Hertie School Research Repository
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Libyen-Konferenz: Wenig gute Neuigkeiten für Geflüchtete
Get PDFAls einen „neuen politischen Anlauf“ hat Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel die Ergebnisse der Berliner Libyen Konferenz vom 19. Januar beschrieben. Die Tatsache, dass sich alle an dem Konflikt beteiligten Parteien auf einen gemeinsamen Fahrplan geeinigt haben, darf dabei zweifelsohne als diplomatischer Erfolg gewertet werden. Bei der Umsetzung der Beschlüsse hat sich die Diskussion hierzulande jedoch schnell auf das Für und Wider der deutschen Beteiligung an einem möglichen Militäreinsatz konzentriert
Designing authoritarian deliberation: how social media platforms influence political talk in China
No full textDiscussion is often celebrated as a critical element of public opinion and political participation. Recently, scholars have suggested that the design and features of specific online platforms shape what is politically expressed online and how. Building on these findings and drawing on 112 semi-structured qualitative interviews with information technology experts and internet users, we explain how major Chinese social media platforms differ in structure and motivation. Drawing upon a nationwide representative survey and an online experiment, we find that platforms aiming to make users a source of information through public, information-centred communication, such as the Twitter-like Weibo, are more conducive to political expression; while platforms built to optimize building social connections through private, user-centred communication, such as WhatsApp and Facebook-like WeChat, tend to inhibit political expression. These technological design effects are stronger when users believe the authoritarian state tolerates discussion, but less important when political talk is sensitive. The findings contribute to the debate on the political consequences of the internet by specifying technological and political conditions
We Don't Know What We Don't Know: When and How the Use of Twitter's Public APIs Biases Scientific Inference
No full textThough Twitter research has proliferated, no standards for data collection have crystallized. When using keyword queries, the most common data sources—the Search and Streaming APIs—rarely return the full population of tweets, and scholars do not know whether their data constitute a representative sample. This paper seeks to provide the most comprehensive look to-date at the potential biases that may result. Employing data derived from four identical keyword queries to the Firehose (which provides the full population of tweets but is cost-prohibitive), Streaming, and Search APIs, we use Kendall’s-tau and logit regression analyses to understand the differences in the datasets, including what user and content characteristics make a tweet more or less likely to appear in sampled results. We find that there are indeed systematic differences that are likely to bias scholars’ findings in almost all datasets we examine, and we recommend significant caution in future Twitter research
The political economy of pension financialisation: Public policy responses to the crisis
No full textFinancialisation has become a key feature of post-industrial economies. This special issue sheds light on pre-funded private pensions as one key component of financialisation, as they turn savings into investment via financial services providers. Public pension systems face financial pressures, resulting from ageing and rising public debt, while financial services are keen to move into the market of private pension provision. Pre-funded private pensions are shaped by regulatory policies that create and correct markets. The financial crisis has triggered policy responses including shifts in investment strategies and also a re-assessment of the role of pre-funded private pensions as a complementary, rather than a superior, source of old-age income. Policymakers’ growing awareness of the benefits of collective occupational schemes administered by the social partners may pave the way for a greater role for collective schemes
Workers' voice and good corporate governance
No full textThe scientific final report describes the topics that have been worked on by the Böckler expert group on Workers Voice: Good scientific arguments for anchoring it more strongly and legally binding to the benefit of "good corporate governance". In the supervisory and executive bodies of cross-border operating companies in Europe
Improving Public Services by Mining Citizen Feedback: An Application of Natural Language Processing
No full textResearch on user satisfaction has increased substantially in recent years. To date, most studies have tested the significance of pre‐defined factors thought to influence user satisfaction, with no scalable means of verifying the validity of their assumptions. Digital technology has created new methods of collecting user feedback where service users post comments. As topic models can analyze large volumes of feedback, they have been proposed as a feasible approach to aggregating user opinions. This novel approach has been applied to process reviews of primary‐care practices in England. Findings from an analysis of more than 200,000 reviews show that the quality of interactions with staff and bureaucratic exigencies are the key drivers of user satisfaction. In addition, patient satisfaction is strongly influenced by factors that are not measured by state‐of‐the‐art patient surveys. These results highlight the potential benefits of text mining and machine learning for public administration
