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 18th 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.
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.
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.
Very timely, the book has now also appeared in print in the “Policy Analysis” series at the LIT-Verlag.
