Suchergebnisse

This paper connects insights from the literature on cosmopolitan values in political science, anxiety in social psychology, and identity economics in a vignette-style experiment. We asked German respondents about their attitudes towards a Syrian refugee, randomizing components of his description (N=662). The main treatment describes the refugee as being aware of and empathetic towards potential Germans' worries about cultural change, costs and violence associated with refugee inflows. This increases reported levels of sympathy and trust substantially, especially for risk averse people. We argue that acknowledging concerns of the host population relieves the tension between an anxious and a cosmopolitan part of peoples' identities. When one aspect of identity is already acknowledged (expressing anxieties) it has less influence on actual behavior (expressing sympathy). In addition, we find that previous contact with foreigners and a higher willingness to take risks are important factors to determine an individual's willingness to interact with refugees.

Immigration has been considered critical for the emergence of a new cleavage in the European Union that pits the winners of globalisation against the losers. Ample research has demonstrated the social structure and the organisational base of this new cleavage. So far, however, there is no study showing that the rise of new parties is also associated with a stronger political identification of individuals with issues that these parties promote - a key feature to speak of a cleavage in the tradition of Lipset and Rokkan. In this paper, we provide systematic evidence on whether immigration contributes to the collective identification with the new cleavage on the micro-level. We show that an increase in immigration is strongly associated with this process and contrast our argument against alternative explanations that scrutinize the dealignment of individuals and political parties. We analyse a dataset of about 600 000 comments made on Facebook below articles of regional German newspapers using topic models to add to the debate about the emergence of new cleavages in Europe.

Intervenieren Zentralbanken häufig auf Devisenmärkten, um Wechselkurse zu beeinflussen? Falls ja, ist das effektiv? Aus deutscher Perspektive mögen diese Fragen überraschen: Die Europäische Zentralbank interveniert praktisch nicht auf Devisenmärkten, sondern lässt die Wechselkurse frei schwanken. In Schwellenländern dagegen setzen Notenbanken dieses Instrument fast jeden dritten Tag ein, wie aus der vorliegenden Analyse hervorgeht, für die teilweise vertrauliche Daten zu Devisenmarktinterventionen aus 33 Ländern zwischen 1995 und 2011 ausgewertet wurden, darunter sowohl Industrie- als auch Schwellen- und Entwicklungsländer. Im Untersuchungszeitraum haben Notenbanken demnach meist fremde Währungen gekauft, um Devisenreserven aufzubauen. Im Schnitt setzten sie pro Tag, an dem eine Intervention stattfand, fast 50 Millionen US-Dollar ein - hochgerechnet auf das Bruttoinlandsprodukt der Europäischen Währungsunion wären dies rund zwei Milliarden US-Dollar. Im Durchschnitt dauerte eine Sequenz von Devisenmarktinterventionen fünf Tage, mitunter aber auch deutlich kürzer oder länger. Meistens erfolgten Interventionen gegen den vorherigen Wechselkurstrend. Gemessen an üblichen Erfolgskriterien waren Interventionen - ohne Kontrollgrößen zu berücksichtigen - in 60 bis 90 Prozent der Fälle erfolgreich, signifikant häufiger, als sich Wechselkurse von selbst in erwünschter Weise verändert hätten. Insofern sind Devisenmarktinterventionen für wirtschaftspolitische Strategien ein nicht zu vernachlässigendes Instrument.

Zentralbanken, zum Beispiel die schweizerische und die zahlreicher Schwellenländer, intervenieren häufig an Devisenmärkten. Es ist jedoch nicht unmittelbar festzustellen, ob diese Interventionen wirksam sind. Mittels anerkannter Kriterien analysiert dieser Bericht die Erfolgswahrscheinlichkeit aus einem Datensatz von 4.500 Interventionsepisoden aus 33 Ländern. Dabei ist es wichtig, Währungsregimes zu unterscheiden, da jeweils andere Ziele im Vordergrund stehen. Während in flexiblen Wechselkursregimes seltener interveniert wird und meist Trends verändert werden sollen, zielen andere Regimes auf eine Stabilisierung des Wechselkurses in einem Band, in dem sich der Wechselkurs bewegen kann. Interventionen sind generell erfolgreicher, wenn sie mit größeren Volumen durchgeführt werden, mit dem Wechselkurstrend gehen und hin zum Fundamentalwert orientiert sind. Wenn EntscheidungsträgerInnen zudem Interventionen oder Veränderungen der Wechselkurspolitik kommunizieren, können diese stärker wirken. ZentralbankerInnen sollten also Interventionen mit Kommunikation begleiten, um ihre Erfolgswahrscheinlichkeit zu erhöhen.

The widespread view that the refugee crisis has sparked unprecedented levels of European Union politicisation has rarely been backed by systematic empirical evidence. We investigate this claim using a novel dataset of several thousand user comments posted below articles of German regional media outlets on Facebook. Despite considerable European Union authority in the policy area, extensive media coverage of the crisis and the rise of a populist party in Germany, our results suggest that the politicisation of Europe remains low among social media users, especially when compared to national and subnational levels of governance. When talking about Europe, users hardly refer to European Union institutions or policies. Instead, other member states and notions of the geographic or cultural space dominate the debate.

The widespread view that the refugee crisis has sparked unprecedented levels of European Union politicisation has rarely been backed by systematic empirical evidence. We investigate this claim using a novel dataset of several thousand user comments posted below articles of German regional media outlets on Facebook. Despite considerable European Union authority in the policy area, extensive media coverage of the crisis and the rise of a populist party in Germany, our results suggest that the politicisation of Europe remains low among social media users, especially when compared to national and subnational levels of governance. When talking about Europe, users hardly refer to European Union institutions or policies. Instead, other member states and notions of the geographic or cultural space dominate the debate.

We take stock of the Schengen Agreement that celebrated its 30th birthday on June 14th, 2015. We argue that the abolition of internal border controls in most European Union member states is rightly considered a blessing to EU citizens. Internally, the Agreement facilitates social and economic interactions without impeding the security of EU citizens. Externally, the Schengen Agreement has also helped to spread liberal norms and promote EU policies across EU borders, whenever Schengen borders prove permeable enough to allow for legal migration or if the relaxation of Schengen visa requirements is used as a carrot to trigger reforms in EU candidate and neighboring countries. The recent humanitarian crisis at the EU borders reveals that the Schengen system still lacks an appropriate joint asylum policy to counterbalance the loss of internal border controls. This weakness may undermine one of the main achievements of European integration. This Policy Brief revisits the accomplishments of 30 years of Schengen. We first ask how Schengen has affected member states and their citizens and which effects it has exerted on non-Schengen states outside of the EU's borders. We subsequently elaborate on appropriate reforms of a communitarized asylum policy that is needed to safeguard the accomplishments of the Schengen Agreement in the future.

Political trust matters for citizens' policy preferences but existing research has not yet considered whether this effect depends on how policies are designed. To fill this gap, this article analyses whether and how policy design and political trust interact in shaping people's policy preferences. We theorise that policy controls such as limits and conditions can function as safeguards against uncertainty, thereby compensating for a person's lack of trust in political institutions in generating support for policy provision. Focusing on the case of public preferences for asylum and refugee policy, our empirical analysis is based on an original conjoint experiment with 12,000 respondents across eight European countries. Our results show that individuals' trust in the political institutions of the European Union has a central role in the formation of their asylum and refugee policy preferences. Individuals with lower levels of political trust in European institutions are less supportive of asylum and refugee policies that provide expansive, unlimited, or unconditional protection and more supportive of policies with highly restrictive features. We also demonstrate that even politically distrusting individuals can systematically support policies that provide protection and assistance to refugees if there are limits or conditions on policy provision. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our findings to theoretical understandings of the role of political trust in the formation of individuals' policy preferences.

This article provides the first-ever analysis of the structure of public preferences for asylum and refugee policy, a highly politicized policy area that has attracted little scholarly attention to date. We first conceptualise the core dimensions of asylum and refugee policy and then conduct an original conjoint experiment with 12,000 respondents across eight European countries to examine how different policy designs impact on public support. Our results demonstrate that Europeans are generally committed to policies that provide protection to asylum-seekers and refugees but this commitment tends to be contingent upon policy features which allow for a means of control, namely through the implementation of limits or conditions. We find this pattern of preferences to be remarkably similar in both the old and more recent EU Member States that we surveyed. Our results imply that some aspects of the current model of the international refugee system are misaligned with the more control-based model that Europeans would prefer. We conclude by discussing our findings in the context of existing research and ongoing political debates about policy reforms.