Centre for Social Sciences

This paper focuses on the role of international actors in policy/ knowledge transfer processes to suggest a dynamic for the transnationalization of policy results. The paper seeks to redress the tendency towards methodological nationalism in much of the early policy transfer literature by bringing to the fore the role of international organizations and non-state actors in transnational transfer networks. Secondly, attention is drawn to ‘soft’ forms of transfer – such as the spread of norms – as a necessary complement to the hard transfer of policy tools, structures and practices and in which non-state actors play a more prominent role. Thirdly, transnational networks are identified as an important vehicle for the spread of policy and practice not only cross-nationally but in emergent venues of global governance.

Europe is increasingly described as the region in the world with the least confidence in vaccination, and particularly in the safety of vaccines. The aim of this systematic literature review was to gather and summarise all peer-reviewed and grey literature published about determinants of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine hesitancy in Europe. Ten thematic categories were identified across the 103 articles which were included in the review. Participants from European studies most commonly reported issues with the quantity and quality of information available about HPV vaccination; followed by concerns about potential side effects of the vaccine; and mistrust of health authorities, healthcare workers, and new vaccines. Comparative analyses indicated that confidence determinants differed by country and population groups. This evidence supports the need to develop context-specific interventions to improve confidence in HPV vaccination and design community engagement strategies aiming to build public trust.

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020). Respondents who reported identifying more strongly with their nation consistently reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies. Results were similar for representative and non-representative national samples. Study 2 (N = 42 countries) conceptually replicated the central finding using aggregate indices of national identity (obtained using the World Values Survey) and a measure of actual behaviour change during the pandemic (obtained from Google mobility reports). Higher levels of national identification prior to the pandemic predicted lower mobility during the early stage of the pandemic (r = -0.40). We discuss the potential implications of links between national identity, leadership, and public health for managing COVID-19 and future pandemics.

This study was conducted to increase our understanding of learners' perceptions about how the first "class" in an online course should be and to further understand how learners' experiences in the first class contribute to their sense of well-being and engagement in online courses. The study revealed that learners' sense of engagement with courses is more dependent on their connection with the learning materials than with instructors or colleagues, that learners are most comfortable with a generous amount of time to prepare in advance for courses, and that the role of instructors at the beginning of courses is very much a functional one. Instructors are judged on the clarity and completeness with which their course details are presented.

Although images have always been part of politics, research on the visual aspects of political communication recently gained momentum, especially with the spread of social media–based political communication. However, there are still several significant research gaps in this field. The aim of this article is to identify and compare the patterns and effects of Hungarian politicians’ ( n = 51) image-based communication on Facebook ( n = 2,992) and Instagram ( n = 868) during the Hungarian parliamentary election campaign in 2018. By doing so, we shed light on two important dimensions of personalization: individualization and privatization. This work is designed to fill three gaps in the literature. We argue that existing research of visual political communication (1) treats images predominantly as illustrations, (2) is limited to single-platform studies, and (3) does not investigate the engagement effects of images. To move beyond these limitations, this study investigates images as objects of interest on their own; it adopts a cross-platform comparative approach and examines the engagement effects of visual cues by applying a combination of inductive and deductive qualitative content analysis. Our results show that images are often used to personalize communication. While on Facebook the individualization dimension of personalization is more common and popular, on Instagram its privatization dimension prevails. Furthermore, on Facebook, users like more politics-related candidate-centered images, but on Instagram we could not find similar effects for more informal visuals.

The study addresses the question of what type of political content can trigger reactions from electoral candidates’ followers on Facebook. Citizens’ reactivity is increasingly important in contemporary political communication. The politicians’ posts can reach the wider public through the citizens’ public reactions. While we have extended knowledge about mass media reactivity, citizens’ political reactivity on social media is highly underexplored. This study is intended to fill this gap by examining what type of political content can trigger reaction from followers on politicians’ Facebook pages. The data contain 7048 Facebook posts by 183 single-member district candidates posted during the Hungarian general election campaign in 2014. The unit of analysis is the individual Facebook post, and the dependent variables are the numbers of likes, comments, and shares. The independent variables are the structural (text, picture, video, etc.) and substantial (content, emotional tone, etc.) characteristics of each post, after controlling for, inter alia, a general follower-activity score on politicians’ Facebook pages. Results showed that citizens are highly reactive to negative emotion-filled, text-using, personal, and activity-demanding posts. Virality is especially facilitated by memes, videos, negative contents and mobilizing posts, and posts containing a call for sharing.

While there is much debate on transformative change among academics and policymakers, the discussion on how to govern such change is still in its infancy. This article argues that transformative governance is needed to enable the transformative change necessary for achieving global sustainability goals. Based on a literature review, the article unpacks this concept of transformative governance. It is: integrative, to ensure local solutions also have sustainable impacts elsewhere (across scales, places, issues and sectors); inclusive, to empower those whose interests are currently not being met and represent values embodying transformative change for sustainability; adaptive, enabling learning, experimentation, and reflexivity, to cope with the complexity of transformative change; and pluralist, recognizing different knowledge systems. We argue that only when these four governance approaches are: implemented in conjunction; operationalized in a specific manner; and focused on addressing the indirect drivers underlying sustainability issues, governance becomes transformative.

With widespread democratic backsliding globally, people’s support for democracy-eroding leaders is receiving overdue attention. But existing studies have difficulty disentangling contextual effects (such as who is in power at the time of the survey) from individual differences (like which party one supports and how strongly). Moreover, we lack evidence on the causal antecedents of these attitudes. We propose a novel survey experimental design to strip away the political context through hypothetical scenarios, allowing us to identify citizens’ differential support for democratic norms when their own party is in versus out of power. Our findings indicate a large degree of democratic hypocrisy among the American public, whose support for norm-eroding policies increases when their own party is in power, an effect further amplified by two indicators of polarization: strong expressive partisanship and threat perceived from the opposing party.

This report discusses the educational uses of the 'wiki,' an increasingly popular approach to online community development. Wikis are defined and compared with 'blogging' methods; characteristics of major wiki engines are described; and wiki features and selection criteria are examined.

The phenomenon of “overtourism” in cities is hardly a new one, however the process and nature of resistance has changed significantly in recent years. The work of Colomb and Novy [2017. Protest and Resistance in the Tourist City. London: Routledge] encapsulates the manifestations of resistance in numerous cities. They argue that many of the contestations surround tourism rather than being about tourism. This paper explores resident resistance in the Hungarian capital city Budapest. This includes the rejection of the Olympic bid in 2017 and protests surrounding a controversial new development project in the city park. An uncontrolled night-time economy has also adversely affected local resident quality of life. Questionnaire data collected from both local residents and tourists as well as an analysis of Facebook sites using Sentione software will be used to illustrate the key areas of discontent. The research attempts to demonstrate that tourism is often marginal rather than central to residents’ discontent and resistance to developments.

The rise of populist governance throughout the world offers a novel opportunity to study the way in which populist leaders and parties rule. This article conceptualises populist policy making by theoretically addressing the substantive and discursive components of populist policies and the decision-making processes of populist governments. It first reconstructs the implicit ideal type of policy making in liberal democracies based on the mainstream governance and policy making scholarship. Then, taking stock of the recent populism literature, the article elaborates an ideal type of populist policy making along the dimensions of content, procedures and discourses. As an empirical illustration we apply a qualitative congruence analysis to assess the conformity of a genuine case of populist governance, social policy in post-2010 Hungary with the populist policy making ideal type. Concerning the policy content, the article argues that policy heterodoxy, strong willingness to adopt paradigmatic reforms and an excessive responsiveness to majoritarian preferences are distinguishing features of any type of populist policies. Regarding the procedural features populist leaders tend to downplay the role of technocratic expertise, sideline veto-players and implement fast and unpredictable policy changes. Discursively, populist leaders tend to extensively use crisis frames and discursive governance instruments in a Manichean language and a saliently emotional manner that reinforces polarisation in policy positions. Finally, the article suggests that policy making patterns in Hungarian social policy between 2010 and 2018 have been largely congruent with the ideal type of populist policy making.

As most other EU countries, Hungary implemented severe lockdown measures during the pandemic, including the closure of the schools and childcare facilities. This meant that for several months a vastly increased volume of childcare had to be supplied by individual households without much institutional help. In the end of May 2020, we conducted a representative survey in Hungary to find out how the pandemic affected the gendered division of these childcare duties. We found that on average, in relative terms, men have increased their contributions at roughly the same rate (by 35 percent) as women. But given that women had been doing a lot more childcare work before the pandemic, in absolute terms, women's contributions grew significantly more than men's and the gap between men and women has increased in absolute work hour terms. This was particularly so among a specific group of women: middle class, highly educated city-dwellers. Our data suggest that in Hungary the pandemic increased gender inequality the most among the highest educated.

Social networks amplify inequalities by fundamental mechanisms of social tie formation such as homophily and triadic closure. These forces sharpen social segregation, which is reflected in fragmented social network structure. Geographical impediments such as distance and physical or administrative boundaries also reinforce social segregation. Yet, less is known about the joint relationships between social network structure, urban geography, and inequality. In this paper we analyze an online social network and find that the fragmentation of social networks is significantly higher in towns in which residential neighborhoods are divided by physical barriers such as rivers and railroads. Towns in which neighborhoods are relatively distant from the center of town and amenities are spatially concentrated are also more socially segregated. Using a two-stage model, we show that these urban geography features have significant relationships with income inequality via social network fragmentation. In other words, the geographic features of a place can compound economic inequalities via social networks.

This paper addresses the seemingly implausible project of establishing a ‘generic’ organizational information system. This is an apparent contradiction: on the one hand, we are told of the diversity of specific organizational contexts and on the other, we often find the same standardized software solutions being applied across those settings. How do generic software packages work in so many different contexts? Science and Technology Studies provides contrasting accounts of how this contradiction is resolved: either stressing the unwanted organizational change that standardized systems may bring; or, alternatively, insisting these technologies can only be made to work through processes of ‘localization’. We argue that the focus on specificity versus localization of application contexts draws attention away from enquiring into the origins and characteristics of generic solutions. Through comparing the design and evolution of two software packages we shift the debate from understanding how technologies are made to work within particular settings to how they are built to work across a diverse range of organizational contexts. Our question is ‘How do software packages achieve the mobility that allows them to bridge the heterogeneity within organizations and between organizations in different sectors and cultures?’ We describe a set of revealed strategies through which suppliers produce software that embodies characteristics common across many users; what we term generification work. One aspect of this process of generification is the configuring of users within ‘managed communities’, but it also includes ‘smoothing’ the contents of the package and, at times, reverting to ‘social authority’. Our argument is that generic systems do exist but that they are brought into being through an intricately managed process, involving the broader extension of a particularized software application and, at the same time, the management of the user community attached to that solution.

Do strong demographic faultlines breed opinion polarization in work teams? We integrate two theories that have been used to explain faultline effects. The first, the approach of Lau and Murnighan [Lau DC, Murnighan JK (1998) Demographic diversity and faultlines: The compositional dynamics of organizational groups. Acad. Management Rev. 23(2):325–340], suggests that in teams with strong faultlines the mechanisms of homophilous selection of interaction partners and persuasive influence cause subgroup polarization, defined as the split of the team into subgroups holding opposing opinions. The second, from sociological and anthropological traditions, emphasizes that crisscrossing actors bridge faultlines because they share demographic attributes with several subgroups. Demographically crisscrossing actors help to prevent polarization in social groups. We argue that Lau and Murnighan’s theory implicitly factors in the effects of crisscrossing actors. However, we show that the authors overlooked crucial implications of their theory because they did not consider crisscrossing actors explicitly. Most importantly, we demonstrate that demographic crisscrossing implies that even teams with strong faultlines will overcome polarization in the long run, although they might suffer from it in the short term. We develop and analyze a formal computational model of the opinion and network dynamics in work teams to show the consistency of our reasoning with Lau and Murnighans’ theory. The model also revealed another counterintuitive effect: strong faultlines lead to structures of interaction that make teams with strong faultlines faster in arriving at a stable consensus than teams with weak faultlines.

Despite advances in myocardial reperfusion therapies, acute myocardial ischaemia/reperfusion injury and consequent ischaemic heart failure represent the number one cause of morbidity and mortality in industrialized societies. Although different therapeutic interventions have been shown beneficial in preclinical settings, an effective cardioprotective or regenerative therapy has yet to be successfully introduced in the clinical arena. Given the complex pathophysiology of the ischaemic heart, large scale, unbiased, global approaches capable of identifying multiple branches of the signalling networks activated in the ischaemic/reperfused heart might be more successful in the search for novel diagnostic or therapeutic targets. High-throughput techniques allow high-resolution, genome-wide investigation of genetic variants, epigenetic modifications, and associated gene expression profiles. Platforms such as proteomics and metabolomics (not described here in detail) also offer simultaneous readouts of hundreds of proteins and metabolites. Isolated omics analyses usually provide Big Data requiring large data storage, advanced computational resources and complex bioinformatics tools. The possibility of integrating different omics approaches gives new hope to better understand the molecular circuitry activated by myocardial ischaemia, putting it in the context of the human 'diseasome'. Since modifications of cardiac gene expression have been consistently linked to pathophysiology of the ischaemic heart, the integration of epigenomic and transcriptomic data seems a promising approach to identify crucial disease networks. Thus, the scope of this Position Paper will be to highlight potentials and limitations of these approaches, and to provide recommendations to optimize the search for novel diagnostic or therapeutic targets for acute ischaemia/reperfusion injury and ischaemic heart failure in the post-genomic era.

BACKGROUND: In the last decades, shared decision-making (SDM) models have been developed to increase patient involvement in treatment decisions. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a SDM intervention (SDMI) for patients dependent on psychoactive substances in addiction health care programs. The intervention consisted of a structured procedure to reach a treatment agreement and comprised 5 sessions. METHODS: Clinicians in 3 treatment centres in the Netherlands were randomly assigned to the SDMI or a standard procedure to reach a treatment agreement. RESULTS: A total of 220 substance-dependent patients receiving inpatient treatment were randomised either to the intervention (n = 111) or control (n = 109) conditions. Reductions in primary substance use (F((1, 124)) = 248.38, p < 0.01) and addiction severity (F((8)) = 27.76, p < 0.01) were found in the total population. Significant change was found in the total population regarding patients' quality of life measured at baseline, exit and follow-up (F((2, 146)) = 5.66, p < 0.01). On the European Addiction Severity Index, SDMI showed significantly better improvements than standard decision-making regarding drug use (F((1, 164)) = 7.40, p < 0.01) and psychiatric problems (F((1, 164)) = 5.91, p = 0.02) at 3-month follow-up. CONCLUSION: SDMI showed a significant add-on effect on top of a well-established 3-month inpatient intervention. SDMI offers an effective, structured, frequent and well-balanced intervention to carry out and evaluate a treatment agreement.

Abstract This review article addresses the phenomenon of urban experimentation. Urban experimentation has achieved notable significance in recent years. Viewing the city as a laboratory for field‐testing new practices, or as a setting for experimental sites, has earned significant cache when it comes to contemporary urban issues such as governance reform, urban sustainability and economic development. In this regard, urban experiments are an important vehicle for not only understanding the city but also transforming it. This article reviews how experimentation has been defined teasing out some basic concepts before examining how experimentation has been broadly applied across urban studies. The paper then draws attention to three realms of urban development – social, economic, and sustainability – and asks how experimentation in these realms acts as a mode of problematization that summons particular forms of governance, the implications of which are summarized.

This paper is a reaction to the increasing high cost of higher education and the resulting inaccessibility for the millions of potential learners now seeking opportunities for quality higher education opportunities. The paper examines the cost centers associated with campus-based and online education systems and then suggests that disaggregation may prove to be a cost-effective way to reduce tuition payments, while maintaining quality. The paper suggests that discount service models, now available to consumers in many industries may also be attractive in new models of higher education. The paper also briefly looks at the Open Educational Resources University initiative, a pilot, collaborative project attempting to test some of these innovations in a consortium of high quality, accredited public universities. Finally, we note both the disruptive characteristics of this model and commiserate opportunities for innovative providers of higher education.

The most widely cited explanation for the evolution of reliable signals is Zahavi's so-called Handicap Principle, which proposes that signals are honest because they are costly to produce. Here we provide a critical review of the Handicap Principle and its theoretical development. We explain why this idea is erroneous, and how it nevertheless became widely accepted as the leading explanation for honest signalling. In 1975, Zahavi proposed that elaborate secondary sexual characters impose 'handicaps' on male survival, not due to inadvertent signalling trade-offs, but as a mechanism that functions to demonstrate males' genetic quality to potential mates. His handicap hypothesis received many criticisms, and in response, Zahavi clarified his hypothesis and explained that it assumes that signals are wasteful as well as costly, and that they evolve because wastefulness enforces honesty. He proposed that signals evolve under 'signal selection', a non-Darwinian type of selection that favours waste rather than efficiency. He maintained that the handicap hypothesis provides a general principle to explain the evolution of all types of signalling systems, i.e. the Handicap Principle. In 1977, Zahavi proposed a second hypothesis for honest signalling, which received many different labels and interpretations, although it was assumed to be another example of handicap signalling. In 1990, Grafen published models that he claimed vindicated Zahavi's Handicap Principle. His conclusions were widely accepted and the Handicap Principle subsequently became the dominant paradigm for explaining the evolution of honest signalling in the biological and social sciences. Researchers have subsequently focused on testing predications of the Handicap Principle, such as measuring the absolute costs of honest signals (and using energetic and other proximate costs as proxies for fitness), but very few have attempted to test Grafen's models. We show that Grafen's models do not support the handicap hypothesis, although they do support Zahavi's second hypothesis, which proposes that males adjust their investment into the expression of their sexual signals according to their condition and ability to bear the costs (and risks to their survival). Rather than being wasteful over-investments, honest signals evolve in this scenario because selection favours efficient and optimal investment into signal expression and minimizes signalling costs. This idea is very different from the handicap hypothesis, but it has been widely misinterpreted and equated to the Handicap Principle. Theoretical studies have since shown that signalling costs paid at the equilibrium are neither sufficient nor necessary to maintain signal honesty, and that honesty can evolve through differential benefits, as well as differential costs. There have been increasing criticisms of the Handicap Principle, but they have focused on the limitations of Grafen's model and overlooked the fact that it is not a handicap model. This model is better understood within a Darwinian framework of adaptive signalling trade-offs, without the added burden and confusing logic of the Handicap Principle. There is no theoretical or empirical support for the Handicap Principle and the time is long overdue to usher this idea into an 'honorable retirement'.