Author: publicpolicy

Over the next three years, the BMBF funded project ‘Linking Borderlands’ will bring together researchers from Saarland University, University of Kaiserslautern, European University Viadrina Frankfurt and Brandenburg University.

From an interdisciplinary perspective we will look at the specific dynamics of EU border regions by comparing the Saar-LorLux+ and the Brandenburg/Lebus area. Starting from a classical border studies approach, we hope to contribute to the growing field by adding a stronger policy-oriented perspective.

The results of the project will also be shared with decision makers in politics and society.

Stefanie Thurm

We are looking forward to Marie-Louise Hauch joining our team as an additional student assistant (Wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft) this month.

Marie-Louise currently studies Integrated Social Sciences with a specialization in politics (Bachelor’s program) at the TUK.

Welcome to the team!

In their new article, published in the European Journal of Political Research, Georg Wenzelburger and Carsten Jensen take a closer look at mass media reporting on welfare state reforms. Building on news value theory and the welfare state reform literature, they argue that mass media attention is conditioned by the direction of reforms, the election platform that the incumbent party ran on in the last election and by the policy reputation of the government. Drawing on a new dataset including about 4,800 news articles in British, Danish, and German quality newspapers from 1995 to 2014, they find supporting evidence for their hypotheses.

First, it shows that articles on cutbacks are generally longer than those on expansions. Second, newspapers tend to cover reforms more extensively if they are implemented by governments which campaigned on a pro-welfare position, especially if the welfare state is cut. This effect can be seen in the figure below. Lastly, more reporting tends to take place when right-of-center parties implement reforms compared to left-of-center governments.

The article presents a systematic analysis of the underlying patterns of newspaper reporting on welfare state reforms and paves the way for future research on the relationship between public policy making and media attention.

Figure: Predicted number of words per article for cutbacks (hollow circles) and expansions (black circles).

Stefanie Thurm

We are happy to anounce that Nora Fritz has joined our team as student assistant (Wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft).

Nora currently studies in the Bachelor’s program Integrated Social Sciences and, after having submitted her Bachelor’s thesis this summer, she will continue her studies in the master’s program at the University of Kaiserslautern. During the last winter term, she has taught a student course (Tutorium) to Georg’s lecture ‘Introduction to Political Economy’.

Welcome to our team!

After Jonas Philipp and I had written our master’s thesis together under the supervision of Georg Wenzelburger in February 2020, the idea to publish an article about this topic came up over the course of last year. Together with the expertise of Georg Wenzelburger, the essay “The Migration Policy of the German States – A Multi-Dimensional Analysis” was published in the Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft – Comparative Governance and Politics (ZfVP). We examined to what extent there are differences in the design of migration policy at the sub-national level in the Federal Republic of Germany and what explains the policy variance between the German Länder.

In order to be able to examine the research question as precisely as possible, we considered the following six competences of the federal states:

• the type of accommodation for refugees,
• the benefits they receive,
• their integration into the health system,
• the establishment of “Ankerzentren“,
• the practice of deportation to Afghanistan of the federal states and
• their positioning regarding the topic of safe countries of origin.

To analyse possible paths to explain the differences between the federal states, we use a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) with party politics, socioeconomic context and population attitudes as conditions.

Our results show that there are indeed substantial differences between the German Länder. We also find that the partisan composition of the government is an important condition in different paths for the existence of restrictive or permissive migration policies, respectively.

 

The figure above, an XY plot, corroborates our finding that Land governments with a liberal ideological position (horizontal axis) implement more permissive migration policies (vertical axis) than Land governments with a conservative ideological position.

Daniel Meyer

In their new article “Uncertainty, risk and the use of algorithms in policy decisions: a case study on criminal justice in the USA”, Kathrin Hartmann and Georg Wenzelburger investigate (1) how risk assessment tools, based on machine learning (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, COMPAS) are implemented in daily public administration decision-making and (2) how legal officials in the local criminal justice system of Eau Claire County, Wisconsin experience the changes the use of risk assessment tools bring to their individual working routines.

Through qualitative expert interviews we conducted with legal officials in the local criminal justice system of Eau Claire County, Wisconsin as well as carefully analyzed insight documents provided by them, we could show that especially the individual notion of uncertainty in decision-making processes has changed through the introduction of COMPAS. While, before, a fundamental uncertainty concerning the outcome of proceedings seemed to be dominant, the introduction of the risk assessment tool generated a notion of statistical prediction to a situation. This, consequently, shifted the actors’ decision-making from a state of using incarceration when in doubt to a strong reliance on the risk score of COMPAS.

As a result, we see a need to carefully think about the consequences the use of algorithms might have in decision-making processes.

The article was published in Policy Sciences and can be accessed through: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11077-020-09414-y

            Kathrin Hartmann

On Tuesday, January 19, 2021, we discussed the results of our FairandGoodADM project with politicians, experts and practitioners as well as a great number of interested viewers.

Over the last few years, Georg Wenzelburger and Kathrin Hartmann, together with scientists from the fields of computer science and philosophy at the TU Kaiserslautern, drafted guidelines for the use of algorithmic decision making (ADM) systems by state actors. The main focus was on how to ensure the fairness and quality of said algorithms.

An example was given by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Michael Wagner-Pinter from Synthesis Forschung GmbH in a keynote speech: For the Austrian labor market services he developed an ADM system designed to classify jobless persons according to their labor market chances and their resulting support needs.

In two panels, the results of the project as well as the Austrian labor market service example were discussed. The first panel, consisting of Georg Wenzelburger, Carla Hustedt (Bertelsmann-Stiftung), Dr. Pascal König (TUK) and Dr. Hannah Ruschemeier (Center for Advanced Internet Studies, CAIS), exchanged views on ethical and legal aspects of the proposed guidelines.

The second panel, which included Prof. Dr. Katharina Zweig (TUK), Marco-Alexander Breit (BMWi), Saskia Esken (MdB, SPD party leader), Dr. Stefan Heumann (Stiftung Neue Verantwortung) und Tabea Rößner (MdB, Grüne), discussed the need for political regulation and possible impacts on innovation climate.

A consensus was reached by the panelists that an interdisciplinary evaluation is necessary before the implementation of an ADM system – the guidelines that were formulated in the course of the FairandGoodADM project are a good starting point.

We would like to invite you to the concluding symposium of the research project “FairandGoodADM” taking place on Tuesday, January 19, 2021 from 14:00 to 17:00 via Zoom.

Over the last years, Georg Wenzelburger and Kathrin Hartmann investigated several implications of algorithmic decision making (ADM) systems for democratic governance (for details, see the project website and previous blog posts). During the symposium, they present the results of their work in an interdisciplinary team and discuss their conclusions with policians, civil servants, other researchers and the audience.

All who are interested in the topic are welcome to the virtual event.

In the week before Christmas, our team came together to a Christmas meeting. Due to the pandemic, it was held virtually, but – as you can see – this did not spoil the good mood of those who were present. Eating home-made cookies, drinking mulled wine and opening the little presents that were anonymously exchanged before, we looked back at a demanding, but altogether successful year 2020.

In a new article entitled “Whose bread I don’t eat, his song I don’t sing? MPs’ outside earnings and dissenting voting behaviour”, recently published in the journal Party Politics, Philipp Mai deals with the question of whether politicians’ outside earnings affect their legislative behaviour, precisely their propensity to vote against the party line.

Voting against the party line is a rare phenomenon in most parliamentary democracies and not without risk for Members of Parliament (MPs). Although its determinants, i.e. which MP- or vote-related characteristics facilitate or impede vote defections, are a rather well studied topic in legislative studies, the role of moonlighting therein has never been thoroughly theorized nor empirically examined yet. Philipp argues that MPs with high outside earnings have a higher degree of financial and career-related independence from their party. Therefore, they can be less effectively disciplined by their parliamentary party group and, all else being equal, are expected to have a higher probability to vote against the party line than their non-moonlighting colleagues.

Empirically, he collected data for all MPs of the 18^th parliamentary term of the German Bundestag (2013-2017) and tested his proposition quantitatively using logistic panel regressions against more than 115,000 individual voting decisions. The data support his hypothesis that MPs obtaining the bulk of their earnings outside parliament vote more often against the will of their party group leadership than those who do not have additional income besides their parliamentary mandate.

The findings of the paper have many implications for our understanding of how politicians’ career paths are linked to their political behaviour.