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Item Association, Property, Territory: What is at stake in Immigration?(2017) Miklósi, Zoltán; Department of Political ScienceIt is often claimed that states have territorial rights, and that these rights include the right to exclude people who seek admission to their territory. In this paper I will examine whether the most defensible account of territorial rights can provide support to the right to exclude. I will discuss three types of theories of territorial rights. The first account links the right of states to exclude to the prior right of individuals to freedom of association, which is said to include the right not to associate and to dissociate. The second is a Lockean theory that grounds the territorial rights of states, and hence their right to exclude, in the prior right of individuals to private property in the land that constitutes the territory of the state. I argue that these accounts have independently implausible implications, regardless of their implications for the immigration debate. The third account is a Kantian theory that bases the territorial jurisdiction of states on individuals’ duty to create, sustain and submit themselves to a shared system of law that is a necessary condition of guaranteeing their rights and of discharging their duties towards one another. I will argue that the Kantian account is superior to its current alternatives. However, I also suggest that it cannot ground a broad right to exclude.Item Collective responsibility and the scope of justice(2016) Miklosi, Zoltan; Department of Political ScienceThe paper examines Thomas Nagel's 'political conception' of justice that holds that the requirements of socioeconomic justice apply only among those persons who are subject to the authority of the same political institutions. The paper has two aims. The first aim is to clarify the theoretical motivation for Nagel's theory, which it identifies in what it calls the 'responsibility thesis', i.e. that inequalities may be considered as unjust only if some agents are responsible for them, and to reconstruct the account of collective responsibility that, together with the responsibility thesis, may support his substantive conclusions. The second aim is to show that Nagel's conclusions must be rejected even if the account of collective responsibility that may support it is correct. This is so, first, because the responsibility thesis cannot be defended, and second, because even if the thesis is assumed to be correct, it does not succeed in restricting the scope of the requirements of justice to fellow citizens of particular nation states. In light of Nagel's own account of the link between legitimate authority and justice, the standards of the latter ought to apply to the state system as a whole, and not to particular states, taken separately.Item Reconsidering the capacity Principle(2024-01-01) Miklósi, Zoltán; Department of Political ScienceAvia Pasternak’s admirably clearly and tightly argued book defends four broad theses. First, it argues that contemporary states are appropriately regarded as corporate moral agents, entities that can act, consistently over time, on the basis of reasons of their own that can be distinct from the reasons of their constituent members, and at least some of which are moral reasons. This is the corporate moral agency of states thesis. Second, it argues that under certain circumstances that are frequently satisfied by contemporary states, including most democracies but also some non-democratic states, ‘members’ (roughly, citizens and long-term residents) are appropriately regarded as ‘inclusive authors’ of their state’s actions even when they are not aware of them or when they strenuously disagree with them. The conditions include, crucially, that members actually understand and accept themselves, in a manner not coerced against their will, to be members, and some of their actions as contributing to the maintenance of the state. Call this the inclusive authorship thesis. Third, it argues that inclusive authorship makes members morally liable to bear the burdens of remedial duties for the wrongful actions of the state, provided that a distribution of remedial duties that tracks the level of blameworthiness of different members is not feasible or would be prohibitively costly. Call this the moral liability thesis (recall that inclusive membership does not imply direct involvement in, support for, or even agreement with, the actions of the state that incur the remedial obligations, and therefore it does not entail blameworthiness). And finally, it argues that when the conditions stated in the second and third theses obtain, it is morally justified not only to distribute the burdens of remedial obligations to all inclusive authors of the state’s wrongful actions, but to distribute them in a nonproportional manner that does not track members’ level of ‘intentional citizenship’, the latter referring to the necessary conditions of inclusive authorship. Call this the nonproportionality thesis. The corporate moral agency thesis adopts and applies Christian List and Philip Pettit’s influential theory of group agency (List and Pettit 2011). The inclusive authorship thesis refines Christopher Kutz’s theory of the morality of collective action (Kutz 2002 and other works) and applies it to the problem of state action and citizenship, with special focus on the morality of collective action in democracies and non-democratic states. Arguably, the book’s main contribution lies in its elaborate defense of the nonproportional distribution of remedial obligations among all inclusive authors of state actions (or among all intentional citizens), which my comments focus on in parts III–IV. But I begin by raising some concerns about Pasternak’s discussion of blame-tracking and inclusive authorship-tracking distribution (part I) and about her broadly subjectivist account of intentional citizenship and inclusive authorship (part II).Item Ministerial Autonomy, Parliamentary Scrutiny and Government Reform Output in Parliamentary Democracies(2022-02) Bäck, Hanna; Müller, Wolfgang C.; Angelova, Mariyana; Strobl, Daniel; Department of Political ScienceOne of the most important decisions coalition partners make when forming a government is the division of ministries. Ministerial portfolios provide the party in charge with considerable informational and agenda-setting advantages, which parties can use to shape policies according to their preferences. Oversight mechanisms in parliaments play a central role in mitigating ministerial policy discretion, allowing coalition partners to control each other even though power has been delegated to individual ministers. However, we know relatively little about how such mechanisms influence the agenda-setting and gatekeeping powers of ministers and how much influence minister parties have on policy output relative to the government as a whole in different institutional settings. We fill this gap by analyzing original data on over 2000 important social and economic policy reform measures adopted in nine Western European countries over 20 years, based on a coding of more than 1200 country reports issued by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). We find that parliaments with strong oversight powers constrain the agenda-setting capacity of minister parties but have limited impact on their gatekeeping capacity. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of policy-making and democratic accountability.Item What are the boundaries of this potential revolution? : Exploring the shape of Mahoney's scientific-constructivist social science(2022) Schneider, Carsten Q.; Department of Political ScienceJim Mahoney has written an opus magnum. The breadth, scope, and potential implications of the system of thought proposed by Mahoney are such that any attempt—or at least any attempt by me—to do justice to all important aspects of this book is, unavoidably, doomed to fail. I will necessarily have to be very selective and focus on those aspects that I feel reasonably competent. And, even more, rather than commenting or responding to some of Mahoney’s main arguments, I will mostly ask questions of clarification. These will be genuine questions, not rhetorical ones. I am curious to hear Mahoney’s answers because—so my hope—those answers will further sharpen the boundaries of the revolution of the social science (singular!) that Mahoney is arguing for. I shall also disclose that I not only find this book mind-blowing and horizon-widening, but also largely agree with its main gist.Item Welfare States Matter for Democracy: Income-based Participatory Inequality in Post-WW 2 Western Democracies(2021-10-13) Bosancianu, Constantin Manuel; Schneider, Carsten Q.; Department of Political ScienceItem Transparency Standards in Qualitative Comparative Analysis(2015) Schneider, Carsten; Department of Political ScienceItem Set-theoretic Multimethod Research : The Role of Test Corridors and Conjunctions for Case Selection(2019-09-01) Schneider, Carsten Q.; Rohlfing, Ingo; Department of Political ScienceSet-theoretic multimethod research (SMMR) using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) formalizes the choice of cases based on a truth table analysis. We make three recommendations for improving SMMR. First, current standards can lead to faulty case selection if causal inference on a conjunction is the goal. Case selection needs to take into account that the non-members of a conjunction might be empirically diverse and that only selected types of non-members are ideal for causal inference. Second, we formally show that cases with similar fuzzy-set memberships in a term and the outcome are the superior choice for process tracing. They minimize the expected membership in the mechanism and make it most difficult to pass a hypothesis test. Third, we propose formulas that comply with all SMMR principles and identify the best pairs of cases for analysis. We illustrate our arguments with a study of the effectiveness of sanctions against authoritarian regimes.Item Fuzzy Sets are Sets — A Reply to Goertz and Mahoney(2013) Schneider, Carsten; Department of Political ScienceItem SetMethods : An add-on R package for advanced QCA(2018-07-01) Oana, Ioana Elena; Schneider, Carsten Q.; Department of Political ScienceThis article presents the functionalities of the R package SetMethods, aimed at performing advanced set-theoretic analyses. This includes functions for performing set-theoretic multi-method research, set-theoretic theory evaluation, Enhanced Standard Analysis, diagnosing the impact of temporal, spatial, or substantive clusterings of the data on the results obtained via Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), indirect calibration, and visualising QCA results via XY plots or radar charts. Each functionality is presented in turn, the conceptual idea and the logic behind the procedure being first summarized, and afterwards illustrated with data from Schneider et al. (2010).Item Does Set-Relational Causality Fit Into a Potential Outcomes Framework? An Assessment of Gerring's Proposal(2012) Schneider, Carsten; Department of Political ScienceItem Clarifying Misunderstandings, Moving Forward: Towards Standards and Tools for Set-Theoretic Methods(2014-09-30) Rohlfing, Ingo; Schneider, Carsten Q.; Department of Political ScienceCritical debates can push boundaries if they are open-ended in nature. In this spirit, we appreciate David Collier’s efforts in putting together a set of articles about set theory and QCA in a symposium published in the previous issue of this newslet-ter. Many important issues about the principles and current practices of set-theoretic methods are raised and at least some contributors seem open to the possibility that set theory and QCA are worthy of being pursued and improved. We are grate-ful to the editor of the newsletter, Robert Adcock, for inviting us to respond to these arguments—an invitation we accept based on the expectation that the goal of everyone involved in this exchange is to strengthen set-theoretic methods rather than prematurely dismissing them based on what we find to be shaky arguments. We further believe that this can only be the start of a larger, open debate aimed at resolving misunder-standings and enhancing set-theoretic research.Item Are We All Set?(2013) Schneider, Carsten; Department of Political ScienceItem Closer during crises? European identity during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine(2024-03-15) Nicoli, Francesco; van der Duin, David; Beetsma, Roel; Bremer, Björn; Burgoon, Brian; Kuhn, Theresa; Meijers, Maurits J.; de Ruijter, Anniek; Department of Political ScienceDo crises bring us closer together? Many have observed how, during the Covid-19 pandemic, several European societies experienced a ‘rally around the flag’ effect. While this certainly took the form of support for incumbent governments, anecdotal evidence suggests that individuals’ European identification may have been affected as well. In this paper, we exploit the unique timing and panel nature of a survey, whose respondents were interviewed in March/beginning of April 2020, again in July 2020, and finally in November 2022 to analyze whether a change in attachment to Europe occurred between the first and the second wave of the pandemic and with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our results show that the emotive dimension of EU attachment changed over the course of these crises, increasing both during the Covid pandemic and after the invasion of Ukraine. Our results support the view that symmetric crises tend to bring people closer together, suggesting that far-reaching EU-level actions in case of crises create, rather than require, a perception of belonging to an EU-level community.Item Preferences for growth strategies in advanced democracies : A new ‘representation gap’?(2024-05-10) Baccaro, Lucio; Bremer, Björn; Neimanns, Erik; Department of Political ScienceWhile research on the economic characteristics of growth models across countries is now extensive, research on their politics is in its infancy, even though governments routinely pursue different strategies to generate growth. In particular, we lack evidence on (1) whether citizens have coherent preferences towards growth strategies, (2) what growth strategies citizens prefer and (3) what shapes their preferences. We address these questions through a new survey of public opinion in Germany, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom, which exemplify different economic models. We find that preferences for growth strategies are consistent with other policy preferences and are meaningfully structured by class, retirement status, and to a lesser extent, sector of employment. At the same time, differences across class and sector are small, and a large majority of respondents across countries favour wage-led growth. This hints at a possible ‘representation gap’ since this growth strategy is in crisis everywhere.Item Lower taxes at all costs? : Evidence from a survey experiment in four European countries(2024-03-30) Bremer, Björn; Bürgisser, Reto; Department of Political ScienceIt is commonly argued that citizens favour lower taxes, thereby exerting pressure for tax reductions that undermine the ability of governments to raise revenues. We argue that the ostensibly strong support for lower taxes is the result of survey measures that fail to account for fiscal trade-offs. An original survey experiment conducted in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom reveals that support for lower taxes declines significantly when this comes into conflict with other fiscal policy objectives, such as government spending, public debt, or other taxes. Overall, regressive changes receive less support than progressive reforms. At the individual level, preferences are shaped by self-interest and ideology, with ideology exerting a predominant influence. Notably, left-leaning, high-income voters exhibit an even stronger inclination to resist tax reductions compared to their low-income counterparts. Our findings challenge the assumption that tax cuts enjoy widespread popularity and suggest the potential for a progressive coalition against tax cuts, encompassing both low-income and affluent left-wing individuals.Item The Ukrainian Refugee Crisis and the Politics of Public Opinion : Evidence from Hungary(2024-12-01) Pepinsky, Thomas B.; Reiff, Adam; Szabo, Krisztina; Department of Political ScienceThe 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was a watershed moment in European politics. The invasion prompted a massive influx of refugees into Central Europe, a region in which immigration has proven highly contentious and politically salient in recent decades. We study public opinion toward refugees in Hungary, a highly exclusionary political environment in which anti-migrant and anti-refugee sentiments are commonly invoked by the ruling government. Combining historical public opinion data from the past decade with two rounds of original survey data from 2022, we demonstrate that the Ukrainian refugee crisis was accompanied by a large increase in tolerance for refugees, reversing what had previously been one of the most anti-refugee public opinion environments in Europe. To explain this reversal, we use a series of survey experiments coupled with detailed settlement-level demographic data to investigate how conflict proximity and racial, religious, and national identity shape openness to refugees. We find that the distinguishing feature of the 2022 refugee crisis was that refugees were mostly white European Christians driven from their home country by conflict. We discuss the implications of our argument for Hungary, for European politics in times of crisis, and for the politics of public opinion in competitive authoritarian regimes.Item An Economic Understanding of Populism : A Conceptual Framework of the Demand and the Supply Side of Populism(2022-07-18) Benczes, Istvan; Szabo, Krisztina; Department of Political ScienceThis article assesses progress in the economics-centred literature on populism along three key themes and develops a conceptual framework to better understand the phenomenon. On the demand side (t − 1), economics research identifies the effect of an exogenous economic shock on a marginalised segment of society and works with the economic voting hypothesis. On the supply side of populists in power (t), in the literature, populist rule is typically associated with unsustainable expansionary fiscal and monetary policies and with trade protectionism. At t + 1, by using rational and biased belief assumptions, economists provide implicit inputs for a seemingly paradoxical question: why is a populist re-elected even if most populist policies assumably end up in Pareto inferior outcomes? This article summarises and criticises the relevant economic literature and shows that not only political science, but economics scholarship is instrumental for studying populism at all three stages.Item The language of discrimination : assessing attention discrimination by Hungarian local governments(2022-09-06) Buda, Jakab; Németh, Renáta; Simonovits, Bori; Simonovits, Gábor; Department of Political ScienceIn our study we assess the responsiveness of Hungarian local governments to requests for information by Roma and non-Roma clients, relying on a nationwide correspondence study. Our paper has both methodological and substantive relevance. The methodological novelty is that we treat discrimination as a classification problem and study to what extent emails written to Roma and non-Roma clients can be distinguished, which in turn serves as a metric of discrimination in general. We show that it is possible to detect discrimination in textual data in an automated way without human coding, and that machine learning (ML) may detect features of discrimination that human coders may not recognize. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first attempt to assess discrimination using ML techniques. From a substantive point of view, our study focuses on linguistic features the algorithm detects behind the discrimination. Our models worked significantly better compared to random classification (the accuracy of the best of our models was 61%), confirming the differential treatment of Roma clients. The most important predictors showed that the answers sent to ostensibly Roma clients are not only shorter, but their tone is less polite and more reserved, supporting the idea of attention discrimination, in line with the results of Bartos et al. (2016). A higher level of attention discrimination is detectable against male senders, and in smaller settlements. Also, our results can be interpreted as digital discrimination in the sense in which Edelman and Luca (2014) use this term.Item Stability and change in the opinion–policy relationship : Evidence from minimum wage laws(2023) Simonovits, Gabor; Bor, Alexander; Department of Political Science; Democracy InstituteRecent studies have documented large discrepancies between mass preferences and policies in U.S. states consistent with theories that highlight the oversized influence of affluent Americans on policymaking. In this note, we replicate and extend a recent such study (Simonovits, Guess, and Nagler, 2019) to assess how policy bias evolves in time. Specifically, relying on novel data and methods, we construct measures of minimum wage preferences and compare them to observed policies in each state for the years of 2014, 2016, 2019, and 2021. We demonstrate that, averaged across states, policy change closely tracked a pronounced increase in preferences for higher minimum wages, but the size of policy bias remained relatively stable. However, this national pattern hides an increasingly polarized policy landscape: in many states, insufficient responsiveness led to an increasing deviation between preferences and policies, while in other states policy changes—larger than preference changes—closed initial policy bias.