Hertie School Research Repository
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The Assembly of a Field Ideology: An Idea-Centric Perspective on Systemic Power in Impact Investing
No full textWe advance a novel idea-centric perspective to study power-laden aspects of institutional life in fields. Our study includes data from the field of impact investing in Europe from 2006–2018, collected from the inside and analyzed collaboratively by inside and outside researchers. We develop an analytical tool based on dichotomies to detect latent forms of conflict that easily remain unnoticed and to see how some ideas become dominant while others are abandoned or sidelined. We display the assembly of a field ideology—a coherent system of ideas that shapes thinking, reasoning and acting in a field. Furthermore, we specify suppression as a mechanism that gives rise to and perpetuates systemic power in fields, restricting options and shaping what is valued. Our study provides insights into the dynamic nature of institutional life in fields, including alternative paths not taken and possible futures
Social Entrepreneurship: Prospects for the Study of Market Based Activity and Social Change
No full textCorporate social responsibility (CSR) continues to grow as an area of interest in academia and business. Encompassing broad topics such as the relationship between business, society, and government, environmental issues, globalization, and the social and ethical dimensions of management and corporate operation, CSR has become an increasingly interdisciplinary subject relevant to areas of economics, sociology, and psychology, among others.
New directions in CSR research include advanced 'micro' based investigations in organizational behaviour and human resource management, additional studies of environmental social responsibility and sustainability, further research on 'strategic' CSR, connections between social responsibility and entrepreneurship, and improvements in methods and data analysis as the field matures. Through authoritative contributions from international scholars across the social sciences, this Handbook provides a cohesive overview of this recent expansion. It introduces new perspectives, new methodologies, and new evidence from a range of disciplines to encourage and facilitate interdisciplinary research and global implementation of corporate social responsibility
Compliance Behavior in Networks: Evidence from a Field Experiment
No full textThis paper studies the spread of compliance behavior in neighborhood networks in Austria. We exploit a field experiment that varied the content of mailings sent to potential evaders of TV license fees. The data reveal a strong treatment spillover: untreated households are more likely to switch from evasion to compliance in response to mailings received by their network neighbors. Digging deeper into the properties of the spillover, we find that it is concentrated among close neighbors of the targets and increases with the treated households' diffusion centrality. Local concentration of equally treated households implies a lower spillover
More voice, less exit: sub-federal resistance to international procurement liberalization in the European Union, the United States and Canada
No full textComparative federalism contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between ‘Brussels’ and member states in international trade policy. Analysing the understudied field of international procurement liberalization and comparing the European Union (EU), the United States (US) and Canada, the article observes that sub-federal resistance has differed across federations. It finds that the more ‘voice’ sub-federal executives enjoy, the less they ‘exit’ from international commitments. Voice hinges on their representation in federation-wide decision-making (council or senate) and the sectoral nature of vertical relations (collaborative or competitive). In the US senate federation, effective means of joint policy-making have not evolved in this non-coercive field, inciting states to exit. In Canada, increasing collaboration has compensated provinces for senate federalism’s low voice, reducing their resistance. EU ‘second chamber federalism’ proves peculiar for constituent units’ decisive role and its dense and trusting regime of collaboration. Member states’ high voice has encouraged their low resistance
Economic Voting in Direct Democracy: A Case Study of the 2016 Italian Constitutional Referendum
No full textReferendums provide citizens with more control over policy. At the same time, they often entail choices over highly complex policies and are politicised along partisan lines, suggesting that partisan rather than policy considerations will guide voters’ choices. I look to the 2016 Italian constitutional referendum, which was particularly complex and polarised, as an opportunity to test for mechanisms of government accountability in a referendum. Using a national survey of voters, I show that the more negative a respondent’s evaluation of the state of the economy, the lower their likelihood to vote ‘yes’ on the government’s reform proposal. This relationship is remarkably strong: an average respondent with a very positive evaluation of the state of the economy has an 88% probability of supporting the government’s reform proposal compared to only 12% for a respondent with a very negative evaluation. The fact that economic evaluations are a strong determinant of vote choice provides evidence for the existence of an economic vote in a referendum. This further suggests that voters may treat referendums as a sort of second-order election
On Board with Banks: Do Banking Connections Help Politicians Win Elections?
No full textDo politicians benefit electorally from connections to banks? Recent research illuminates how banks benefit from political connections, yet we do not know much about the impact of bank connections on a politician’s reelection chances. We consider the German system of publicly owned local savings banks to assess whether local politicians who sit on bank boards are likelier to win reelection for their parties. Based on data from 3,214 mayoral elections and 182 savings banks between 2006 and 2015, we find that mayors with a board seat in a savings bank have higher odds of winning reelection than mayors without a board seat. We address concerns about unobserved confounders and show that the electoral benefits of board membership are concentrated among conservative mayors. We also present preliminary evidence that mayors in bank boards increase bank donations to, and prevent branch closures in, their municipalities, which helps us understand why voters reelect them
In die Ecke Besen, Besen...Die Einsetzung von Flüchtlingskoordinatoren in Deutschland – neutrale Meister in Zeiten der Krise?
No full textCompensatory mutation can drive gene regulatory network evolution
No full textGene regulatory networks underlie every aspect of life; better understanding their assembly would better our understanding of evolution more generally. For example, evolutionary theory typically assumed that low-fitness intermediary pathways are not a significant factor in evolution, yet there is substantial empirical evidence of compensatory mutation. Here we revise theoretical assumptions to explore the possibility that compensatory mutation may drive rapid evolutionary recovery. Using a well-established in silico model of gene regulatory networks, we show that assuming only that deleterious mutations are not fatal, compensatory mutation is surprisingly frequent. Further, we find that it entails biases that drive the evolution of regulatory pathways. In our simulations, we find compensatory mutation to be common during periods of relaxed selection, with 8-15% of degraded networks having regulatory function restored by a single randomly-generated additional mutation. Though this process reduces average robustness, proportionally higher robustness is found in networks where compensatory mutations occur close to the deleterious mutation site, or where the compensatory mutation results in a large regulatory effect size. This location- and size-specific robustness systematically biases which networks are purged by selection for network stability, producing emergent changes to the population of regulatory networks. We show that over time, large-effect and co-located mutations accumulate, assuming only that episodes of relaxed selection occur, even very rarely. This accumulation results in an increase in regulatory complexity. Our findings help explain a process by which large-effect mutations structure complex regulatory networks, and may account for the speed and pervasiveness of observed occurrence of compensatory mutation, for example in the context of antibiotic resistance, which we discuss. If sustained by in vitro experiments, these results promise a significant breakthrough in the understanding of evolutionary and regulatory processes
The weaponisation of the US financial system: How can Europe respond?
No full textUS secondary sanctions present a unique challenge for Europe. These measures limit where European firms can operate, hinder the EU’s ability to maintain its foreign commitments, and limit Europe’s ambitions of achieving strategic sovereignty. The US’s re-imposition of secondary sanctions on Iran in May 2018 has highlighted this issue. With geopolitical tensions rising, it is possible that the US could impose secondary sanctions on larger EU trading partners. In light of this possibility, this paper explores why secondary sanctions are so effective and offers concrete proposals to counter them
Contact tracing apps in Europe - When one is better than many
No full textOne of the issues brought forth by the COVID-19 crisis is the need to track the infection chains in order to stop the disease from spreading. One of the simplest ways this can be done is via a smartphone app. However, this can bring about several privacy issues. Furthermore, unless a common protocol is taken up all over Europe allowing apps from different member states to be able to seamlessly communicate with each other, the discrepancies would render the national apps ineffective. The member states need to decide on a single app protocol throughout Europe and the European Commission should strongly back its uptake