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.