation active in this field as it demands that the approaches employed balance better the technical and the political dimensions of taxation.
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.[...]
03/2016
This project argues that Eurosceptic challenger parties can affect mainstream parties’ attitudes toward European integration in Western Europe. Defined as anti-European parties without governing experience, Eurosceptic challengers have become a pervasive electoral phenomenon. On the backdrop of both spatial theory and issue saliency theory of party competition, this project argues that Eurosceptic challenger parties can influence mainstream parties’ positions on as well as emphasis of the European integration issue.
After comparative overview of party-based Euroscepticism, a historical and descriptive quantitative analysis of mainstream EU positions and EU issue salience demonstrates that mainstream party attitudes vary significantly over time – an important precondition for Eurosceptic challengers’ programmatic influence.(...)
02/2016
Although not a clear cut question of treaty compliance, this project takes as its theoretical point of departure two potentially opposing explanations for state compliance with international agreements, and asks whether investor-state disputes are better explained by shifting state preferences toward FDI (or a particular investment), or the lack of state capacity to maintain an investment-friendly environment.
The project is structured around three sub-research questions: 1) which domestic institutions are taking the measures that are subsequently challenged by investors? What is the content of these measures? Against investors in which industries are these measures being taken? 2) Under what economic and political conditions are investor-state arbitration cases most likely to occur?3) Are these changes in policy toward investment the outcome of a shift in preferences on the part of state actors toward investment, or are they instead the result of a lack of institutional capacity to respect IIAs? This project adopts a mixed-methods approach to the research question, with empirical chapters based on the qualitative coding of an original dataset of investor-state disputes; a regression analysis, and three case studies of specific disputes in Canada, El Salvador, and Hungary. Therefore, this project paints a general picture of investor-state disputes not as the result of a failure of bureaucratic capacity, but as incidences in which (private) transnational actor preferences truly conflict with those of domestic actors, and in which the state chooses its obligation to the latter rather than the former.
If we accept that investor-state arbitration has the potential to impose significant costs on states, it is important when either justifying or criticising the regime to have an understanding of for which policy measures, and at whose behest, states are incurring these costs. These findings in turn have relevance for those who wish to improve investor-state relations and avoid investor-state disputes, as well as attempts to reform the investment arbitration system.
01/2016
(...) Simple changes in an institutional framework can have huge impacts for the human society which makes it important to analyze them and define their consequences to create a surplus for the society.
In the following dissertation, I present applications how policy regulations and external events generate behavioral responses with a focus on indirect effects, e.g. from health on education and education on crime. All chapters, while not exclusively, follow an empirical approach and show effects in important fields of human society. Beyond the research methods from microeconomics, this dissertation tackles the field of health, early childhood development, secondary education, adolescent drug-abuse and law enforcement. Several identification strategies are used to cope with endogeneity and deliver causal effects between the fields of education, health and crime.(...)
02/2015
The first decade of this century witnessed a transformation of the German financial system from a hitherto bank-based system towards a hybrid system containing elements of both bank-based and market-oriented systems. This hybrid structure was decisive for the German banking sector having been comparatively severely affected by the global financial crisis of 2008, as it had generated an environment partially prone to inadequate risk-taking of some banks. For that reason, the causes for the development of such a hybrid structure are critical in understanding the later development. While much has been written on the German financial system, both before and after the latest crisis, the existing research is less clear on the underlying
factors that have actually led to the development of such a hybrid structure. [...]
01/2015
In recent times, the “lost generation” is discussed widely in public debates. The “lost generation” is the young generation in Southern Europe: In Spain and in Greece, more than half of all young people are unemployed. In Croatia, Italy, Cyprus and Portugal, it is more than one third. With such difficulties in finding entry positions in the labour market, the young generation is faced with an insecure future. Without a job, it is difficult to be independent or to start a family: thus, both the personal and the economic independence suffer. Unemployment in the beginning of a career is likely to hamper career perspectives also in the middle and long run, and hereby leads to diffi-culties in saving for retirement. In this generation, unemployment hits everybody: university graduates who are perceived to be overqualified – or those who left school early in order to take a well-paid job in booming industries such as the construction sector in Spain. No matter the indi-vidual reason: a generation is deprived of their hopes. [...]
04/2014
The decision to establish an Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) marked a momentous change in the history of the European Union: By introducing a common currency and a single monetary policy at the European level, the institutions and practices of economic governance in the EU were transformed. At the same time, EMU created new economic structures and actors at the heart of the international macroeconomic system – with novel and potentially far-reaching implications for policy-making in international financial institutions (IFIs).
How does the EU govern its external relations in international financial institutions? And what explains the patterns of EU unity in IFIs? The dissertation pursues both a descriptive and an explanatory goal, as reflected in the two guiding research questions. I take an encompassing view to studying the EU’s external relations. Representation of the EU in international organizations and fora is an important element, yet it is only part of a longer and more complex story: Before any common position can be communicated or represented at the international level, European actors need to decide on it in the first place. The internal aggregation and authorization of external policies and positions in a poly-centric political system is thus a vital ingredient to the governance of the EU’s external relations in IFIs.(...)
03/2014
German policy makers and scholars have repeatedly referred to the United States’ higher education system as a model for improving the quality of universities in Germany.
Starting at this debate about a potential "Americanization” of German higher education policy this dissertation focuses on the introduction of new bachelor’s programs at German universities and analyzes whether these new degrees resemble their American counterparts.
The theoretical basis for this study is the “Varieties of Capitalism” (VoC) approach by Hall and Soskice, which argues that firms in coordinated market economies (CMEs) such as Germany need employees with specific skills, while employees in liberal market economies (LMEs) like the United States have to acquire general skills for the job market. Assuming that new German bachelor’s degrees are aimed at providing graduates with more general skills, the question of whether the introduction of these new degrees represents a convergence with American higher education policy and whether this indicates a shift towards a more liberal American-style market economy constitutes the main part of this study.
02/2014
Sovereign rating downgrades have led to strong criticism of the criteria used by the three major rating agencies, Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch. But which criteria do rating agencies actually use for evaluating the creditworthiness of sovereign states? The existing literature points to a few basic macroeconomic factors. This book shows that, in addition, rating agencies take political factors into account, in particular a country’s economic liberalization policies, international economic agreements, and political institutions. The book demonstrates the importance of political factors for sovereign ratings based on a new data set for 145 rated countries, which is the largest sample analyzed in the literature thus far. Methodologically, the study combines panel econometric evidence with a text analysis of a unique database of more than 1,200 rating announcements. In 72 per cent of these rating announcements, rating agencies refer to political factors as a key rating determinant.
This book argues that rating agencies have good reason for taking political indicators into account as well. (...)
01/2014
Questions of migration control have long been of central concern to wealthy Western states that attract large numbers of new immigrants. While border control measures aimed at deciding who is allowed to enter state territory and who is prevented from doing so are generally accepted as a legitimate sovereign prerogative, the removal of resident non-citizens tends to be far more controversial. Deportation, i.e., the enforcement of legal obligations to leave the country, is often considered a “cruel power” (Gibney 2008: 147) on the part of the state because it bears the potential of tearing vulnerable individuals from their families and breaking other social ties. In liberal democracies, return enforcement has therefore traditionally been considered a measure of last resort, rather than a normal policy option. This normative assessment is closely interlinked with liberal-democratic states’ emphasis on individual rights (Hampshire 2013: 44-47). This rights-based identity leads to instances in which not only non-citizens’ right to physical integrity, but also their right to family life and their claims to social belonging in their country of residence may trump the state’s prerogative to control access to its territory, and delegitimize forced return. In line with these considerations, the enforcement of former colonial citizens’ legal obligation to leave the United Kingdom (UK) was denounced as “un-British” during the late 1970s.2 In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, so-called guest worker programmes became discredited as domestic authorities proved unwilling or unable to enforce the idea of strictly temporary stay (Pagenstecher 1995). In addition, both the UK and Germany have over the course of the past four decades enacted a number of one-off regularizations of asylum seekers whose applications had been rejected, but who were granted legal residence on the basis of their extended stay in the respective country (cf. Baldwin-Edwards/Kraler 2009).
02/2013
Wie Städte sich neu finden
(2013)
In Städten verdichten sich wie nirgendwo sonst ökonomische, soziale und kulturelle Facetten menschlichen Zusammenlebens. Hier entstehen wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Impulse. 84 Prozent der deutschen Bevölkerung lebt in Städten. Doch sind nicht alle Städte gleichermaßen Orte von Wachstum und Innovation. Mit dem Ende der Industrialisierung und dem Übergang in die Dienstleistungsgesellschaft (vgl. Bell 1999) sind einige Städte aus dem größeren Arbeits-kreislauf der Gesellschaft herausgefallen. Sie haben aufgehört, zentrale Orte des Wirtschaftens zu sein. Ihre Bevölkerungen schrumpfen, Gebäude bleiben ungenutzt und die öffentliche Hand verfügt nur über unzureichende und schwindende Mittel, dem entgegenzuwirken. Es sind strukturschwache Städte.
Kommunale Schrumpfungsprozesse sind aus dem 20. Jahrhundert kaum bekannt, obwohl zwei Kriege in Deutschland tobten und unvorstellbare Verwüstungen hinterlassen haben. (...)
01/2013
Should there be free trade? This question finds different, and often contradicting answers in philosophy and economics. Among economists, there is a remarkable consensus that free markets are desirable. It is this curious consensus that motivates this study.
This dissertations aims to explain, reconstruct and contest the neoclassical vision in mainstream trade theory. It is argued that economic justifications for free trade policies rely on an array of implicit and explicit normative premises,and that economists take positions on topics that are usually dealt with by political philosophers. Taken together, these premises and positions amount to what will be called the neoclassical vision. It is argued that throughout the history of economics, economic doctrines were inescapably normative. Tracing the intellectual and historical origins of this neoclassical vision, it is shown how a specific view of what justice demands in the economy came to be constitutive of today’s economic arguments. I hence attempt to treat economics today as it has historically been: as a branch of political philosophy, and as inextricably normative.
Normative trade theory and the theoretical arguments put forward by international economists will serve as the case study on which basis the neoclassical vision is reconstructed. In turn, the vision will be critically assessed from a liberal egalitarian perspective. Particular attention will be paid to the question of the role of politics in how losers from economic activity are treated.
Following this critical analysis, I argue for the need of a normative ‘countervision’that is most convincingly provided by John Rawls’s early work. It will then be outlined how Rawls could respond and overcome the pitfalls of the neoclassical vision – even though Rawls is deeply influenced by conventional economic thought himself. (...)
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. (...)