We are very happy to announce that dissertation “The Political Economy of Private Security” by our former colleague Helge Staff has been awarded the Prize of the “Freundeskreis” of the TU Kaiserslautern. This is a great honor, because Helge’s dissertation has succeeded in an univesity-wide competition and is now one of 6 theses that has been distinguished in a ceremony on December 1st. It is the second prize for this excellent thesis after the work has already been decorated with the “Haaß award”. Congratulations to Helge from the entire team!
Very timely, the book has now also appeared in print in the “Policy Analysis” series at the LIT-Verlag.
We are happy to welcome Philipp Mai, who has joined our team this week as lecturer (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter). Philipp has graduated from the University of Heidelberg and has been working in the Political Science Department there as a lecturer in recent years
Philipp will start as a part-time lecturer at the TUK and his his office can be found on the ground floor in building 57 (room 265). However, office hours will be held virtually (due to the pandemic). Philipp will teach a course on party competition this winter term, continue his work on the Ph.D.-thesis on legislative behaviour and start to work on research collaborations with Georg Wenzelburger. His research centers on legislative politics and party competition with a focus on Germany.
The increased use of algorithmic decision making systems (ADM-systems) in various areas of politics and society raises many intricate questions, such as
“How are ADM-systems implemented into democratic governance?”
“How and to what extent do they affect everyday decision-making?”, or
“How and to what extend does society influence the implementation processes?”
Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), our team, consisting of researchers from the fields of informatics, philosophy and political science, addressed those questions from the different angles of our expertise during the last 1 ½ years in the project “FairAndGood ADM”. The results we obtained so far, were presented in a scientific workshop hosted by us – partly in presence, partly online. Over one and a half days, taking place on the 21st and 22nd of September, 2020 the team discussed their research findings gathered with participants from University of Düsseldorf, Saarland University and University of Twente as well as colleagues working on similar subjects from the TUK. The workshop featured four paper presentations – three by the political science team and an “ethical reflection paper” by the philosophy group. In their papers, the political science team (Kathrin Hartmann and Georg Wenzelburger) present a “deep dive” into three empirical cases that teach us how ADM systems are implemented in real life of public administration and what political processes led to the decision to introduce the systems. In the first case study, we analyzed the implementation of the ADM system ‘COMPAS’, which is used in the criminal justice system of the U.S to assess a criminal defendant’s likelihood to re-offend.
In our second case study we concentrated our research on the implementation of ‘Admission Post-Bac’ (APB), a tool that was designed to assign high school graduates to university programs. The introduction of this algorithmic matching tool was a very complicated process (as can be glanced from the figure), which we tried to theoretically explain using the Multiple Streams Framework.
Slide from our workshop presentation on APB
Finally, the third case study focuses on ‘AMAS’, and ADM-system which shall be implemented in the Austrian unemployment service to assess the reintegration chances of a job-seeker into the labou
r market. Not only studying already available data and documents but also going into the field, conducting semi structured interviews using qualitative empirical methods, we were able to gain good insights into the political decision making and the political regulation surrounding the implementation of ADMs.
The results of the workshop were very helpful to us to further polish the papers. As each research paper was discussed by one of our participants, looking at the strengths of the paper but also discussing weaknesses to overcome, we had insightful and thorough discussions about the contributions. Besides papers, we also discussed further steps we have to take in order to provide solid information about the implementation of ADM systems for scientific researchers and what we, as researchers and citizens, can learn from the cases.
Helge Staff and Georg Wenzelburger have published a new article in the Journal of Public Policy. They focus on the penal-welfare nexus, namely the idea that cutbacks in welfare state policy are accompanied by expansion of penal policy. The article examines, more specifically, how political parties and electoral competition affect the relationship between these policies.
Staff and Wenzelburger assume that both policies depend on party ideology and government participation, and differentiate – on the left hand side of the ideological spectrum – between social democrats that follow a reform oriented “third-way” -program and more traditional social democratic parties. For their research, they selected four different European countries (Britain, Denmark, France, and Germany), which they analyzed over a period of 24 years. In each of the countries, the authors coded legislative changes in penal and welfare policies. A multiple regression analysis, executed as ordinal logistic and OLS regression, allows to test the effects of the independent variables (e.g. growth, homicide, or cabinet seats) on legislative change – both for penal and welfare state policy. To see whether there is a penal-welfare nexus, they also include a time-lag variable that indicates whether welfare state change affects penal policy.
In their study, Staff and Wenzelburger find that government participation of conservative parties is associated with welfare state cutbacks, while conversely social democratic governments have a higher chance of expanding the welfare state. Regarding penal legislation, they point out that social democrats as well as conservatives are more repressive. For market-liberal, green, but especially left-liberal parties the opposite is true. One interesting fact is that left liberal parties are the best at slowing harsh penal policies.
Concerning the penal-welfare nexus, there is no evidence of a direct effect – namely that penal policies change in direct relation to welfare state change. However, using a model with interaction effects, Staff and Wenzelburger show that this is different for third way social democratic governments. In these cases, welfare state cutbacks are indeed followed by more repressive penal legislation (see the line with filled circles in the graph above). Based on this evidence, the authors conclude that the penal-welfare nexus is not a universal pattern, but can indeed be observed for third-way social democratic governments, such as the Blair government in Britain or the Schröder governments in Germany. These finding mesh well with qualitative evidence from comparative case studies (as published by the authors in the EJPR in 2017).
My new book “The Partisan Politics of Law and Order” has now appeared at Oxford University Press. I am super happy that the results of several years of work have now found a home in this monograph. Thanks to all the people that have halped to make this happen!
Interested? Here is a short summary:
“Whereas some Western democracies have turned toward substantially tougher law and order policies, others have not. How can we account for this discrepancy?
In The Partisan Politics of Law and Order, Georg Wenzelburger argues that partisan politics have shaped the development of law and order policies in Western countries over the past twenty-five years. Wenzelburger establishes an integrated framework based on issue competition, institutional context, and policy feedback as the driving factors shaping penal policy. Using a large-scale quantitative analysis of twenty Western industrialized countries covering the period from 1995 to 2012, supplemented by case studies in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Sweden, Wenzelburger presents robust empirical evidence for the central role of political parties in law-and-order policy-making.
By demonstrating how the configuration of party systems and institutional context affect law and order policies, this book addresses an understudied but key dynamic in penal legislation. The argument and evidence presented here will be of interest to political scientists, sociologists, criminologists, and criminal justice scholars.”
We are proud and happy to announce that the dissertation of our former colleague, Helge Staff, has been distinguished by the Haaß Foundation with the Haaß Award. Helge has defended his Ph.D.-thesis on the political economy of private security in January 2020 – and the thesis will be published soon as a monograph.
The “Haaß Promotionspreis” is awarded every year to the best dissertations defended in the Faculty of Economics and the Faculty of Social Sciences.
Congratulations to Helge for his important contribution and the award!
We have a job opening for pre-doctoral students at the professorship and are looking for a candidate with a Masters degree in political science/social sciences with an interest in public policy analysis or political economy. Interested candidates are asked to send in applications until the 15th of July 2020. We offer a part-time job (50%) in salary scale E13.
Looking for a Christmas gift? Maybe you are happy to hear that the new book on welfare state reforms is out now and might be a gift idea for your family and friends (probably not…), but perhaps for yourself (who knows?).
At any rate, I am happy to see this joint work with Carsten Jensen (Aarhus University) finally in print. The book draws heavily on the work done by the WSCEP project team (Carsten, myself, Christoph Arndt and Seonghui Lee), but centers mostly on the policy side – that is the complicated world of social policy legislation. It introduces our new dataset on welfare state reforms in the UK, Denmark, Finland, France and Germany from 1974 to 2014, which is now also available online on Harvard Dataverse.
In the book, we have systematically investigated core questions that have preoccupied the welfare state literature at least since the 1990s. These include the extent of path dependency in mature welfare states, the usage of so-called “invisible” policy instruments for hiding cutbacks, and the role of partisanship – on whether the ideological color of the incumbent affects policy – which have been analysed in depth by examining the new dataset presented in this book.
In a recent paper, published in West European Politics, I have analyzed – together with Carsten Jensen, Seonghui Lee and Christoph Arndt – how governments strategically time welfare state legislation. Our main theoretical argument boils down to the observation that governments may not simply “electioneer” welfare state expansions and cutbacks at their discretion over the electoral term with cutbacks in the beginning of a mandate and expansions at the end, as the literature on political business cycles expects. This is because governments are bound by their election manifesto and these manifestos mostly involve pledges to expand social policies. Hence, whereas it seems reasonable from a political economy perspective to indeed expect that governments expand the welfare state toward the end of their mandate in order to reap electoral gains, governmemnts have to weigh possible cutbacks in the beginning of a mandate against the need to fulfill – mostly expansive – electoral pledges.
Building on our new dataset on welfare state reform legislation (Welfare State Reform Dataset, WSRD), we test these claims and find empirical evidence that support our theoretical expectations. Indeed, welfare state legislation seems to follow a u-shaped trajectory over the course of a governments mandate with a mixed (or slightly expansive) period in the first months, followed by a cutback period, and a clearly expansionist stance toward the end. The exception from the rule are governments made up of parties that have pledged to cut the welfare state in the first place. Here the u-shaped relationship is less pronounced and a linear positive trajectory fits the data better (i.e. cutbacks in the beginning, expansions in the end) (see Figure below).
We hope that these findings contribute to the debate about the strategic timing of welfare state cutbacks, the political business cycle, and public policies, in general.
When I joined the inaugural lecture of the EuroCrim 2019 in Ghent (Belgium) – the opening of this year’s large conference of the European Society of Criminology – it felt a bit like being a Ph.D.-student again and participating at the first big scientific conference. As a political scientist, I clearly was the odd one out only knowing one or two criminologists from the rare events of interdisciplinary research I participated in over the last years (e.g. thanks to my joint project on the penal-welfare nexus).
However, political science was actually all over the place during these days at the conference. In his inaugural speech, Tapio Lappi-Seppälä, winner of the lifetime criminology award, talked about patterns of penal policy, linking imprisonment rates up to concepts borrowed from political science, such as Lijphart’s theory of democracies or Esping-Andersen’s welfare regimes – couldn’t it be more political sciency? And in a panel on fear of crime, political dynamics were mentioned as main reason of why everybody is concerned with fear of crime nowadays (while actual crime rates are decreasing). Finally, the panel I participated in was even termed “politics and insecurity” – so I felt quickly at home.
Inaugural lecture by Tapio Lappi-Seppälä on comparative penal policies
In my talk, I presented the key theoretical claims and main empirical findings of the quantitative analyses that will be published as part of my book “The partisan politics of law and order” – the final output of my research project on law and order policies forthcoming in Spring 2020 at Oxford University Press. My main findings come in two steps: First of all, it seems safe to say that parties emphasize law and order issues in their manifestos to a much stronger extent, if voters find security-related issues to be important and if the configuration of party competition includes strong right-wing populist parties. However, parties do not only talk about law and order policies, but they actually put them into law, once they enter office. Based on analysis of public spending and law and order legislation, I also find that parties which emphasize law and order heavily in the election campaign translate this emphasis into more spending and tougher legislation when they are part of the government. However, judicial review by powerful constitutional courts may push back such developments to a certain extent. Nevertheless, my findings show that party politics is key if we want to understand why some countries did engage on tough-on-crime policies whether others don’t.
I am very grateful to the conveners of the panel, Emily Gray and Steve Farrell (Derby University, UK) for having invited me to present my findings at the EuroCrim 2019 – not only because it I received good feedback and learned a lot attending an interesting conference, but also because I got to know the very cozy city of Ghent. Clearly, next time I will stop by, I need to reserve more time to do sight-seeing in what seems to be a very attractive city to live (see photos).
Very timely, the book has now also appeared in print in the “Policy Analysis” series at the LIT-Verlag.
