Based on and linking our research projects on “The Politics of Law and Order” and “The Political Economy of Private Security”, Georg Wenzelburger and I have published a new article in the Austrian Journal of Political Science. In this study we ask, how Germany’s policy output in the sector of law and order changed due to the refugee crisis and whether this change amounts to a new policy path?
By drawing on several mechanisms of path dependency and by expanding the empirical analysis to private security, we can show that the refugee crisis impacted greatly on German law and order policy. State and market provide more security than before and cooperate more closely – a somewhat new policy path which might be going to last due to reinforcing mechanisms of path dependency. The full article can be accessed here.
Last week, Georg Wenzelburger, Pascal König (Goethe University Frankfurt), and myself travelled to Zurich to attend the „Dreiländertagung“ – the conference of the three German speaking political science associations of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at ETH Zurich.
Georg Wenzelburger and Pascal König presented a current paper on “The electoral role of fiscal conservatism at both extremes of the political spectrum”: While both radical left (RLP) and radical right parties (RRP) claim to protect those most vulnerable to globalization, far-right parties are no staunch advocates of welfare. To examine how they can nevertheless attract citizens with strong pro-spending attitudes, they tested the role of welfare chauvinism, the effect of an anti-system stance, and whether the effect of an anti-system stance depends on the RRP’s anti-system credentials. Using data from the 2016 European Social Survey, Georg and Pascal found for five continental European countries with successful RRPs weak support for an effect of economically motivated welfare chauvinism beyond a general anti-immigration stance. But besides immigration preferences, a lack of political support formed a major factor for explaining why voters with strong redistribution preferences support RRP.
Georg Wenzelburger, Pascal König, Helge Staff (from left to right) in front of the main building of ETH Zurich
On the last day of the conference I presented my latest study in which I explore the usefulness of the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) to explain the length of policy processes during decision making. As a most time attentive theory the MSF should offer a good account of which determinants influence the temporal dynamics at agenda setting and decision making stage. In addition, my study aimed at contributing to the still small list of quantitative MSF applications by critically discussing and partly implementing recent suggestions of how to apply the theory in a quantitative manner. Empirically, I drew on the dataset of all German penal and security legislation from 1997 to 2017, collected during the research project “The Politics of Law and Order”. Although the results were mixed and much work remains to be done, the preliminary results support the MSF literature’s stance that during decision making it is the political stream which is most dominant and influential in shaping the policy process.
With many interesting, current, and methodologically sound papers as well as a welcoming and well organized structure, the “Dreiländertagung” in Zurich greatly helped to improve our current studies, and was a rewarding conference experience as well as a good chance to interact with researchers from all German speaking countries.
We are currently looking for a new research assistant (student assistant, 5h/week) to help us with data collection on the use of algorithmic decision making systems in the criminal justice system in US states. The job will start on April, 1, 2019.
If you are interested, please apply until the 1.3.2019! For more information, click here.
Algorithmic decision making (ADM) systems are increasingly used in different parts of public life to decide together with humans (or all alone). In the US, the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) is for instance used to assess a defendant’s risk of committing more crimes. In Poland, an algorithmic scoring system is used to assess the “employment potential” of job seekers and influences the possibilities for this person to benefit from active labour market policies. Similarly, predictive policing is based on algorithms that scan big data to carve out correlational patterns and leading to decisions where police patrols are strengthened.
Server cluster at the University of Kaiserslautern
Whereas ADM-systems are all over the place, political science has not started to seriously engage with these developments. To date, most of the early studies on the politics of algorithms cover the “input”-side of the political system and ask, for instance, whether “filter bubbles” exist and whether ADM-systems used in social networks affect public opinion and, in consequence, influence the outcomes of elections (see for instance here). Almost nothing has been published on the “output”-side of the political system, namely whether and how policies are affected by ADM-systems.
This year, two new research projects at the professorship will start to change this. A first two-year project (“FairAndGoodADM”, financed by the German Ministry of Higher Education and Research (BMBF), will explore how three different ADM-systems that are already at work (social policy, higher education policy, penal policy), have been implemented and how they are regulated. We will work in close collaboration with the “Algorithm Accountability Lab” at the TUK (Prof. Zweig) and the Chair of Philosophy (Prof. Joisten).
The second four-year project “Deciding about, by and together with algorithmic decision-making systems” is financed by the Volkswagen Foundation and focusses on the criminal justice sector more specifically. It is an international collaborative endeavour and involves computer scientist Prof. Zweig (TUK), the legal scholar Prof. Schulz (Hamburg), the legal philosopher Prof. Yeung (Birmingham) and the economic psychologist Prof. Achtziger (Friedrichshafen). In this project, we will aim at establishing a dataset on ADM-systems that are used in the criminal justice system in all 50 US states. The dataset, which provides details on the respective ADM-systems, will then be analyzed quantitatively to carve out dynamics of policy diffusion, political influence and so on.
Two great new paths of research in the growing field of the politics of digitalization that we are happy to begin this year.
Georg Wenzelburger
[photo by Thomas Koziel, provided by KLUFOS, University of Kaiserslautern]
The third of four talks in the Brown-Bag Seminar of the Political Science Department at the University of Kaiserslautern dealt on the 12th of December with questions of social housing policy – the subject of the dissertation of Alexander von Kulessa.
Of the very early project, Kulessa presented preliminary results of his first empirical case: London. A massive decline in the rate of social housing has been evident in the British capital since the 1980s. And by 2011 there was almost no social housing left in the city’s center. Instead social housing is now mainly located on the outer edges of the metropolitan area. An important factor in this regard was the “Right to buy” introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1980. The “Right to Buy” scheme is a UK policy which gives tenants of councils and some housing associations the legal right to buy, at a large discount, the apartment they are living in. In the talk, Alexander von Kulessa presented various hypotheses to explain this temporal and geographical variance. A specific issue adressed by him was the role of political parties in terms of a partisan effects approach.
However, the hypotheses which assume that the social housing rate is higher given a higher share of Labor mandates in a community, have not yet been confirmed. The multi-level regression model rather indicate that the social housing rate is lower when the proportion of homeowners is higher. Following the presentation of the first results, a lively discussion ensued with a large number of students and the teaching team of the Political Science Department of the University of Kaiserslautern.
Last Friday and on invitation by Dr. Tim H. Stuchtey, director of the BIGS (Brandenburgisches Institut für Gesellschaft und Sicherheit gGmbH), I held a talk at the BIGS PizzaSeminar – right in the center of Berlin. The BIGS PizzaSeminar offered the unique opportunity to present preliminary research results of my dissertation project “The Political Economy of Private Security” to an audience of experts from academia, business, and politics – lured to the talk by the interesting topic of private security as well as by the delicious pizza.
First, I introduced the audience to the heterogeneous landscape of private security services in the EU by highlighting the differences between member states in the number of private security personnel – both in relation to population and police officers – and in the industries’ turnover. In addition, I reported on three possible indicators which measure the degree of a country’s private security regulation. In the second part of my talk, I offered an overview of my qualitative work and the three regulatory case studies of private security regulation policy processes. The applied process tracing strongly suggests three main drivers: individual actors (entrepreneurs), organized interests, and path dependent decision-making. These appear to be causally responsible for the policy output and should thus be looked at when trying to determine responsible factors driving the variance of private security regulation in the EU.
Scatterplot of the quality of private security regulation and turnover
Finally, and coming to the main question of the talk, I cautiously presented very preliminary and basic calculations on a possible correlation between the degree of regulation and the scope of the national private security industries. So far the statistics suggest a somewhat mild but positive link between regulation and turnover as well as a market’s concentration – influenced by some outliers. Due to the absence of more and better data, the analysis has to stop here and needs to remain quite critical concerning its results. Yet the answers found encourage to continue the valuable research on private security from a political science perspective.
On November 27, Colette Vogeler lectured at the University of Kassel as part of the lecture series “Challenges and possibilites for Sustainable Development Goals: Food security, human development and natural resource management”. Her talk focused on interdependencies between environmental and culture policies. The following video shows a discussion between students and Colette Vogeler.
When travelling abroad you certainly learn more about foreign countries, yet you also – and perhaps even more so – learn about your own country. Following this spirit, I spent two days of the last week at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg, where I attented a workshop on “Interpretation” and its use in political science. The workshop was part of the preparation of an upcoming special issue in the German journal “Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft”, guest-edited by Marlon Barbehön, Sybille Münch, and Gabi Schlag.
The renowned “Libeskind building” at Leuphana University
Being rooted in positivist policy analysis, I do not use interpretative or constructivist approaches in my research at all. Yet, the special issue offered the unique opportunity to reflect upon one’s own perspective by engaging with ideas usually not treated in my day-to-day work. Indeed, my contribution to the special issue tries to determine whether interpretative elements do exist in positivist policy analysis. I answer this question by examining the two sets of theories mainly used in traditional German policy analysis, policy-output-theories and policy-process-theories, as well as two methods of data collection, the quantification of policy outputs and semi-structured expert interviews.
The preliminary results suggest that while policy-output-theories exhibit very little interpretative elements, theories of the policy process contain concepts which highlight the role of individual meaning-making and societal discourses. The theories’ assumption of bounded rationality and their focus on the micro-level make them appear closer to interpretative approaches, although their main aim remains the testing of generalizable hypotheses. Concerning the two methods of data collection, the quantification of policy outputs did feature less interpretative elements than expert interviews. Yet, I got so many new ideas at the workshop, that I may reconsider these early results and sharpen my conclusions.
Lüneburg’s picturesque old town
In sum, you have to get out of your own shoes sometimes in order to have a closer look at them. Participating in the special issue and going to Lüneburg to discuss the many different contributions to the special issue and ideas about “interpretation” was therefore a very worthwhile endeavor also – or perhaps especially – for a researcher in positivist policy analysis.
During two weeks in November, I am a visiting researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark. The department of political science is the leading political science department in Denmark and was ranked third best political science department in Europe in 2017 (after the LSE and Oxford University). The department is home to outstanding scholars like welfare state expert Kees van Kersbergen, comparative public policy scholar Christoffer Green-Pedersen, political behavior specialist Rune Slothuus or Helene Helboe Pedersen, expert in political parties. Briefly: It is a great place to discuss research, meet interesting people and work on my own projects in an inspiring context.
Entrance to the department building
During my stay, I am primarily working together with Carsten Jensen on our book “Reforming the Welfare State” (under contract with Routledge) which will present results of the analysis of a new dataset in legislative changes to the welfare state in four European countries which was collected in the WSCEP-project during the last four years. Carsten organized not only a nice flat on campus for my stay but also an office from which I can work. I also participate in research meetings and the very nice lunches with all the other department staff that take place every day in the common lounge which is open to everybody working at the department.
The grey lighthouse in Skagen
Besides research, I also enjoy being in a very beautiful region of Denmark with the lively city of Aarhus and an incredibly beautiful landscape around. During the week-end, I got to know the most Northern part of Jylland, the small town of Skagen. Not far from there is the place where the two seas– the Skagerrak and the Kattegat – collide. It was a very impressive moment to stay at the top of Denmark and just watching…
Last week Colette Vogeler held the first talk in this semester’s “Brown Bag Seminar” – an event hosted by the political science department of the University of Kaiserslautern. Colette Vogeler began her talk on “Animal welfare policy in policy analysis” with an overview of the current state of research in this under-researched policy field. After a brief description of subdivisions of animal welfare, Colette Vogeler spoke about the problems of animal welfare policy.
In fact, there are various competing interests, e.g. between economy and animal welfare, but also sometimes between environmental protection and animal welfare. In the further course of the presentation, different aims of animal protection were mentioned, e.g. the “Five Freedoms” approach, which originated in the UK, the country with the highest level of animal welfare policy in the EU.
Furthermore, Colette presented evidence on the influence of party politics on animal welfare policy in Germany. Yet, there is not only a great variance in animal welfare policy between the German states, but within the EU as well. Indeed, the different national societies exhibit quite different views on the question of who should take care of animal welfare (see figure 1).
Figure 1: Who should handle animal welfare? (Eurobarometer 2016)
In the near future, Colette aims to take a closer look not only at partisan effects but also at other influencing factors such as societal pressures, international dependencies, the influence of interest groups and issues of harmonization in the EU. She also plans to apply her research to the United States and even developing countries.
It was great to see so many students and faculty members at the first Brown Bag Talk in this semester, which turned out to be the most visited one in the history of the Brown Bag Seminar(!). [For more information on the research projects of the Professorship for Policy-Analysis and Political Economy, also visit Alexander von Kulessa’s Brown Bag Talk on “Social Housing – The Politics of Social Housing in Paris, London and New York” on the 12th of December (57-315; 12pm).]
Daniel Meyer
(Photo by Daniel Meyer, figure by Colette Vogeler)
