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Are governments actually less popular with the voters if they cut back the welfare state? This question was at the heart of the project “Welfare State Cutbacks and Electoral Punishment” (WSCEP) which now turned into the final year of funding. The core team consisted of four researchers: Prof. Carsten Jensen (PI, Aarhus University, Denmark), Dr. Seonghui Lee (Aarhus University), Dr. Christoph Arndt (University of Reading, UK) and Prof. Georg Wenzelburger (TUK, Germany).

The main work of the project was to create a unique dataset on changes of unemployment and pension legislation in five countries (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany and UK) that measures policy change on a very fine-grained level differentiating between individual policy instruments (e.g. changes to nominal benefits, to the duration period or to the indexation formula). With this new data at hand, several analyses were run, investigating whether governments lose popularity if they cut benefits (yes, they do), whether they gain popularity when they expand the welfare state (yes, they do, but mostly for pensions) or whether the type of instrument matters (yes, it does). At the Kaiserslautern meeting in May, the project team talked about current papers (and revisions to do), set out a plan for future publications (e.g. a final book with Routledge) and discussed avenues for future research based on the great data collected so far. Finally, the guests from Britain and Denmark also got to know the city of Kaiserslautern including a nice dinner during the sunset.

First results of the WSCEP-project were published in the British Journal of Political Science and the Journal of European Social Policy:

Lee, Seonghui/Jensen, Carsten/Arndt, Christph/Wenzelburger, Georg (2017). “Risky Business? Welfare State Reforms and Government Support in Britain and Denmark“, British Journal of Political Science: doi:10.1017/S0007123417000382

Jensen, Carsten/Arndt, Christoph/Lee, Seonghui/Wenzelburger, Georg (2017): „Policy instruments and welfare state reform“, Journal of European Social Policy: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0958928717711974

In the US, decisions of the justice system are increasingly affected by algorithmic decision making systems. They are used in almost all US states and assist decision-makers in a wide range of decisions, e.g. about probation or the risk assessment for recidivists.

In a new article, computer scientists from the Algorithm Accountability Lab at the TUK, Prof. Katharina A. Zweig and Tobias Krafft, have joined forces with Georg Wenzelburger and put together a paper that discusses 1) how algorithms affect decision-making in the criminal justice system and 2) what difficulties and challenges arise from this from a political science perspective and theories of democracies. The paper entitled “On chances and risks of security related algorithmic decision making systems” has been accepted by the European Journal of Security Research and can be accessed here.

Certainly, this first paper is only the beginning of a longer collaboration between the Professorship for Policy Analysis and Political Economy with the Algorithm Accountability Lab. There is too much going on in this interesting field – especially from a public policy perspective. Algorithms are used in education policy (deciding in France about who is entitled to enroll in certain universities), in social policy (assisting employment agencies in their decisions about what candidate to propose a job offer), and, not least, in law and order policies. From a public policy perspective, it is important to first assess how such systems are used in different countries, how they are embedded in bureaucratic decision-making, and, most importantly, to analyze the policy process (including the various actors and interests involved in it) that led to the decision for or against the use of a certain algorithm.

Georg Wenzelburger

[photo by Thomas Koziel, provided by KLUFOS, University of Kaiserslautern]

This summer term I am teaching an under-graduate seminar on policy process theories and wanted to spice it up a little by making the seminar more research focused. This led to a more elaborate seminar design featuring alternating theory- and research sessions, the continuous analysis of a real German policy process, and the iterative execution of small research processes by the students – with the ultimate aim of a first empirical term paper to be written over the summer break.

Together with my teaching assistant, Kathrin Hartmann, I will report over the coming months on this extra-ordinary teaching experience in a mini-series on this blog. This first episode will deal with the structure and background of the seminar while latter episodes cover individual sessions or the tutorials on term paper writing by Kathrin Hartmann.

The core idea of the seminar is to introduce the students to the analysis of policy processes by teaching core policy process theories and to give them the chance to directly apply them in a structured setting. To achieve this the seminar proceeds along the stages of the policy process (Agenda-Setting, Decision-Making, Implementation, Evaluation) – but not just theoretically but quite practically by researching step by step the recently introduced road user charge in Germany (“PKW-Maut”).

For each stage, one or two theories of the policy process have been selected. In the first session on a theory, the theory itself is discussed and we develop together a research question for our selected policy process, evaluate the state of the literature (to an extent), and define a hypothesis. Based on these first three steps of the research process, the students engage in the following session in a structured analysis. This is facilitated by the use of  very limited research questions, narrow hypotheses, simple methods and carefully prepared data.

A huge advantage of the seminar – and one of the main reasons why the seminar can be offered in this way – is the presence of my TA, Kathrin Hartmann. The seminar is supported by a small grant from a program specifically designed to promote empirical research by students in their first or second semester and to especially encourage female students in pursuing an academic career.

Kathrin Hartmann offers a range of services to the seminar and the students by preparing data for the research sessions, assisting the student research groups in the seminar, offering individual mentoring, and by organizing and executing voluntary tutoring sessions on term paper writing over the course of the summer.

In sum, the seminar is intend to teach policy process analysis and by doing so to introduce the students to the world of empirical political science research at the same time. To be continued…

Helge Staff

 

As part of the project “The Political Economy of Private Security“, Helge Staff has authored a short review of the literature on the question “Why does ‘private security’ grow?”. Aimed at a general audience the article was published in “DSD – Der Sicherheitsdienst” – a key industry journal of the German private security sector.

You can access the article (pg. 38) in German here.

Since George & Bennett’s influential book “Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences” was published in 2005, qualitative work in the social sciences increasingly claims to identify “causal mechanisms” and to apply a technique called “process tracing”. But what does “process tracing” actually mean and how can we use it for better qualitative research?

In order to update our knowledge of this method, which we apply in several research projects (e.g. in “The Politics of Law and Order”  or in “The Political Economy of Private Security“) and to give other, especially young scholars, at the University of Kaiserslautern a chance to get to know it first hand, Georg Wenzelburger invited Peter Starke to come to Kaiserslautern. Prof. Dr. Peter Starke, University of Southern Denmark, has not only applied the method intensively in his own research but has also published a very good German handbook article on the subject.

Supported by the TU-Nachwuchsring (network for the promotion of young scientists)  the short methods workshop was held from the 12^th to the 13^th of March. On the first day, Peter Starke introduced the participants to the basis of good qualitative research in social sciences: the case selection. Whereas quantitative research can draw on large numbers of cases or even random sampling, qualitative research dealing with a few or even only one case needs to pay special attention to case selection in order to avoid methodological pitfalls. After also discussing the notion of causal mechanisms (in difference to a simple X-Y relationship), Professor Starke began the second day by illustrating the use of certain “tests” in process tracing which help to assess the weight of a particular piece of evidence speaking in favor or against a hypothesized causal mechanism. The workshop concluded by also considering “best practices” of process tracing as well as the drawbacks of the method.

Throughout the whole workshop Peter Starke encouraged and gave ample opportunity for the participants to directly apply the learned lessons to their own research. In direct talks he offered his help with any individual problems within a particular research project. The diversity of the participants, who came from different disciplines and three faculties of the University, led to a lively interdisciplinary debate and also showed the methodological potential of process tracing beyond political science and policy analysis.

Helge Staff

As part of the project “The Political Economy of Private Security” I spent the last five days in Madrid and Barcelona interviewing policy experts on how the 2014 reform of Spanish private security regulation came about. This detailed tracing of the “Ley 5/2014 de seguridad privada” is one of six case studies of my project. These detailed case studies of single policy processes are intended to show whether and – more importantly – how the factors, analyzed on the macro-level and via quantitative methods, play out in terms of specific causal mechanisms.

Analyzing these policy processes in the abstract and theoretical terms of causal mechanisms, which I model via an updated version of John Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework, requires a detailed knowledge of the policy process itself. A central source of this policy process knowledge are for me the persons who have actually taken part in the process. Academic literature, newspaper articles, policy reports, committee documents, or Parliamentary debates are other valuable sources, yet talking to the very people who have “made” the policy offers unique insight knowledge.

And indeed, the interviews of the past week showed once again that policy-making is often an long-term endeavor of dedicated people seizing the opportunity of the moment: Spanish private security regulation, enshrined in an act of 1992, became over the years in need of revision and a wide coalition of actors across industry, unions, administrators, and the police were ready for change. In 2011 the victory of the Popular Party, sympathetic to the idea of private security regulation reform, was an ideal “window of opportunity” actively seized by policy experts engaged with the issue.

The technique of semi-structured expert interviews is a common and often used method of data collection in qualitative research and I can only encourage  especially students to just give it a try (for an early but very insightful guide to expert interviews, see Dexter [1969] 2006). Over the next weeks I will transcribe and analyze the interviews more carefully, collect further data on the process via various sources, compare and thus “triangulate” the data in order to get a full picture of the process. Only on this basis I can in the next step truly relate the data to my hypothesized causal mechanisms. Thus, this research trip to Spain was only one but an important step in the case study and the overall dissertation project “The Political Economy of Private Security”.

Helge Staff

About ten years after the financial and economic crisis hit Europe, the annual meeting of the DVPW’s (Germany’s Political Science Association) section on Political Economy now dealt with the outcomes and aftershocks of the most severe crisis since WWII. Held at the “Schader-Forum” in Darmstadt from the 22nd to 23rd of February 2018, we (Georg Wenzelburger and Helge Staff) had the chance to participate in the lively discussions, presentations, and roundtables.

Our own contribution focused on one of the professorship’s current research areas: the interrelation between the policy areas of social and penal policy (see, also Georg Wenzelburger’s recent Inaugural Lecture). Taking the crisis as a unique policy setting we asked, whether the crisis in Europe reinforced a policy compensation effect between welfare and law & order or whether both policy sectors have developed in parallel due to fiscal constraints. We basically developed two competing hypotheses from the literature: The first – based on comparative criminology – suggests that the crisis reinforced a compensation effects between the policy sectors. Whereas the welfare state gets cut amidst the crisis, the state’s potency and punitivity in issues of law & order is increased.

The second hypothesis understands the crisis as an event which severly constraints all public budgets and therefore leads to a parallel retrenchment of both welfare and penal policy. Thus, the paper essentially is a much more mature and significantly enhanced version of the study I presented in November at the workshop “Policy-Making in Hard Times” in Barcelona.

The results of our quantitative and qualitative analyses using different measurements of the two policy areas were not completely harmonious but supported the compensation-effect-hypothesis more so than a fiscal-constraint-hypothesis during the crisis. This preliminary result – to be refined by further testing – related well to the conference’s many discussions on the mid- to long-term effects of the recent economic and financial crisis.

Helge Staff

 

Celebrating his appointment to full professor for Policy-Analysis and Political Economy at the University of Kaiserslautern, Georg Wenzelburger held his inaugural lecture on Friday the 9th of February.  Starting on a personal note, Georg Wenzelburger first welcomed his family and friends as well as many old and new colleagues by looking back at his academic career and the crossroads he faced on his way to become a professor. Prof. Dr. Shanley E.M. Allen, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, expressed her gratitude that this path has led to him to Kaiserslautern.

The inaugural lecture by Prof. Wenzelburger then dealt with two of his past and current academic interests integrated into a new and fascinating research endeavor. Titled “The left and the right hand? On the relationship between welfare and security in times of globalization“, the lecture explored common drivers of, or a causal relationship between, the dual processes of welfare state retrenchment and penal state expansion. Drawing on the rich data and analytical results of the research project “The Politics of Law and Order”, Georg Wenzelburger mapped the development of law and order policies and related them to the dynamics of partisan competition. In this perspective, partisan competition structured by the nature of a state’s party system leads to distinct policy outputs. Returning, to the relationship between increasing security measures and decreasing social welfare, Prof. Wenzelburger strongly hinted at the prominence of a micro-level explanation: Insecurities and fears of crime at the individual level could be anticipated by political parties which in return offer policy solutions.

After the lecture, Prof. Wenzelburger invited his guests to a small reception prepared by his team. Many used the opportunity to congratulate him, to discuss about the lecture, and to enjoy a very nice evening with friends and colleagues.

We are proud to announce that in cooperation with the “TU-Nachwuchsring” we are hosting a methods workshop on case study designs and process tracing with the renowed scholar and process-tracing-expert Peter Starke, University of Southern Denmark.

The workshop takes place between the 12th and 13th of March 2018. All young scholars of the University of Kaiserslautern are invited to apply. For further information, please click here.

… for our upcoming project on “The Politics of Housing Policy”. If you are interested in getting to know firsthand the reality of academic research, have fun working with quantitative data as well as hold a B.A. degree, we are very much looking forward to your application till the 15th of February 2018.

For further information (in German), please click here.