Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (294)
- Report (212)
- Review (48)
- Part of Periodical (29)
- Working Paper (29)
- Doctoral Thesis (14)
- Preprint (8)
- Conference Proceeding (5)
- Book (4)
- Part of a Book (4)
Language
- English (650) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (650)
Keywords
- global justice (23)
- terrorism (15)
- islamic state (13)
- democracy (12)
- gender (12)
- populism (12)
- Europe (9)
- IS (9)
- migration (9)
- Egypt (8)
Institute
- Gesellschaftswissenschaften (650) (remove)
Animal agriculture is responsible for at least 16.5% of global yearly CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) emissions (Twine 2021: 3) and thus partially causal for the corresponding climate change, and its disastrous consequences for millions (Romanello et al. 2023: 1-2). At the same time, animal agriculture restricts and damages the bodily autonomy of animals regularly (Hampton et al. 2021: 28) which could be unethical depending on the underlying ethical theory. The policy option of veganism by law is, nevertheless, rarely considered. The definitions of veganism range from an individual ethic of the abstention from consuming animal products to a political philosophy calling for the abolition of animal agriculture (Mancilla 2016: 1-3). Because veganism through the cessation of animal agriculture could be the policy solution to the aforementioned issues concerning the rights of present and future generations affected by climate change and the rights of animals, I explore arguments for and against the implementation of veganism by law.
Although a veganized agriculture would provide 52% of the required emission reductions for the 2°C target of the Paris climate accord (Eisen and Brown 2022: 6), and could allow for greater animal welfare, current policies of many governments promote the opposite. For example, 82% of the subsidies of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy are routed towards the production of animal products and animal feed (Kortleve et al. 2024: 1-2). Moreover, for American adults the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2020: 96) promotes the consumption of 720ml of cow milk or other dairy per day and recommends a protein intake through meat and eggs between 652 g and 936 g per week.
In this bachelor thesis I outline the current state of animal agriculture, its emissions and the associated harm towards animals and humans. The empirical findings are dissected ethically with a consequentialist approach and a deontological approach. The ethical analysis concerning the decisions of individuals is then converted into a political philosophy regarding the duties of states towards present and future generations and animals including corresponding policy implications.
The normative argument is mainly based on the example of industrialized animal agricul-ture, the area where most of the interaction between animals and humans occurs. Nevertheless, other sectors where animals are used for human consumption or entertainment are discussed in less detail, in order to analyze the arguments for veganism by law.
In short, using the recommended political argument structure of Abel et al. (2021: 6) the following hypothesis acts as the basis for the political and philosophical discussion and is revised where necessary:
Moral claims: The state should protect present and future generations and animal rights.
Empirical claims: Animal agriculture is a major contributor to climate change and its corresponding effects and violates the wellbeing of animals regularly.
Conclusion: The state should enforce veganism by law.
Research around the “glass escalator” demonstrates that men receive promotions faster than women in women-dominated occupations. However, it remains unclear how overall establishment composition affects the glass escalator. We use German longitudinal linked employer-employee data (LIAB) between 2012 and 2019 to examine how occupational and establishment gender composition shape gender differences in promotions to management. Establishment gender composition moderates the glass escalator, meaning women's mobility disadvantages in women-dominated jobs are most pronounced in men-dominated establishments. We hypothesize that changing occupational status is a central mechanism: When occupations mirror the composition of the establishment, their status increases locally. Higher occupational status offsets lower leadership expectations attributed to women and increases women's promotion odds relative to their male colleagues.
Highlights
• Family structure transitions decrease academic school track attendance among children of less educated parents.
• Children of highly educated fathers in single-mother families also have lower outcomes.
• Reduced income and increased exposure to poverty are relevant mediators.
• There is no cumulative disadvantage linked to a further transition to a stepfamily.
• Previous parental separation does not affect educational outcomes for children residing with a highly educated stepfather.
Abstract
Recent research has documented that the effect of parental separation on children’s educational outcomes depends on socioeconomic background. Yet, parental separation could lead to a stable single-parent family or to a further transition to a stepfamily. Little is known about how the effect of family structure transitions on educational outcomes depends on the education of parents and stepparents, and there has been limited empirical research into the mechanisms that explain heterogeneity in the effects of family transitions. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and models with entropy balancing and sibling fixed effects, I explore the heterogeneous effects of family transitions during early and middle childhood on academic secondary school track attendance, grades and aspirations. I find that family transitions only reduce the academic school track attendance among children of less educated parents living in stepfamilies or with a single mother after parental separation, and among children of highly educated fathers living in single-mother families. The mechanisms that partly explain these effects relate to reduced income and exposure to poverty after parental separation. The findings underscore the importance of considering the stepparent's educational level, indicating that the adverse consequences of parental separation on educational outcomes are mitigated when a highly educated stepfather becomes part of the family. Overall, these findings align more closely with the resource perspective than the family stability perspective.
Coming of voting age. Evidence from a natural experiment on the effects of electoral eligibility
(2024)
In recent years, several jurisdictions have lowered the voting age, with many more discussing it. Sceptics question whether young people are ready to vote, while supporters argue that allowing them to vote would increase their specific engagement with politics. To test the latter argument, we use a series of register-based surveys of over 10,000 German adolescents. Knowing the exact birthdates of our respondents, we estimate the causal effect of eligibility on their information-seeking behaviour in a regression discontinuity design. While eligible and non-eligible respondents do not differ in their fundamental political dispositions, those allowed to vote are more likely to discuss politics with their family and friends and to use a voting advice application. This effect appears to be stronger for voting age 16 than for 18. The right to vote changes behaviour. Therefore, we cannot conclude from the behaviour of ineligible citizens that they are unfit to vote.
My aim in this paper is to make the debates about epistemic injustice fruitful for an analysis of trust in the knowledge of others. Epistemic trust is understood here in a broad sense: not only as trust in scientific knowledge or expert knowledge, but also as trust in implicit, positioned and experience-based knowledge. Using insights from discussions of epistemic injustice, I argue for three interrelated theses:
1. Questions of epistemic trust and trustworthiness cannot be answered with reference to individual virtue alone; rather, they have a structural component.
2. The rationality of epistemic trust must be analyzed against the background of social structures and social relations of domination.
3. Epistemic trust is (also) a political phenomenon and epistemically just relations depend on political transformation processes that promote equality.
Over the last three decades, countries across the Andean region have moved toward legal recognition of indigenous justice systems. This turn toward legal pluralism, however, has been and continues to be heavily contested. The working paper explores a theoretical perspective that aims at analyzing and making sense of this contentious process by assessing the interplay between conflict and (mis)trust. Based on a review of the existing scholarship on legal pluralism and indigenous justice in the Andean region, with a particular focus on the cases of Bolivia and Ecuador, it is argued that manifest conflict over the contested recognition of indigenous justice can be considered as helpful and even necessary for the deconstruction of mistrust of indigenous justice. Still, such conflict can also help reproduce and even reinforce mistrust, depending on the ways in which conflict is dealt with politically and socially. The exploratory paper suggests four proposition that specify the complex and contingent relationship between conflict and (mis)trust in the contested negotiation of pluralist justice systems in the Andean region.
The resurgence of populism and the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic have consolidated an appeal to the language of trust and distrust in the political arena, but any reference to these notions has often turned into an ideological and polarized debate. As a result, the possibility of developing an appropriate picture of the conditions for trust in politics has been undermined. To navigate the different demands for trust raised in the political arena, a notion of political trust must cover two partially unfulfilled tasks. One is to clarify what trust means when referring specifically to the political context. The other is to connect political trust to other notions that populate the debate on trustworthiness in the political arena - those of rational, moral, epistemic, and procedural trust. I will show how the political categories I use to define the scope of a political notion of trust function as normative leverages to develop politics-compatible versions of rational, moral, procedural, and epistemic trust.
Coercion or privatization? Crisis and planned economies in the debates of the early Frankfurt School
(2023)
The 1930s–1940s underwent profound structural economic and political turmoil following the collapse of the nineteenth century liberal market economies. The intellectual debates of the time were dominated by the question of whether Marx’s theory of the tendency of rate of profit to fall was true, or what consequence could be imagined in the survival of capitalist societies. Placed in the middle of such debates was also the reorganization of national productions into war economies. By means of reconstructive analysis, the paper provides a critical overview of the debates that took place within the circle of the Frankfurt School during those years. It also advances an interpretive thesis suggesting that remedies to capitalist crises of the time turned state powers into privatized, illiberal coercive entities. Coercion and privatization reinforced each other. This general tendency is well illustrated by the famous Pollock-Neumann debate. These intellectuals expressed views not only intended to shed light on the historical period of time, but also to formulate long-term considerations on the authoritarian trends embedded in our contemporary democracies. Through historical reconstruction, the paper’s aim is to identify a long-term structural thread of transformation starting from the transformation of the German economy in 1930s and touching upon post Second World War problems of states’ restructuring along privatization/coercion divides.
Recent research finds that Muslim girls increasingly have in-group friendships in adolescence, while Muslim boys remain more open to interreligious friendships. This gender gap mirrors established findings of female Muslims’ lower involvement in interreligious romantic relationships, which is attributed to gendered religious norms. In this study, we examine whether gendered religious norms also contribute to the emerging gender gap in Muslim youths’ interreligious friendship-making. Building on the literature on intergroup dating, we identify religiosity, parental control, and leisure time activities as key factors through which religious norms may not only constrain Muslim girls’ intergroup romantic relationships, but also their interreligious friendships. We also examine the contribution of gendered experiences of religious discrimination and rejection by non-Muslims to religious friendship-making. We study 737 Muslim youth from age 11–17 with six waves of longitudinal German data and find that religiosity, parental control, and leisure time activities all contribute to the emerging gender gap in interreligious friendship-making. Religiosity is associated with more in-group friendships, but only rises among Muslim girls in adolescence, not among boys. By contrast, parental control increases among both genders, but it only constrains girls’ interreligious friendships. Muslim girls’ declining participation in clubs also is associated with fewer interreligious friendships. Gendered experiences of religious discrimination and rejection do not contribute to the gender gap. Jointly, these factors explain one third of the emerging gender gap in interreligious friendship-making. This finding suggests that gendered religious norms not only limit interreligious romantic relationships but also interreligious friendships of Muslim girls.
In this paper, we use the “gender as a social structure” framework to assess macro-, interactional-, and micro-level mechanisms explaining the stalled revolution in gender ideologies. Using the European Values Study 2008 data and latent class analysis, we look at the spread of gender ideologies and examine their association with national levels of gendered ascription of work and care roles, work–family compatibility, social inequality and societal affluence, individual characteristics, and cross-level interactions with gender and education in 36 (post-)industrialized countries. By including a large number of Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern European countries, we provide a new and comprehensive picture of the gender ideology landscapes of Europe, reflected in two unidimensional classes—egalitarian and traditional—and four multidimensional classes, covering more than 60 percent of respondents—family oriented, choice egalitarian, intensive motherhood, and neotraditional. By modeling key features of macro-level variation, we show how the spread of gender ideologies is associated with distinct contextual conditions. We consolidate previous findings on multidimensional gender ideologies, which were based on fewer countries.
Aim: Replicate the analysis conducted by Prof. Dr. Alexander W. Schmidt-Catran (Goethe University Frankfurt), Prof. Dr. Malcolm Fairbrother (Umea University), and Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Andreß (University of Cologne) that was published in a special issue on Cross-National Comparative Research in the German academic journal Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie in 2019. Result: Almost all calculations, tables and graphs from Schmidt-Catran et al. (2019) could be replicated sufficiently well in R.
The first case of COVID-19 infection in Africa was recorded in Egypt on 14 February 2020. Following this, several projections of the possible devastating effect that the virus can have on the population of African countries were made in the Western media. This paper presents evidence for Africa’s successful responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and under-reporting or misrepresentation of these successes in Western media. It proceeds to argue for accounting for these successes in terms of Africa’s communitarian way of life and conceptions of self, duty, and rights; and that a particular orientation in theorizing on global justice can highlight the injustices inherent in the misrepresentation of these successes and contribute shared perspectives to formulating a framework of values and concepts that would facilitate the implementation of global policy goals for justice. The paper is thus grounded in a rejection of the insular tenets of theorizing prevalent in the global justice debate and to persistent inclinations in Western scholarship to the thinking that theorizing in the African context that draws inspiration from the cultural past has little to contribute to the quest for justice globally. On the contrary, it argues that reflexive critique of cultural history is a necessary source of normative ideals that can foster tolerant coexistence and a cooperative endeavour toward shared conceptions of justice in the contemporary world.
This paper considers ways in which rulers can respond to, generate, or exploit fear of COVID-19 infection for various ends, and in particular distinguishes between ‘fear-invoking’ and ‘fear-minimising’ strategies. It examines historical precedent for executive overreach in crises and then moves on to look in more detail at some specific areas where fear is being mobilised or generated: in ways that lead to the suspension of civil liberties; that foster discrimination against minorities; and that boost the personality cult of leaders and limit criticism or competition. Finally, in the Appendix, we present empirical work, based on the results of an original survey in Brazil, that provides support for the conjectures in the previous sections. While it is too early to tell what the longer-term outcomes of the changes we note will be, our purpose here is simply to identify some warning signs that threaten the key institutions and values of democracy.
We live in tragic times. Millions are sheltering in place to avoid exacerbating the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. How should we respond to such tragedies? This paper argues that the human right to health can help us do so because it inspires human rights advocates, claimants, and those with responsibility for fulfilling the right to try hard to satisfy its claims. That is, the right should, and often does, give rise to what I call the virtue of creative resolve. This resolve embodies a fundamental commitment to finding creative solutions to what appear to be tragic dilemmas. Contra critics, we should not reject the right even if it cannot tell us how to ration scarce health resources. Rather, the right gives us a response to apparent tragedy in motivating us to search for ways of fulfilling everyone’s basic health needs.
The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting countries across the globe. Only a globally coordinated response, however, will enable the containment of the virus. Responding to a request from policy makers for ethics input for a global resource pledging event as a starting point, this paper outlines normative and procedural principles to inform a coordinated global coronavirus response. Highlighting global connections and specific vulnerabilities from the pandemic, and proposing standards for reasonable and accountable decision-making, the ambition of the paper is two-fold: to raise awareness for the justice dimensions in the global response, and to argue for moving health from the periphery to the centre of philosophical debates about social and global justice.
The COVID-19 pandemic has both highlighted and exacerbated global health inequities, leading for calls for responses to COVID to promote social justice and ensure that no one is left behind. One key lesson to be learnt from the pandemic is the critical importance of decolonizing global health and global health research so that African countries are better placed to address pandemic challenges in contextually relevant ways. This paper argues that to be successful, programmes of decolonization in complex global health landscapes require a complex three-dimensional approach. Drawing on the broader discourse of political decolonization that has been going on in the African context for over a century, we present a model for unpacking the complex task of decolonization. Our approach suggests a three-dimensional approach which encompasses hegemomic; epistemic; and commitmental elements.
Large companies are increasingly on trial. Over the last decade, many of the world’s biggest firms have been embroiled in legal disputes over corruption charges, financial fraud, environmental damage, taxation issues or sanction violations, ending in convictions or settlements of record-breaking fines, well above the billion-dollar mark. For critics of globalization, this turn towards corporate accountability is a welcome sea-change showing that multinational companies are no longer above the law. For legal experts, the trend is noteworthy because of the extraterritorial dimensions of law enforcement, as companies are increasingly held accountable for activities independent of their nationality or the place of the activities. Indeed, the global trend required understanding the evolution of corporate criminal law enforcement in the United States in particular, where authorities have skillfully expanded its effective jurisdiction beyond its territory. This paper traces the evolution of corporate prosecutions in the United States. Analyzing federal prosecution data, it then shows that foreign firms are more likely to pay a fine, which is on average 6,6 times larger.
Introduction
(2022)
Episodes of liberalization in autocracies: a new approach to quantitatively studying democratization
(2022)
This paper introduces a new approach to the quantitative study of democratization. Building on the comparative case-study and large-N literature, it outlines an episode approach that identifies the discrete beginning of a period of political liberalization, traces its progression, and classifies episodes as successful versus different types of failing outcomes, thus avoiding potentially fallacious assumptions of unit homogeneity. We provide a description and analysis of all 383 liberalization episodes from 1900 to 2019, offering new insights on democratic “waves”. We also demonstrate the value of this approach by showing that while several established covariates are valuable for predicting the ultimate outcomes, none explain the onset of a period of liberalization.
Although scholars hypothesized early on that social belonging is an important predictor for voting behavior, its role for populist voting remains empirically ambiguous and underexplored. This contribution investigates how different aspects of social belonging, that is, quality, quantity, and perception of one's own social relationships, relate to electoral abstention and to populist voting on the left and right. Employing multilevel regression models using data from four waves of the European Social Survey, this study finds that all measures of social belonging foster turnout, but they exert an incoherent influence on populist voting depending on the party's ideological leaning. While social belonging plays a subordinate role for left populist support, strong social belonging reduces the probability to support populist parties on the right. With that, the study analysis offers a nuanced view on how different dimensions of social belonging relate to electoral behavior. By doing so, this study sheds light on what aspects of social belonging encourage, or inhibit, which form of “protest at the ballot box.”
In this article, we propose to develop a realist interpretation of political progress—that is, an analysis of what it means to achieve better conditions of life in society under political power according to realist standards. Specifically, we are interested in identifying the criteria according to which political realism defines a change in the status quo as a desirable change...
The sixth sanction package of the European Union in the context of the aggression against Ukraine excludes Sberbank, the largest Russian bank, from the SWIFT network. The increasing use of SWIFT as a tool for sanctions stimulates the rollout of alternative payment information systems by the governments of Russia and China. This policy white paper informs about the alternatives at hand, as well as their advantages and disadvantages. Careful reflection about these issues is particularly important, given the call for an “Economic Article 5” tabled for the next NATO meeting. Finally, the white paper highlights the need for institutional reforms, if policymakers decide to return SWIFT to the status of a global public good after the war.
This paper challenges widespread assumptions in trust research according to which trust and conflict are opposing terms or where trust is generally seen as a value. Rather, it argues that trust is only valuable if properly justified, and it places such justifications in contexts of social and political conflict. For these purposes, the paper suggests a distinction between a general concept and various conceptions of trust, and it defines the concept as a four-place one. With regard to the justification of trust, a distinction between internal and full justification is introduced, and the justification of trust is linked to relations of justification between trusters and trusted. Finally, trust in conflict(s) emerges were such relations exist among the parties of a conflict, often by way of institutional mediation.
For some years, the German public has been debating the case of migrant workers receiving German benefits for children living abroad, which has been scandalised as a case of “benefit tourism.” This points to a failure to recognise a striking imbalance between the output of the German welfare state to migrants and the input it receives from migrant domestic workers. In this article I discuss how this input is being rendered invisible or at least underappreciated by sexist, racist, and classist practices of othering. To illustrate the point, I will use examples from two empirical research projects that looked into how families in Germany outsource various forms of reproductive work to both female and male migrants from Eastern Europe. Drawing on the concept of othering developed in feminist and postcolonial literature and their ideas of how privileges and disadvantages are interconnected, I will put this example into the context of literature on racism, gender, and care work migration. I show how migrant workers fail to live up to the normative standards of work, family life, and gender relations and norms set by a sedentary society. A complex interaction of supposedly “natural” and “objective” differences between “us” and “them” are at work to justify everyday discrimination against migrants and their institutional exclusion. These processes are also reflected in current political and public debates on the commodification and transnationalisation of care.
By comparing two distinct governmental organizations (the US military and NASA) this paper unpacks two main issues. On the one hand, the paper examines the transcripts that are produced as part of work activities in these worksites and what the transcripts reveal about the organizations themselves. Additionally, the paper analyses what the transcripts disclose about the practices involved in their creation and use for practical purposes in these organizations. These organizations have been chosen as transcription forms a routine part of how they operate as worksites. Further, the everyday working environments in both organizations involve complex technological systems, as well as multi-party interactions in which speakers are frequently spatially and visually separated. In order to explicate these practices, the article draws on the transcription methods employed in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis research as a comparative resource. In these approaches audio-video data is transcribed in a fine-grained manner that captures temporal aspects of talk, as well as how speech is delivered. Using these approaches to transcription as an analytical device enables us to investigate when and why transcripts are produced by the US military and NASA in the specific ways that they are, as well as what exactly is being re-presented in the transcripts and thus what was treated as worth transcribing in the interactions they are intended to serve as documents of. By analysing these transcription practices it becomes clear that these organizations create huge amounts of audio-video “data” about their routine activities. One major difference between them is that the US military selectively transcribe this data (usually for the purposes of investigating incidents in which civilians might have been injured), whereas NASA’s “transcription machinery” aims to capture as much of their mission-related interactions as is organizationally possible (i.e., within the physical limits and capacities of their radio communications systems). As such the paper adds to our understanding of transcription practices and how this is related to the internal working, accounting and transparency practices within different kinds of organization. The article also examines how the original transcripts have been used by researchers (and others) outside of the organizations themselves for alternative purposes.
The intergenerational transmission of gender: paternal influences on children’s gender attitudes
(2022)
Objective: This study provides the first systematic longitudinal analysis of the influence of paternal involvement in family life—across childhood and adolescence—on the gender-role attitudes of children by the age of 14 or 15.
Background: Recent research suggests that, in post-industrial societies, paternal involvement in family life is increasing. Although previous studies of paternal involvement have considered paternal influences on children's cognitive or socio-emotional development, such studies have not yet addressed paternal influences on children's attitudes toward gender. Relatedly, previous studies on the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes have analyzed maternal influences, but have neglected the significance of paternal influences. This study engages both strands of the research by analyzing the effects of paternal behaviors on children's attitudes toward gender roles.
Method: Multivariate linear regressions models were estimated on data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC); a survey with biannual observations over 10 years for 2796 children born between 1999 and 2000.
Results: Fathers' time spent on childcare during childhood was associated with gender-egalitarian attitudes in children by the age of 14 or 15. The most powerful predictor of children's gender-role attitudes, however, was the amount of time fathers spent on housework during children's adolescence, both absolute and relative to the amount of time mothers spent on housework. Fathers' unpaid labor at home was as relevant for children's gender-role attitudes as mothers' paid labor in the workforce. These results held after controlling for maternal domestic behaviors and for the gender-role attitudes of both parents.
Conclusion: Father involvement in childcare and housework during childhood and adolescence play an important role in shaping children's gender-egalitarian attitudes.
The article studies civil wars and trust dynamics from two perspectives. It looks, first, at rebel governance during ongoing armed conflict and, second, at mass mobilisation against the regime in post-conflict societies. Both contexts are marked by extraordinarily high degrees of uncertainty given continued, or collective memory of, violence and repression.
But what happens to trust relations under conditions of extreme uncertainty? Intuitively, one would assume that trust is shaken or even substantially eroded in such moments, as political and social orders are questioned on a fundamental level and threaten to collapse. However, while it is true that some forms of trust are under assault in situations of civil war and mass protests, we find empirical evidence which suggests that these situations also give rise to the formation of other kinds of trust. We argue that, in order to detect and explain these trust dynamics in contexts of extreme uncertainty, there should be more systematic studies of: (a) synchronous dynamics between different actors and institutions which imply trust dynamics happening simultaneously, (b) diachronous dynamics and the sequencing of trust dynamics over several phases of violent conflict or episodes of contention, as well as long-term structural legacies of the past. In both dimensions, microlevel relations, as well as their embeddedness in larger structures, help explain how episodes of (non-)violent contention become a critical juncture for political and social trust.
Studies of occupational sex segregation rely on the sociocultural model to explain why some occupations are numerically dominated by women and others by men. This model argues that occupational sex segregation is driven by norms about gender-appropriate work, which are frequently conceptualized as gender-typed skills: work-related tasks, abilities, and knowledge domains that society views as either feminine or masculine. The sociocultural model thus explains the primary patterns of occupational sex segregation, which conform to these norms: Requirements for feminine (masculine) skills increase with women’s (men’s) representation in the occupation. However, the model does not adequately explain cases of segregation that deviate from these norms or investigate the ways in which feminine and masculine skills co-occur in occupations. The present study fills these gaps by evaluating two previously untested explanations for deviations from the sociocultural model. The findings show that requirements for physical strength (a masculine skill) increase with women’s representation in professional occupations because physical strength skills co-occur with substantially higher requirements for feminine skills that involve helping and caring for others. These results indicate that the sociocultural model, and more generally explanations for how gender norms drive occupational sex segregation, can be improved by examining patterns of gender-typed skill co-occurrence.
Cryovalues beyond high expectations: endurance and the construction of value in cord blood banking
(2022)
Cryopreservation attracts attention as a practice grounded in high expectations: current life is suspended for future use—to generate life, to save life, and to resurrect life. But what happens when high expectations in cryobanking give way to looming uselessness and the risk of failure? Based on ethnographic insights into the case of umbilical cord blood (CB) banking in Germany, this contribution investigates the liminal state of “non-failure.” Averting failure amid a lack of success in this field requires putting effort into the construction of value. The resulting practices and dynamics overflow generic stories of commercialization and instrumentalization of biological material and are best grasped as an expanded version of the recently coined notion of “cryovalue.” The long-term availability of cryopreserved CB facilitates the steady yield of social and economic capital beyond and after promise. Moreover, the value construction is reoriented from CB itself toward the socio-technical cryo-arrangements in which it is embedded. In exemplifying how it expands the understanding of the diversity of valuation and valorization practices, continuities, and economic endurance in cryoeconomies and bioeconomies, the paper advocates the study of their ambivalent and allegedly uneventful sites.
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, social restrictions and social distancing policies forced large parts of social life to take place within the household. However, comparatively little is known about how private living situations shaped individuals experiences of this crisis. To investigate this issue, we analyze how experiences and concerns vary across living arrangements along two dimensions that may be associated with social disadvantage: loneliness and care. In doing so, we employ quantitative text analysis on open-ended questions from survey data on a sample of 1,073 individuals living in Germany. We focus our analyses on four different household structures: living alone, shared living without children, living with a partner and children, and single parents. We find that single parents (who are primarily single mothers) are at high risk of experiencing care-related worries, particularly regarding their financial situation, while individuals living alone are most likely to report feelings of loneliness. Those individuals living in shared houses, with or without children, had the lowest risk of experiencing both loneliness and care-related worries. These findings illustrate that the living situation at home substantially impacts how individuals experienced and coped with the pandemic situation during the first wave of the pandemic.
The paper presents the findings of two recent books on the financial history of the Frankfurt School: Jeanette Erazo-Heufelder, Der argentinische Krösus: Kleine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule, 2017, and Bertus Mulder, Sophie Louisa Kwaak und das Kapital der Unternehmerfamilie Weil. Ein Beitrag zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule, 2021 (Dutch original 2015). In contrast to the “court histories” of the school, the two authors tell the story of the money that brought the school to life and secured its existence throughout a turbulent period of history. At the center of the books are individuals who have been sidelined until now or even completely ignored by the literature on the Frankfurt School: on the one hand, Felix Weil, who founded and financed the Institute of Social Research and, on the other hand, Erich A. Nadel and Sophie L. Kwaak, two employees of the holding company who managed the accounts of the Weil family and the Institute’s foundations and were responsible for protecting the assets from being seized by Nazis. The books’ thick descriptions induced the author of the present paper to consider an alternative perspective on the Frankfurt School by contemplating Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock as playing confidential games with Weil and others.
In ‘Justice and Natural Resources,’ Chris Armstrong offers a rich and sophisticated egalitarian theory of resource justice, according to which the benefits and burdens flowing from natural (and non-natural) resources are ideally distributed with a view to equalize people’s access to wellbeing, unless there are compelling reasons that justify departures from that egalitarian default. Armstrong discusses two such reasons: special claims from ‘improvement’ and ‘attachment.’ In this paper, I critically assess the account he gives of these potential constraints on global equality. I argue that his recognition of them has implications that Armstrong does not anticipate, and which challenge some important theses in his book. First, special claims from improvement will justify larger departures from the egalitarian default than Armstrong believes. Second, a consistent application of Armstrong’s life planfoundation for special claims from attachment implies that nation-states may move closer to justify ‘permanent sovereignty’ over the resources within their territories than what his analysis suggests.
In this paper, we discuss Armstrong’s account of attachment-based claims to natural resources, the kind of rights that follow from attachment-based claims, and the limits we should impose on such claims. We hope to clarify how and why attachment matters in the discourse on resource rights by presenting three challenges to Armstrong’s theory. First, we question the normative basis for certain attachment claims, by trying to distinguish more clearly between different kinds of attachment and other kinds of claims. Second, we highlight the need to supplement Armstrong’s account with a theory of how to weigh different attachment claims so as to establish the normative standing that different kinds of attachment claims should have. Third, we propose that sustainability must be a necessary requirement for making attachment claims to natural resources legitimate. Based on these three challenges and the solutions we propose, we argue that attachment claims are on the one hand narrower than Armstrong suggests, while on the other hand they can justify more far-reaching rights to control than Armstrong initially considers, because of the particular weight that certain attachment claims have.
Introduction
(2021)
Objective: The study investigates the relationship between perceived loneliness and the individuals' attitude whether voting is a civic duty. With that, it is the first study to shed light on the mechanism linking perceived loneliness to voting behavior.
Methods: Two independent, cross-sectional, and representative datasets from Germany (n = 1641) and the Netherlands (n = 1431) are analyzed.
Results: The regression results and effect decomposition techniques show that loneliness is associated with reduced intention to vote as well as a lower sense of duty to vote. The effect of loneliness on voting behavior is partially mediated through a reduced sense of duty.
Conclusion: Loneliness is associated with political disengagement. The study provides empirical evidence that the relationship between loneliness and turnout is partially mediated through sense of duty. This showcases that lonely individuals tend to feel detached from society and are less likely to feel obligated to participate in the electoral process.
This article seeks to build a bridge between the empirical scholarship rooted in the traditional theory of political representation and constructivist theory on representation by focusing on the authorization of claims. It seeks to answer how claims can be authorized beyond elections - selecting three democratic innovations and tracing claims through the claim-making process. Different participatory democratic innovations are selected - providing various claims and taking place in different institutional contexts, i.e., (elected) members of the Council of Foreigners Frankfurt; individual citizens in participatory budgeting procedures in Münster; and citizen’s associations elected politicians in the referendum campaign in Hamburg. We first analyze the claims raised by the different claim-makers to identify their claimed constituency eligible to authorize claims. In the second step, we focus on the authorization by the claimed constituency and the relevant decision-making authority. The article finds that claim-making in democratic innovations is fractured and incomplete. Nevertheless, this is not the reason to dismiss democratic innovations as possible loci of representation; on the contrary, seen through the prism of claim-making, all representation – electoral and nonelectoral – is partial. Focusing on the authorization of claims in democratic innovations provides novel inferences about the potential and limits of democratic innovations for broadening democratic representation.
In Justice and Natural Resources: An Egalitarian Theory (2017), Chris Armstrong proposes a version of global egalitarianism that – contra the default renderings of this approach – takes individual attachment to specific resources into account. By doing this, his theory has the potential for greening global egalitarianism both in terms of procedure and scope. In terms of procedure, its broad account of attachment and its focus on individuals rather than groups connects with participatory governance and management and, ultimately, participatory democracy – an essential ingredient in the toolkit of green politics and policy-making. In terms of scope, because it does not commit itself to any particular moral framework, Armstrong’s theory leaves the door open for non-human animals to become subjects of justice, thus extending the realm of the latter beyond its traditionally anthropocentric borders. I conclude that these greenings are promising, but not trouble-free.
This paper uses a novel account of non-ideal political action that can justify radical responses to severe climate injustice, including and especially deliberate attempts to engineer the climate system in order reflect sunlight into space and cooling the planet. In particular, it discusses the question of what those suffering from climate injustice may do in order to secure their fundamental rights and interests in the face of severe climate change impacts. Using the example of risky geoengineering strategies such as sulfate aerosol injections, I argue that peoples that are innocently subject to severely negative climate change impacts may have a special permission to engage in large-scale yet risky climate interventions to prevent them. Furthermore, this can be true even if those interventions wrongly harm innocent people.
A reply to my critics
(2021)
It is a real pleasure to reply to so many thoughtful and probing responses to my book. In what follows, I will focus on six key themes that emerge across the various pieces. Some of them call into question core commitments of my theory, and in those cases I will try to show what might be said in its defence. Quite a number of the critics, however, present what we might call expansionist arguments: though they endorse some of the arguments I make, that is – or pick up some of its key concepts – they seek to push them in new and interesting directions. I will suggest that many of those arguments look likely to be successful, though I will also express caution about one or two of them. I doubt, however, that I will be the final judge of their success. Early on in the book I express the hope that it might provide a set of conceptual tools capable of advancing discussions about resource justice more broadly, even for scholars who reject my own idiosyncratic approach. Having made that gambit, I cannot now claim to have a monopoly on the use of the tools in question. Witnessing the use that others have already made of them has been a refreshing and rewarding experience.
This paper argues that land and resource rights are often essential in overcoming colonial inequality and devaluation of indigenous populations and cultures. It thereby criticizes global welfare egalitarians that promote the abolition of national sovereignty over resources in the name of increased equality. The paper discusses two ways in which land and resource rights contribute to decolonization and the eradication of the associated inequality. First, it proposes that land and resource rights have acquired a status-conferring function for (formerly) colonized peoples so that possession of full personhood and relational equality is partially expressed through the possession of land and resource rights. Second, it suggests that successful internal decolonization depends on access to and control over land and resources, especially for indigenous peoples.
This paper argues first that Armstrong is led to see natural resources primarily as objects of consumption. But many natural resources are better seen as objects of enjoyment, where one person’s access to a resource need not prevent others from enjoying equal access, or as objects of production, where granting control of a resource to one person may produce collateral benefits to others. Second, Armstrong’s approach to resource distribution, which requires that everyone must have equal access to welfare, conceals an ambiguity as to whether this means equal opportunity for welfare, or simply equal welfare – the underlying issue being how far individuals (or countries) should be held responsible for the use they make of the resources they are allocated. Third, when Armstrong attacks arguments that appeal to ‘improvement’ as a basis for claims to natural resources, he treats them as making comparative desert claims: if country A makes a claim to the improved resources on its territory, it must show that their comparative value accurately reflects the productive deserts of its members compared to those of countries B. But in fact, A needs only to make the much weaker claim that its members have done more than others to enhance the value of its resources. Overall, Armstrong’s welfarist approach fails to appreciate the dynamic advantages of allocating resources to those best able to use them productively.
Chris Armstrong argues that attempts at justifying special claims over natural resources generally take one of two forms: arguments from improvement and arguments from attachment. We argue that Armstrong fails to establish that the distinction between natural resources and improved resources has no normative significance. He succeeds only in showing that ‘improvers’ (whoever they may be) are not necessarily entitled to the full exchange value of the improvement. It can still be argued that the value of natural and improved resources should be distributed on different grounds, but that the value of improvements should be conceived differently.
The paper analyses the interrelationship between Armstrong’s egalitarian theory and his treatment of the ‘attachment theory’ of resources, which is the dominant rival theory of resources that his theory is pitched against. On Armstrong’s theory, egalitarianism operates as a default position, from which special claims would need to be justified, but he also claims to be able to incorporate ‘attachment’ into his theory. The general question explored in the paper is the extent to which ‘attachment’ claims can be ‘married’ to an egalitarian theory. The more specific argument is that a properly constrained attachment theory is more plausible than Armstrong’s egalitarian theory. Armstrong’s paper also criticizes attachment and improvement accounts as justifying permanent sovereignty over resources. This paper argues that neither of those arguments aim to justify the international doctrine of permanent sovereignty.