Social Science Research Center Berlin

Article Steffen Augsberg (Hrsg.), Verfassungspatriotismus. Konzept, Kritik, künftige Relevanz. Hamburg, CEP Europäische Verlagsanstalt 2024 was published on August 1, 2025 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 321, issue 1).

Abstract Fixed effects estimation, with linear controls for stratum membership, is often used to estimate treatment effects when assignment propensities differ across strata. In the presence of heterogeneity in treatment effects across strata, this estimator does not target the average treatment effect, however. Indeed, the implied estimand can range anywhere from the lowest to the highest stratum-level average effect. To facilitate the interpretation of results using this approach, I establish that if stratum-level average effects are monotonic in the shares assigned to treatment, then the fixed effects estimand lies between the average treatment effect for the treated and the average treatment effect for the controls.

Migrants’ perceptions of belonging are shaped by the social policies with which they are received by the state. In Germany, policies grant refugees different levels of labor market access according to legal status, a hierarchical system also referred to as differential inclusion. This study compares perceptions and experiences of these labor market policies and discourses among refugees with four legal statuses. Refugees with the most precarious legal status are largely barred from the labor market, leading them to experience severe exclusion and pushing them into liminal spaces of existence. While recognized refugees may be able to work, racialized discourses about their deservingness create conditional and limited senses of belonging. Finally, refugees often themselves observe these hierarchies, reinforcing feelings of exclusion. Results demonstrate how the hierarchies present in policies create a stratified system of differential non-belonging. Overall, the article sheds light on how differential inclusion of refugees also results in hierarchized experiences of differential (non-)belonging.

Media coverage of political actors and debates is a crucial avenue for voters to learn about political parties and their policies. However, nowadays party-media agenda-setting is increasingly shaped by large-scale transformations and the fragmentation of political communication across various party channels (e.g., press releases, social media, speeches) and media types (e.g., newspapers, television, online news), potentially affecting the provision of political information. This article examines these dynamics using large-scale textual data from political parties ( n = 17,677) and media outlets ( n = 90,531) published in the run-up to the Austrian national election in 2019. Building on the measurement of text similarity with state-of-the-art transformer-based models and multiverse analysis, we investigate the success of party messages from press releases, parliamentary speeches, Facebook and Twitter making it into important national newspapers, online news sites as well as television and radio news programs. The article shows that the variety in party channels and media outlets—with their distinct characteristics, modalities, and (technological) affordances—create different flows of information between the parties and the media. Press releases remain crucial tools for parties to get their messages into the media, while social media and parliamentary speeches also matter, albeit with varying effects by party. We also find that online news is more receptive to party messages than print, television, or radio news. Despite these differences, journalistic gate-keeping consistently favors large and government parties across all media types. These findings underscore the need for nuanced research into the interaction between party communication channels and media outlets in contemporary democracies.

Abstract Interactions with technology are part of social life, for example in cafés, trains, or parks. This social situatedness not only changes how users experience these interactions. It also influences the situated experiences for other co-located people (“witnesses”). However, despite a large body of research on user experiences, the relation between an interaction and witness experiences, and ways to design for them, remain underexplored. To address this gap, this paper introduces the “Witness Experience Inventory”, a research tool grounded in social-interpretivist theories, that offers a pragmatic approach to study how interactions with technology affect witness experiences. Based on an analysis of eight interactive technologies, we illustrate how the Witness Experience Inventory can inform the design of socially situated interactions with technology to avoid negative and create more positive witness experiences. We provide guidelines for applications of the Witness Experience Inventory in future research and its adaptable coding template. Both build on experiences from our own research, but give future researchers and practitioners the flexibility to adapt the tool to the social settings they study.

ABSTRACT Immigrant-origin students often hold higher educational aspirations than native-origin peers, accounting for socioeconomic status and school grades. The consequences of this ‘Immigrant Aspiration Paradox’ (IAP) on their socioeconomic attainment are debated. Although individuals’ occupational aspirations and how they compare with their educational aspirations (i.e. their alignment) also affect status attainment, they are understudied in the IAP literature. We contribute to the debate on the benefits of the IAP by investigating immigrant-native gaps in the level, (mis)alignment, and (un)certainty of teenage occupational and educational aspirations and their consequences on educational attainment in Germany. First, we describe immigrant-native gaps in teenage aspirations. Then, we investigate whether these differences mediate immigrant-native gaps in upper secondary attainment and tertiary enrollment. In line with the immigrant optimism theory, Asian-origin and Turkish-origin students are more likely to hold aligned high aspirations. On average, immigrant-origin students are less likely to have aligned low aspirations compared to native-origin students, and equally likely to hold misaligned or uncertain aspirations. We find that students from most immigrant-origin groups have a higher upper secondary attainment and tertiary enrollment than native-origin students, net of controls. Large portions of these advantages are mediated by the aspirations of immigrant-origin students, which we interpret as evidence of the benefits of the IAP.

How do voters react to an ongoing natural threat? Do voters sanction or reward incumbents even when incumbents cannot be held accountable because an unforeseeable natural disaster is unfolding? We address this question by investigating voters' reactions to the early spread of COVID-19 in the 2020 French municipal elections. Using a novel, fine-grained measure of the circulation of the virus based on excess-mortality data, we find that support for incumbents increased in areas that were particularly hard hit by the virus. Incumbents from both left and right gained votes in areas more strongly affected by COVID-19. We provide suggestive evidence for two mechanisms that can explain our findings: an emotional channel related to feelings of fear and anxiety, and a prospective-voting channel, related to the ability of incumbents to act more swiftly against the diffusion of the virus than challengers.

This study illuminates the male advantage in test-based admissions to higher education. In contrast to many other countries, admission tests in Germany are optional, and test-free programs are available. This context offers a unique opportunity to investigate whether the male advantage in test-based admissions is caused by gender differences in test performance or in test participation. We use novel register data for the whole population of 300,000 applicants to highly selective and prestigious medical programs in Germany. We find that men perform better in tests and that female applicants are more likely to withdraw from admission tests. Both differences, however, depend on high school grade point average (GPA): The male advantage in test performance emerges only among test-takers with a lower GPA, and female applicants’ stronger test avoidance appears only among women with a medium GPA. Ultimately, both mechanisms contribute to a male advantage in test-based admissions (ceteris paribus of GPA), with better test performance being the major source for male applicants’ higher admission chances. As a consequence, we find the female advantage in school performance and the male advantage in test-based admissions almost neutralize each other.

Academic studies prior to the pandemic rather emphasized that the progression towards Industry 4.0 happened in an incremental manner. However, the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic have led to considerable investments that were widely interpreted as a (generalized) digitalization push. However, little is known about the character of such investments and their effects. The goal of this contribution is to provide an empirically based overview of recent investment in digital technologies in six economic sectors of the German economy: mechanical engineering, chemicals, automotives, logistics, healthcare, and financial services. Based on 36 case studies and a survey at 540 companies, we investigate the following questions: 1. How much did the COVID-19 pandemic reduce existing obstacles for investments in digitalization measures? 2. Is there a universal digitalization push due to the COVID-19 pandemic that differs from the trajectory before the pandemic? The results show that the pandemic affected investment in an unequal manner. It was driven by the immediate need to sustain business operations through the virtualization of communication among employees and with external partners. However, there was less dynamism in shop-floor-related digitalization, as it was less related to epidemiological concerns and is more long-term in nature.