The dark side of the German ‘welcome culture’: investigating the causes behind attacks on refugees in 2015

In 2015, Germany experienced a record high influx of refugees – and received international praise for its ‘welcome culture’. At the same time, however, attacks on refugees rose to an alarming level. This article describes the distribution of these attacks and probes their causes, using detailed socioeconomic and political data while modelling a hierarchical data structure. Controlling for further relevant factors taken from the extant literature, the analysis first tests whether the strength of extreme right political parties plays a role and, second, it models a contagion effect, taking into account spatial as well as temporal proximity. The findings suggest that the strength of right-wing parties in a district considerably boosts the probability of attacks on refugees in that area. They also corroborate the idea of behavioural contagion. The set of social-structural variables employed as controls yielded only limited explanatory power.     

The role of actors in the policy design process: introducing design coalitions to explain policy output

Policy Sciences - Despite a renaissance of policy design thinking in public policy literature and a renewed interest in agency in the policy process literature, agency in the policy design process...     

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Is there anything Left? The politics of social spending in new democracies

The evolution of public social expenditures displays divergent patterns across non‐western countries. This exploratory article argues that in order to understand the domestic sources of this divergence, institutional and structural explanations should be complemented with an actor‐oriented perspective. Analyses of the role of party politics in non‐OECD democracies, through multivariate fixed‐effect regressions using data from 46 countries between 1995 and 2015, reveals a robust positive association between shifts towards Left party government and increases in total public social expenditures, also when controlling for structural and institutional factors. This association however seems potentially conditional on sufficient levels of economic growth. While indicating an impact of partisanship, further research is arguably needed regarding the origins, organization and policy outputs of parties in more recently democratized countries, as well as regarding the conditions under which the ideological orientation of parties in government are actually consequential.     

Individual Ambidexterity and Performance in the Public Sector: A Multilevel Analysis

In this study, we examine individual ambidexterity (i.e., individuals’ balanced pursuit of exploitative and explorative activities) in a public management context. In particular, we combine survey data from junior scholars and secondary data from the Center for Higher Education to investigate the role of individual ambidexterity in an academic context. We conduct multilevel analyses and find that individual ambidexterity is positively related to research performance, indicating that individual ambidexterity positively influences individual performance in the public sector. In addition, we observe a negative relationship between the supervisory ratio and research performance, indicating that having a lower number of employees supervised by a single person leads to lower performance in the public sector.     

Politikdiffusion im Schatten des Parteistaats: Die Integration Chinas in das internationale Regime zur Geldwäschebekämpfung

This study scrutinizes the functions and effects of various mechanisms of policy diffusion by taking the hyper-sovereigntist state of the People’s Republic of China as a hard test case. It demonstrates that a one-sided focus on the contribution of international or transnational interactions to policy diffusion may lead to severe misinterpretations. Thus, careful control studies of the domestic determinants of policy diffusion are indispensable for clearing up the focus. As the Chinese case reveals, politically orchestrated, tactical adaptation to international regulatory standards can be employed to promote a nation’s rise in the global political economy. Policy diffusion does not therefore automatically promote the establishment of credible, shared norms of global governance.     

Clash of claims: nationalizing and democratizing policies during the first parliamentary election in multiethnic Czechoslovak Ruthenia

This paper examines the question of why the countrywide 1920 parliamentary election in Czechoslovakia was postponed in its eastern borderland, Podkarpatská Rus, by putting this event into a context of simultaneous processes of democratization and nationalization, described here as the “double transformation.” The territory in question was inhabited by a Ruthenian majority, who received the support of the government in Prague; a Jewish population without clear preferences regarding their loyalties and aims; a still-influential Hungarian minority; and finally, a Czech-dominated state administration. The aim of the state administration was to let the ethnically mixed population of Ruthenia vote for its parliamentary representatives in the most democratic way possible. However, this intention clashed with the realities in place: old loyalties of the local population toward the Hungarian elites, Hungarian revisionism, a lack of governance, and security issues. Complicating the situation, Romanian troops still occupied the eastern part of Ruthenia as a result of the war among Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania in 1919; Romanians claimed part of the territory for their own nation-state. Faced with these thorny issues, the Czechoslovak state administration felt constrained to postpone the elections until 1924.