Hertie School Research Repository
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Locational Investment Signals: How to Steer the Siting of New Generation Capacity in Power Systems?
No full textNew generators located far from consumption centers require transmission infrastructure and increase network losses. The primary objective of this paper is to study signals that affect the location of generation investment. Such signals result from the electricity market itself and from additional regulatory instruments. We cluster them into five groups: locational electricity markets, deep grid connection charges, grid usage charges, capacity mechanisms, and renewable energy support schemes. We review the use of instruments in twelve major power systems and discuss relevant properties, including a quantitative estimate of their strength. We find that most systems use multiple instruments in parallel, and none of the identified instruments prevails. The signals vary between locations by up to 20 EUR per MWh. Such a difference is significant when compared to the levelized costs of combined cycle plants of 64–72 EUR per MWh in Europe
Time to unlock the potential of bi-parliamentarism - The Franco-German model
No full textThe inception of the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly in January 2019 marked an important step towards the institutionalization of Franco-German relations on a parliamentary level. The Assembly provides a forum for binational debate and democratic scrutiny, and has the potential to strengthen Franco-German cooperation and leadership at EU level by
fostering practical compromises and solutions bilaterally before they are
being brought to Brussels. The Assembly nevertheless falls short of its potential. In their policy brief, Henriette Heimbach and Thu Nguyen assess the Assembly’s shortcomings and provide suggestions for improvement. Apart from enhancing the transparency of its work, the Assembly should focus on addressing concrete bilateral problems and channeling them into concrete demands. At the same time, the Assembly should act as coordination
forum for Franco-German positions at EU level to foster common positions.
The authors conclude that despite its shortcomings, the Franco-German Parliamentary Assembly can serve as a role model for other member states
to establish and institutionalize similar forms of bi-parliamentarism
The effect of televised candidate debates on the support for political parties
No full textDuring campaigns for legislative elections, a large portion of the general public follows televised debates between the front-running candidates. How can the candidates use the public interest in the debates to increase the support for their party? In this article, we argue that especially challenger candidates can improve the public perception of their valence qualities, such as personal integrity, leadership, and competence, and can - as a result - raise the support of their party. We expect that the perceived policy stances of the candidates matter less. Building on televised debate experiments during the German Federal Elections of 2009 and 2013, we analyse the effect of the debates on party vote and in how far this relationship is mediated by changes in valence and policy evaluations of the candidates. Results show that changes of candidate valence, but not changes in policy perceptions, of the social-democratic front-running candidates mediate the vote intention for the party. Respondents who perceived the candidates more competent, empathetic and have integrity as a result of the debate are more likely to vote for the candidate's party. Our analysis further reveals, however, that this valence effect is not long-lasting and does not carry-over to vote intention briefly before the election
Polarization under rising inequality and economic decline
No full textSocial and political polarization is an important source of conflict in many societies. Understanding its causes has become a priority of scholars across disciplines. We demonstrate that shifts in socialization strategies analogous to political polarization can arise as a locally beneficial response to both rising wealth inequality and economic decline. In many contexts, interaction with diverse out-groups confers benefits from innovation and exploration greater than those that arise from interacting exclusively with a homogeneous in-group. However, when the economic environment favors risk aversion, a strategy of seeking lower-risk in-group interactions can be important to maintaining individual solvency. Our model shows that under conditions of economic decline or increasing inequality, some members of the population benefit from adopting a risk-averse, in-group favoring strategy. Moreover, we show that such in-group polarization can spread rapidly to the whole population and persist even when the conditions that produced it have reversed
Social Entrepreneurship: Research as Disciplined Exploration
No full textSocial enterprises address social problem by means of markets. Over the last two decades they have become increasingly popular across geographies. During this time open contestation and ideological debates over the promise, intention and meaning of social entrepreneurship have dominated public discourse but also inhibited the development of a solid knowledge base on social enterprises as a form of organizing in the spectrum of private action for public purpose.
The dominant way of seeing social enterprises as pursuing dual – commercial and social – goals and as ideal sites to study the battle of logics confines our way of looking and limit the theorizing potential around social enterprise. In this chapter I advocate for disciplined exploration approach to study social enterprises to expose this potential. I draw from a collaborative research project involving 1,045 social enterprises across nine countries and show patterns and common features of social enterprises regarding their choice of legal form, their participation in the market for public purpose, their social footprint, and their role in changing local institutional arrangements. I argue that embracing rather than taming the diversity of social enterprises opens opportunities for developing new but more importantly for recasting, refining and connecting existing theories
The Production of Managerial Knowledge and Organizational Theory: New Approaches to Writing, Producing and Consuming Theory
No full textAs organizational scholars, we are accustomed to using theoretical lenses to understand organizational practices and outcomes. That is, we conceptualize what people do, feel and think in their everyday organizational interactions through the use of theoretical language and models to uncover individual and/or social antecedents and outcomes. We tend to ignore, however, how our own day-to-day work as scholars - doing research - is subjected to the same pressures, affected by similar factors, and should be accounted for through similar modes of analyses. We treat our studies and theories as solid anchor points and as objective truths rather than as constructions embedded within individual, organizational, field and societal contexts.
This volume is a must read for all researchers interested in understanding our own craft. Building on established traditions in the sociology of knowledge, we direct a reflective and critical gaze towards the structures, practices and meaning systems that ground and shape how we produce and consume managerial knowledge and organization theory. The volume includes both empirically-based papers and reflective essays that explore theoretical concepts and analytical reasoning to explain, critique and advance the ways in which we write about, produce, and consume theory
Stiftungen in Deutschland 2: Wirkungsfelder
No full textStiftungen bewegen sich mit ihren Zielen zwischen der Bewahrung von Tradition und Kultur, gesellschaftlichem Wandel und Fürsorge. Viele Stiftungen sehen sich als eigenständige innovative Kraft, andere als Förderer der Zivilgesellschaft oder als karitative Einrichtungen. Ersetzen oder ergänzen Stiftungen staatliches Handeln? Welche Rollen verfolgen sie und was ist ihr gesellschaftlicher Beitrag? Eine Forschungsgruppe der Hertie School of Governance und des Centre for Social Investment der Universität Heidelberg um Helmut K. Anheier hat in einem mehrjährigen Projekt das deutsche Stiftungswesen systematisch und auf Grundlage einer breiten empirischen Basis untersucht. Die Beiträge des Sammelbands bieten detaillierte Analysen von Stiftungen in den Bereichen Bildung und Erziehung, Wissenschaft und Forschung, Soziales, Kunst und Kultur sowie Advocacy und zeigen Handlungsempfehlungen auf
Securing Europe’s Economic Sovereignty
No full textTo protect European economic independence, the EU needs to better integrate economic policy and geopolitics.
Europeans like to believe that the European Union has the collective economic size and capacity to determine Europe’s economic destiny. They think the EU can determine its own rules for economic life, negotiate on an equal footing with partner economies, and even set economic standards and regulations for the rest of the world. But perhaps the EU has been lucky so far. Perhaps its apparent economic independence was always the result of the fortuitous absence of geopolitical interference. Perhaps it could only flourish under the benevolent aegis of a real superpower. Perhaps, in other words, its independence only endured because no serious power was willing to challenge it, and because the United States was willing to protect it. Now the behaviour of other powers is increasingly calling Europe’s economic sovereignty into question. China and the US, in particular, do not separate economic interests from geopolitical interests in the same way that the EU does. They are increasingly using economic connections, from cyberspace to financial links, to serve geopolitical goals. Europe’s economic sovereignty is now at stake.
Until recently, the EU took for granted that the global system provided a functional framework for international economic relations, which could be regarded as separate from the sphere of geopolitics. Of course, the economic rules of the road were determined by power relations that arose in the wake of the Second World War. But in the years that followed, even the US largely followed them. The economic and geopolitical spheres often overlapped, particularly during the Cold War. But the US regarded the economic integration of ‘Western’ countries as conducive to the strength of the free world, and it stood by this principle even after the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The EU’s very construction reflected this disposition: most international economic powers were given to EU-level bodies, and most security and foreign-policy instruments were left to individual member states. Accordingly, the EU was able to conduct an international economic policy that was reasonably insulated from geopolitical concerns.
This separation of the economic was always fragile. It now looks hopelessly outdated. The US and China have fundamentally different relationships with Europe, but neither separates economics from geopolitics. In general, national-security issues are gaining prominence everywhere, as is the relationship between economics and national security. Economic connections, from cyberspace to financial links, are becoming the primary areas of great-power competition and are at risk of being weaponised.1 Increasingly, the US and China follow neither the letter nor the spirit of the rules in their relationships with the EU and its member states. In the US case, its decision to make full use of the centrality of its currency and its financial system to enforce secondary sanctions against Iran was a major shock to European partners. Washington’s abandonment of core principles of the global multilateral trading system and withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change were also disruptive. As for China, the EU now accepts that Beijing is behaving as ‘an economic competitor in the pursuit of technological leadership, and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance’.2
It is essential that Europeans respond to this challenge. The collective capacity of EU countries working together to preserve their economic independence underpins the value of European integration to European citizens. That value is further bolstered by the EU’s ability to participate in defining the rules of the game for the global economy – what Germans call Handlungsfähigkeit and the French call Europe puissance. The challenge for Europe is substantial but manageable. The EU and its member states should adopt an economic-sovereignty agenda to protect European economic independence through a variety of tools ranging from competition policy to the international role of the euro. To do so, the EU needs to better integrate economic policy and geopolitics
Zweitstimme.org. Ein strukturell-dynamisches Vorhersagemodell für Bundestagswahlen.
No full textWe present results of an ex-ante forecast of party-specific vote shares at the German Federal Election 2017. To that end, we combine data from published trial heat polls with structural information. The model takes care of the multi-party nature of the setting and allows making statements about the probability of certain events, such as the plurality of votes for a party or the majority for coalition options in parliament. The forecasts of our model are continuously being updated on the platform zweitstimme.org. The value of our approach goes beyond the realms of academia: We equip journalists, political pundits, and ordinary citizens with information that can help make sense of the parties’ latent support and ultimately make voting decisions better informed
Forecasting the 2013 German Bundestag Election Using Many Polls and Historical Election Results
No full textThis article reports on an attempt to forecast the outcome of the 2013 election to the German Bundestag. In contrast to the predominant academic approach to forecast incumbent vote shares from measures of government popularity, economic conditions and other fundamental variables, we entirely relied on data from published trial heat polls. Opposite to common practice in the news media, we did not take isolated polls as election forecasts in their own right. Instead, we used historical data to assess empirically the relationship between polls and election outcomes, and combined extrapolations from current polls in a Bayesian manner. The forecast was published one month ahead of the election. The retrospective evaluation of our method was added after the election. While our method is parsimonious and provides a large lead time, the performance at the 2013 election was underwhelming. We offer additional suggestions how the approach can be improved in future scenarios