Mannheim Centre for European Social Research

AbstractThe extensive use of social media for protest purposes was a distinctive feature of the recent protest events in Spain, Greece, and the United States. Like the Occupy Wall Street protesters in the United States, the indignant activists of Spain and Greece protested against unjust, unequal, and corrupt political and economic institutions marked by the arrogance of those in power. Social media can potentially change or contribute to the political communication, mobilization, and organization of social movements. To what extent did these three movements use social media in such ways? To answer this question a comparative content analysis of tweets sent during the heydays of each of the campaigns is conducted. The results indicate that, although Twitter was used significantly for political discussion and to communicate protest information, calls for participation were not predominant. Only a very small minority of tweets referred to protest organization and coordination issues. Furthermore, comparing the actual content of the Twitter information exchanges reveals similarities as well as differences among the three movements, which can be explained by the different national contexts.Keywords: protestsocial movementssocial mediaTwittermobilization AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to thank the participants of the 2013 ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop 'The Transnational Dimension of Protest: From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street' for their valuable comments, and Stefaan Walgrave for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this article. Special thanks go to Anne Weber, Florian Zielbauer and Nikos Karavias for their excellent research assistance. The authors would also like to thank the MZES for its financial support.Notes on contributorsYannis Theocharis is Senior Research Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim. His research interests are in political participation, protest politics, new media, and social capital. [email: yannis.theocharis@uni-mannheim.de]Will Lowe is Senior Researcher at the MZES, University of Mannheim. He is a political methodologist focusing on quantitative political text analysis. [email: will.lowe@uni-mannheim.de]Jan W. van Deth is professor of political science and international comparative social research at the University of Mannheim. He has published widely in the field of political engagement, political culture, and research methodology. [email: jvdeth@uni-mannheim.de]Gema García-Albacete is Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellow at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Her main research interests are in political behaviour and the development of political attitudes. [email: gema.garcia@uam.es]Notes1. Van Laer and Van Aelst (Citation2010) introduced a typology that categorizes political action repertoires into 'real' actions, which are supported and facilitated by the internet, and 'virtual' ones that are exclusively internet-based.2. The capacity of articulating specific, nuanced demands in the negotiation process that follows success using internet platforms has been questioned (Lynch, Citation2011); some have even gone as far as to suggest that 'social media politics' are incompatible with representative democracy (Milner, Citation2013).3. Greek banners later declared 'we are now awake' in both Greek and Spanish.4. A regular Discovertext subscription does not provide access to the 'firehose'. This makes it impossible to determine the representativeness of our sample. Loss of tweets may have ranged from 30 to 60%. For a discussion of the representativeness of Twitter data captured without firehose access, see boyd and Crawford (Citation2012).5. Researchers who acquired larger collections of data from the specific movement across a lengthier time span found that #OWS was in fact the most actively used Twitter stream during the protests (Bennett & Segerberg, Citation2013).6. Similar methodologies have been used by Thorson et al. (Citation2013) and Bennett and Segerberg (Citation2013).7. The software was written in Python using the Django framework and backed by an SQLite database from which coding results were constructed and exported for analyses The software has been used in other Twitter coding projects and is available on request. An open source version will be made available to the academic community after publication.8. An online appendix that includes the descriptives for all tweet categories (Tables A1–A4), the project's codebook, and descriptions of software we used are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/26792.9. Here we plot 'symmetric' or French-style plots for clarity. This means that the figures are not biplots and, while distances between purposes are meaningful, only angles between country points and purposes should be interpreted.10. Number of nodes: Occupy Wall Street, 1702; Indignados, 1498; Aganaktismenoi, 1278.11. See also recent findings from Eurobarometer 2011 regarding Greek citizens' distrust of mainstream media.12. In the visualizations, the size of the actor was determined by calculating in-degree centrality, or the number of incoming links (mentions) by other actors.13. As discussed elsewhere (García-Albacete & Theocharis, Citationin press), despite the difficulties of evaluating whether such a small piece of information implies support of or disagreement with the movement (as reflected by the large percentage of neutral or unclear categories), we interpret the fact that both more clearly positive and negative messages could be identified in the United States as a signal of the higher polarization of the OWS movement compared with Spain or Greece, and show that this interpretation is consistent with pooled findings for the three movements.

The repertoire of political participation in democratic societies is expanding rapidly and covers such different activities as voting, demonstrating, volunteering, boycotting, blogging, and flash mobs. Relying on a new method for conceptualizing forms and modes of participation we show that a large variety of creative, expressive, individualized, and digitally enabled forms of participation can be classified as parts of the repertoire of political participation. Results from an innovative survey with a representative sample of the German population demonstrate that old and new forms are systematically integrated into a multi-dimensional taxonomy covering (1) voting, (2) digitally networked participation, (3) institutionalized participation, (4) protest, (5) civic participation, and (6) consumerist participation. Furthermore, the antecedents of consumerist, civic, and digitally networked participation, are very similar to those of older modes of participation such as protest and institutionalized participation. Whereas creative, expressive, and individualized modes appear to be expansions of protest activities, digitally networked forms clearly establish a new and distinct mode of political participation that fits in the general repertoire of political participation.

Abstract This article addresses the need to establish a comprehensive conceptual framework for analysing healthcare systems and their transformations. It begins by offering an overview of the current state of the art in the field, pointing to the literature's absence of conceptual robustness in the definition of system types. By exploring the dimensions ‘financing’, ‘provision’ and ‘regulation’ of healthcare, the article then proceeds deductively in line with the ‘Weberian method of ideal‐types’ to establish a taxonomy of 27 healthcare systems, of which three can be identified as ‘ideal‐types’. When applying this concept, not only can differences between healthcare systems be analysed, but also changes over time. The article concludes by identifying three forms of healthcare system transformation.

This article asks two questions: first, why are party voters less favourable towards specific EU policies than party elites?; second, how does political representation of EU preferences actually work, is it an elite- or a mass-driven process? The data-sets of the European Election Studies 1979 and 1994 are analysed which involve both an elite and a mass survey component. In contrast to earlier research, it appears that political representation of EU preferences works rather well regarding the grand directions of policy making, and that party elites behave responsively in view of changing EU preferences among their voters.

Abstract Ministerial portfolios are the most obvious payoffs for parties entering a governing coalition in parliamentary democracies. This renders the bargaining over portfolios an important phase of the government formation process. The question of ‘who gets what, and why?’ in terms of ministerial remits has not yet received much attention by coalition or party scholars. This article focuses on this qualitative aspect of portfolio allocation and uses a new comparative dataset to evaluate a number of hypotheses that can be drawn from the literature. The main hypothesis is that parties which, in their election manifestos, emphasise themes corresponding to the policy remit of specific cabinet portfolios are more likely to obtain control over these portfolios. The results show that policy saliency is indeed an important predictor of portfolio allocation in postwar Western European parliamentary democracies.

Abstract Looking at the transformation of governance in the process of European integration confronts us with a puzzle. Member states have accepted an incremental transfer of sovereignty and regulatory power. Empirical evidence, however, gives proof of a rather unrestricted vitality to shape policies according to national preferences. In European policy‐making the balance between private and public interests seems to have shifted to the detriment of the latter. At the same time the very properties of the European polity enable public actors to escape capture. In order to gain a better understanding of the transformation of governance it might be helpful to take a different approach. It is not the change in terms of shifting power relations between different levels of government or between different categories of actors which is of interest, but changes in the practice of governing and the understanding of what governance is about.

Abstract There is more to strategic voting than simply avoiding wasting one's vote if one is liberated from the corset of studying voting behavior in plurality systems. Mixed electoral systems provide different voters with diverse incentives to cast a strategic vote. They not only determine the degree of strategic voting, but also the kind of strategies voters employ. Strategic voters employ either a wasted‐vote or a coalition insurance strategy , but do not automatically cast their vote for large parties as the current literature suggest. This has important implications for the consolidation of party systems. Moreover, even when facing the same institutional incentives, voters vary in their proclivity to vote strategically.

Educational aspirations are generally based on past academic achievement and families’ endowment with the resources needed to reach targeted educational levels. However, although they perform worse at school and hold lower social status, previous research observes that some ethnic minorities tend to express higher educational ambitions than natives. This study discusses and tests possible reasons for this striking finding using German data from the <it>Young Immigrants in the German and Israeli Educational Systems</it> project, which includes families from Turkey and the former Soviet Union. The results reveal that Turkish students hold higher aspirations than their native counterparts, whereas no aspiration gap was found between natives and adolescents from the former Soviet Union. While German students’ aspiration patterns can mainly be ascribed to status attainment motivation, Turkish students’ high educational ambitions seem to be stimulated by a desire of status upward mobility.

Abstract This article challenges the dominant assumptions in the literature that cutting social policy incurs voter wrath and that political parties can efficiently internalise electoral fallout with blame avoidance strategies. Drawing on the diverse literature on the role of partisanship in the period of permanent austerity, several partisan hypotheses on the relationship between social policy change and electoral outcomes are posited. The results indicate that religious and liberal parties gain votes, and thereby are able to ‘claim credit’, for retrenching social policy. None of the other coefficients for the effect of social policy cuts reach significance, raising the question of whether parties excel at blame avoidance or the public fails to place blame in the first place.

This study investigated the link between teacher expectations and student learning, relying on longitudinal data from 64 classrooms and 1026 first-grade students in Germany. Further, based on a subsample of 19 classrooms with 354 students, we explored the mediating role of three characteristics of teacher feedback rated in video-recorded school lessons. The results showed that teacher expectations were inaccurate to some extent; that is, they did not entirely agree with students' current achievement, general cognitive abilities and motivations. In addition, this inaccuracy in teacher expectations significantly predicted students’ end-of-year achievement, even after prior achievement, general cognitive abilities, motivation, and student background characteristics were considered. Specifically, inaccurately high teacher expectations were associated with greater achievement in reading and mathematics, whereas inaccurately low teacher expectations were associated with lower achievement in reading only. Furthermore, teacher feedback varied significantly with inaccurate teacher expectations but did not substantially mediate teacher expectancy effects.

With the integration of social media in political communication repertoires, politicians now permanently campaign for support online. By promoting their personal agenda, politicians increasingly profile themselves independent from their associated parties on the web (i.e., self-personalization). By focusing on self-personalization as a multi-layered concept (i.e., professional, emotional, private self-personalization), this study investigates both the use and consequences of self-personalization on Facebook. A manual content analysis of politicians’ Facebook posts (N = 435) reveals that self-personalization is indeed often used as a communication style on Facebook and is most often present in visual communication. Moreover, the study shows that the use of a more emotional and private style provides a beneficial tool for politicians’ impression management. Publishing emotional and private content yields positive effects on audience engagement, suggesting audiences’ demand for more intimate and emotional impressions of public figures on the web.

Existing studies focusing on politicians' adoption of Twitter have found that they use it primarily as a broadcasting tool. We argue that citizens' impolite and/or uncivil behavior is one possible explanation for such decisions. Social media conversations are rife with harassment and politicians are a prime target. This alters the incentive structure of engaging in dialogue on social media. We use Spanish, Greek, German, and U.K. candidates' tweets sent during the run-up to the recent European Parliament elections, and rely on automated text analysis and machine learning methods to measure their level of civility. Our contribution is an actor-oriented theory of political dialogue that incorporates Twitter's specific affordances, clarifying how and why Twitter's democratic promise may be limited.

Im Unterschied zu der in der Literatur weithin verbreiteten These konstanter Ungleichheiten zeigt dieser Beitrag, daß seit der Zwischenkriegszeit und den ersten Nachkriegsjahren die Unterschiede zwischen verschiedenen Bevölkerungsgruppen in der Bildungsbeteiligung und in den erworbenen Bildungsabschlüssen deutlich kleiner geworden sind. Die Analyse sukzessiver Übergänge zwischen den verschiedenen Stufen des Bildungswesens belegt, daß die Ungleichheit insbesondere durch einen Abbau der sozialen Beteiligungsdifferentiale beim Übergang zu den weiterführenden Schulen und beim Erwerb der Mittleren Reife geringer geworden ist. Als Folge haben aber auch die Ungleichheiten beim Erwerb des Abiturs und von Hochschulabschlüssen abgenommen. Die Ungleichheitsreduktion ist unterschiedlich stark nach unterschiedlichen Ungleichheitsdimensionen und sie variiert in unterschiedlichen Phasen der Nachkriegsentwicklung. Aus der Konstellation der Befunde werden spezifische Hypothesen zur Erklärung des Ungleichheitsabbaus diskutiert.

Abstract: The paper reviews some theories of social science which could contribute to the development of a concept of European governance going beyond traditional notions, such as federal states' or ‘international organisation’. The theoretical argument is based on the culturalist version of neo‐institutionalism, which stresses the role of ideas in the functioning and transformation of a political order. It is claimed that both globalisation and functional differentiation transform existing nation‐states and shape the emerging European polity. European governance is characterised as poly‐centric and non‐hierarchical. Finally, different approaches to the legitimation of such a polity are discussed. The paper comes to the conclusion that the emergence of a European political order is part of a process which could require a rethinking of basic social scientific concepts.

Web-based data collection is increasingly popular in both experimental and survey-based research because it is flexible, efficient, and location-independent. While dedicated software for laboratory-based experimentation and online surveys is commonplace, researchers looking to implement experiments in the browser have, heretofore, often had to manually construct their studies' content and logic using code. We introduce lab.js, a free, open-source experiment builder that makes it easy to build studies for both online and in-laboratory data collection. Through its visual interface, stimuli can be designed and combined into a study without programming, though studies' appearance and behavior can be fully customized using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code if required. Presentation and response times are kept and measured with high accuracy and precision heretofore unmatched in browser-based studies. Experiments constructed with lab.js can be run directly on a local computer and published online with ease, with direct deployment to cloud hosting, export to web servers, and integration with popular data collection platforms. Studies can also be shared in an editable format, archived, re-used and adapted, enabling effortless, transparent replications, and thus facilitating open, cumulative science. The software is provided free of charge under an open-source license; further information, code, and extensive documentation are available from https://lab.js.org/ .

Abstract This article analyses the extent to which national policies in the highly internationalised environmental sector are influenced by the policy preferences of political parties. The focus is on policy outputs rather than environmental performance as the central indicator of policy change. Based on a discussion of the relevant theoretical literature competing hypotheses are presented. For an empirical test, a dataset is used that includes information on the number of environmental policies adopted in 18 OECD countries at four points in time between 1970 and 2000. The results show that not only international integration, economic development and problem pressure, but also aspects of party politics, influence the number of policies adopted. The number of environmental measures increases if the governmental parties adopt more pro‐environmentalist policy positions. This effect remains robust even when controlling for the institutional strength of governments, the left‐right position of parties in government, the inclusion of an ecological or left‐libertarian party inside the (coalition) government, and the presence of a portfolio that deals exclusively with environmental issues.

The growing uneasiness about the democratic deficit of the European Union (EU) has incited politicians and academics alike to look for remedies other than institutional reforms and giving more powers to the European Parliament. Strategies of ‘good governance’ shifted centre stage and the governance turn initiated a lively discourse on the democratic credentials of involving civil society. This article presents the changing views on the role of civil society in EU discourse. Al though the Commission and even the Constitutional Convention put high hopes on the legitimacy input of civil society, a representation discourse is conspicuously absent. The article introduces an analytical framework to assess the contributions and limitations of civil society to democratic representation in EU governance.

This study explores how researchers' analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of social science research, research teams reported both widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers' expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 95% of the total variance in numerical results remains unexplained even after qualitative coding of all identifiable decisions in each team's workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that remains hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers' results and conclusions varied is a previously underappreciated explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. These results call for greater epistemic humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings.

Due to diverging levels of political influence of various income groups, political institutions likely reflect the policy preferences of certain groups of citizens better than others, independently of their numerical weight. This runs counter the egalitarian principle of ‘one citizen, one vote’. The present article documents a general trend of underrepresentation of the preferences of relatively poor citizens both by parties and by governments across Western democracies, although important cross-national differences exist.

This paper explores the unemployment dynamics of various immigrant groups in Germany. Several different groups are compared against the native-born population: guest workers, ethnic Germans, immigrants from the EU-15 or other western industrialized countries, non-EU immigrants and finally second-generation immigrants. Event history techniques are applied to German Socio-Economic Panel data from the second half of the 1990s. The analyses underscore the importance of human capital and labour market segmentation in the employment exclusion of immigrant populations. The study contends that the higher risk of unemployment among guest worker immigrants, more recent newcomers from outside the EU and ethnic Germans is only partially related to their inferior human capital characteristics. In fact it appears largely due to their unfavourable labour market allocation, i.e. their over-representation in occupations and economic branches particularly vulnerable during economic slowdown and restructuring. The analyses also show that unemployed immigrants, with the exception of those coming recently from EU-15 countries and second-generation immigrants, retain their outsider status even if successful in finding employment, being largely channelled into the unskilled labour market.