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AbstractThis study investigates the subjective effects of gender quotas by examining how quotas affect party elites' perceptions of quota beneficiaries. Furthermore, it proposes to distinguish between objective and subjective quota effects. Subjective effects were studied by randomizing information on whether politicians got into office through a gender quota. Elites then were asked to rate politicians based on an audio clip and an experimental vignette. Whereas the two treatment groups were told that gender quotas or ceiling quotas for men were employed during a politician's election, the control group did not receive this information. This experiment was conducted in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. More than 1,000 party elites participated overall. Contrary to expectations, being framed as a "quota woman" only has a negative impact among elites of the radical right. In contrast with the center right, the radical right is opposed not only to quotas but to quota beneficiaries as well.

"Committees of Inquiry are powerful instruments of legislative oversight and hold the potential to generate extensive public attention. One can argue that an issue needs to be salient before legislators consider establishing a Committee of Inquiry. The parliamentary groups in the Bundestag employ Committees of Inquiry in a strategic fashion. Legislators use them to signal their responsiveness to public concerns. Therefore, Committees of Inquiry do not reveal political scandals; instead, they are instigated as a reaction to issues already discussed in the public and the media. Two additional conditions are required for initiating a Committee of Inquiry: regular means of oversight are depleted and sufficient legislative resources are available. If these conditions are satisfied, parliamentary party leaders engage in a cost-benefit analysis for assessing the appointment of a Committee of Inquiry. A content analysis of 14 expert interviews with current and former MPs who were members of a Committee of Inquiry provides evidence for the influence of issue salience on the appointment of Committees of Inquiry." (author's abstract)

"Agenda Setting in Political Decision Making" published on by Oxford University Press.

AbstractDoes learning political candidates' social categories through visual cues affect voter preferences? This paper explores this question by conducting a visual conjoint survey experiment with 2324 German voters, varying whether respondents received information on candidates through explicit labels or pretested AI-generated candidate pictures. The results confirm our expectations that the way in which social categories are perceived affects preferences, with visual cues having a more significant effect on voter preferences compared to textual cues, leading to more discriminatory preferences for certain social categories. Moreover, we show that the effect of visual cues is moderated by the visibility of social categories, with visible social categories, such as gender binaries and ethnic in-/out-group, eliciting more discriminatory preferences with visual cues. The study sheds light on how visible and invisible social categories affect political candidates' preferences and emphasizes the importance of considering the intersectionality of social categories and their relationship with ideology.