Open Access

Students from a high socioeconomic background show relatively homogeneous, high levels of educational attainment, whereas students with a low socioeconomic origin display a large variability in their educational careers. In this paper, we examine whether the varying degrees of students’ academic self-efficacy can contribute to an explanation of this variation. Focusing on Germany’s highly stratified educational system, we utilized the CILS4EU dataset to analyse the association between the academic self-efficacy of students from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds in 9th grade and their later educational aspirations and transitions. Our results show that students from non-academic families are much more likely to (a) aspire to an Abitur, (b) transition to upper secondary school, and (c) enter tertiary education if they exhibit a high level of academic self-efficacy. In contrast, academic self-efficacy shows no link to the educational aspirations and decisions of students who have at least one parent with an academic certificate.

Sozialpolitik und soziale Sicherung, in der Vergangenheit eher ein Thema für Spezialisten, haben in den letzten Jahren Breitenwirkung erzielt. Zeitungen und Magazine überbieten sich mit einschlägigen Berichten über die „schwere Last“ des Sozialstaates, die den Wirtschaftsstandort Deutschland gefährde. Zunehmend spielt in solchen Beiträgen auch der internationale Vergleich eine Rolle. Leistungen, Modi der Finanzierung, das Wirkungsgeflecht von sozialer Sicherung und Arbeitsmarkt sowie die „erfolgreichen Operationen“ beim Umbau des Sozialstaates in anderen Ländern werden thematisiert und stoßen auf ein interessiertes Publikum. Diese öffentliche Debatte findet auf dem Hintergrund veränderter ökonomischer, sozialer und politischer Rahmenbedingungen statt, zu denen neben der ökonomischen Globalisierung, die die sozialpolitischen Handlungsspielräume einschränkt, die in den OECD-Ländern seit nunmehr ca. 30 Jahren andauernde Arbeitsmarktkrise ebenso zu zählen ist, wie die demografische Entwicklung mit ihren für die Gesundheits-, Pflege- und Alterssicherungssysteme relevanten Folgen. Hinzutritt der Bedeutungsverlust der Familie als Leistungsträger der sozialen Sicherheit. FürEuropa tritt der europäische Integrationsprozess hinzu, der durch die Möglichkeit der sozialpolitischen Rechtssetzung, die den Sozialpartnern eingeräumt sind, die sozialpolitische Autonomie der Mitgliedsstaaten tangiert. Der Diskurs über die sozialstaatlichen Umbauprozesse ist dabei weitestgehend von Fragen der Finanzierung, der Leistungen und der Auswirkungen auf den Arbeitsmarkt dominiert. Selten werden die Leitprinzipien und Ideen thematisiert und einer komparatistischen Untersuchung unterzogen, die die Sozialstaaten und seine Sicherungssysteme steuern bzw. sich in den Konstruktionselementen von sozialenSicherungssystemen materialisiert haben. Dies soll in dieser Arbeit geschehen, die die Leitbildentwicklung der Rentenversicherungen in den Niederlanden und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von ihrer Konstituierung am Ende des 19. bzw. zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts bis zu ihrer grundlegenden Reform in den 50er Jahren des vorigen Jahrhunderts zum Gegenstand hat. Diese Arbeit ist die für den Druck überarbeitete Fassung einer Dissertation, die im Jahre 2005 von der Abteilung für Gesellschaftswissenschaften an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe - Universität zu Frankfurt am Main angenommen wurde. Angeregt wurde sie von Prof. Dr. Diether Döring. Ihm bin ich wegen seiner wohlwollenden Begleitung dieses nebenberuflichen Unternehmens ebenso zu Dank verpflichtet wie Herrn Prof. Dr.Josef Esser. Ihre zahlreichen Hinweise und ihre stets konstruktive Kritik haben zumGelingen diesesProjektes beigetragen. Dank zu sagen habe ich auch dem Bischöflichen Ordinariat Limburg, das durch einen finanziellen Zuschuss die Drucklegung dieser Arbeit möglich gemacht hat. Widmen möchte ich dieses Buch meiner Frau Christa und unseren Kindern Tobias, Lukas, Matthias und Nikolas, die mir den „Rücken frei gehalten haben“ für die Abfassung dieser Untersuchung.

A long-standing argument in the political sciences holds that high levels of inequality are incompatible with democracy. Although a number of studies have by now investigated whether income inequality endangers democratic consolidation and stability through corroding popular support, the findings remain inconclusive. This study provides new evidence for a sociotropic effect of macroeconomic income inequality on trust in the institutions of representative democracy by making use of the random effects within between specification in multilevel models for data from 28 European democracies over a period of 16 years. The findings show that both long-standing differences in income inequality between countries and changes in inequality within countries over time are negatively related to trust in institutions. While the spirit-level thesis states that this effect should be more pronounced among rich democracies, the findings show that the effect of inequality is stronger in countries that are less affluent. Further analyses on whether the social-psychological mechanism proposed by the spirit-level thesis mediates the effect of inequality on trust document a partial transmission via status concerns and social trust. However, the study suggests that income inequality primarily influences trust in institutions through evaluation-based processes as captured by economic evaluations.

Plastikmüll ist überall auf unserem Planeten zu finden. Er hinterlässt einen augenscheinlichen Fußabdruck des menschlichen Konsumverhaltens und der Massenproduktion. Unser ungebremster Plastikkonsum und dessen Auswirkungen prägen die gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnisse in einer so tiefgreifenden Weise, dass wir vom Plastikzeitalter sprechen. Um Ansätze für einen Umgang mit diesem Problem zu entwickeln, müssen wir das Phänomen umfassend verstehen: Die Autor:innen beleuchten es aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive. Sie zeigen, welche Rolle Kunststoffe in unserer Gesellschaft spielen und welche Auswirkungen sie auf die Umwelt und die menschliche Gesundheit haben.

Why did Russian-Western relations experience such a dramatic downturn less than a generation after they arguably arrived at the highest point in history at the end of the Cold War? Despite extensive literature addressing this question, the academic debate is still largely dominated by the reductionist studies that assign blame for the breakdown of relations between Russia and countries of the political West exclusively to one side of the conflict, overlooking the possible joint responsibility for mismanaging the relations to the point of military conflict. Against this background, this cumulative dissertation project, consisting of five research papers, narrows down this gap by investigating the role of the European security institutions, that were created after the end of the bipolar confrontation, in the deterioration of Russian-Western conflict in the post-Cold War period. It argues that the European security institutions and Russia’s dissociation from them, referred to below as “Ruxit,” should be treated not only as pure victims of the overall Russian-Western conflict but also as one of its causes. Specifically, I demonstrate that the European multilateral institutions, albeit far from being the sole cause of the crisis, have played a key tensions-intensifying role in Russian-Western relation in the post-Cold War period in two distinctive ways. First, Russia’s interaction with European multilateral institutions and Russian-Western reconciliation at large were based on what turned out to be overly optimistic premise of Russia’s inevitable political and economic democratisation and liberalisation. However, the initial optimism surrounding Russia's leadership transition was short-lived, as cascading economic crises and the discreditation of liberal factions, who were made responsible for it, precipitated the resurgence of more hawkish elements within the Russian leadership. In what followed, Western states, openly expressing their frustration with the Russian authoritarian turn, transitioned from a stance of institutional inclusivity to a hedging strategy, ostensibly elevating Russia's symbolic status while effectively keeping it on the margins of the Western-dominated European security architecture. The perceived encroachment of Western policies, most notably by NATO expansion from 1999 onwards, served as a convenient pretext for the hawks within Russia to bolster their position in the Russian government even further, exacerbating a mutually reinforcing cycle of confrontation with the newly created institutional framework. As a result, paradoxically, instead of aiding Russia's democratic transition, the institutional security framework exacerbated its own burdens and intensified tensions between Russia and the West. The second mechanism elucidating the deterioration of Russian-Western relations attributable to European multilateral institutions pertains to their inability to adequately react to Russia's political and diplomatic efforts to adapt joint institutions in response to emerging challenges in the mid-2000s. This dissertation argues that the original institutional framework not only failed to foresee Russia’s domestic development but also demonstrated structural inadequacies to counter resulting foreign policy behaviour of the disillusioned Russian leadership. Subsequently, Moscow, after a brief phase of selectively disregarding established norms, escalated its contestation strategies by initially advocating for alternative institutional frameworks and ultimately opting for a de facto withdrawal from them. With this, I advance the counterfactual argument that had the European institutions proved to be more agile and adaptive to the dynamic of the post-Cold War development of Russian-Western relations, Moscow would most likely have longer remained within the bounds of the reformed European institutional order, or, at least, not pursued such an openly confrontational anti-Western course. Through the use of original aggregated data (43 personal interviews with Russian and Western politicians, diplomats, scholars, and experts) and synthesis of Russian foreign policy literature with the institutional crisis scholarship that have so far developed independently, this dissertation presents a comprehensive analysis of why Russia felt so estranged from the order which it formerly so actively endorsed. Overall, this study bridges the domains of academia and practice, domestic and international politics, while also establishing connections between the past, present, and future of Russian-Western relations.