Problems on the road to high skill: a sectoral lesson from the transfer of the dual system of vocational training to eastern Germany

The central challenge of transferring the dual system of education and training to eastern Germany is to convince companies to bear the in-firm costs of apprenticeship training. Two prominent explanatory variables in the social scientificliterature - national institutions and social capital - offer certain predictions aboutwhich factors will be most important in facilitating the transfer of the dual system toeastern Germany. Data from interviews with thirty-four firms in the metal andelectronics industry suggest that institutionalist theory mis-specifies the role ofemployers in coordinated market economies. Employers' associations in both eastern and western Germany have neither the access to inside information nor theinformal sanctioning capacity attributed to them in this literature, nor do they play anyrole in the regular diffusion of strategies of best practice. Ownership by westernGerman companies, however, appears to be of particular significance in the decisionof eastern German companies to train, a link which may support the institutional emphasis on access to long-term finance. Social capital is unable to explainsignificant variance in the ability of companies to cooperate in order to create additional apprenticeship places. The role of policy design in the new federal statesappears to have an important effect in explaining the ability of firms in some states tocooperate in training apprentices. The ability to craft effective policies depends oncoordination among state governments and employers' organizations, but the distributive conflicts inherent in these subsidies can hamper cooperation among employers. -- Die zentrale Herausforderung bei der Übertragung des dualen Berufsausbildungssystems nach Ostdeutschland ist es, die Unternehmen davon zuüberzeugen, die internen Kosten der Ausbildung zu tragen. Besonders zwe iVariablen in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Literatur - das nationale Institutionengefüge und das Sozialkapital - weisen auf vorab benennbare Faktoren hin, die wichtig sind, um den Transfer des dualen Systems nach Ostdeutschland zuerleichtern.Informationen und Daten aus Interviews in 34 Unternehmen der Metall- und Elektronikindustrie führen zu der Annahme, daß die Institutionen-Theorie die Rolle von Unternehmern in koordinierten Marktwirtschaften mißinterpretiert.Unternehmensverbände in Ost- und Westdeutschland haben weder Zugang zu Insider-Informationen noch eine wie auch immer geartete Sanktionsmöglichkeit - wieihnen in der Literatur zugeschrieben wird -, und sie spielen auch keine Rolle in derüblichen Verbreitung von best-practice-Erfahrungen. Wenn ein Unternehmen in Ostdeutschland einem westdeutschen Unternehmen gehört, so scheint dies allerdings eine wichtige Rolle bei der Entscheidung für eine berufliche Erstausbildung in dem ostdeutschen Unternehmen zu spielen. Dies könnte in einemZusammenhang mit der Diskussion um die Bedeutung von Institutionen und dabei um den Zugang zu langfristigem Kapital gesehen werden.Die These vom Sozialen Kapital kann die erheblichen Unterschiede in der Fähigkeitder Unternehmen, durch Kooperation zusätzliche Ausbildungsplätze zu schaffen, nicht erklären. Die je spezifische Art, wie politische Prozesse in den neuen Bundesländern gestaltet werden, scheint dagegen ein wichtiger Indikator zu sein, umdie in einigen Bundesländern vorhandene Kooperationsfähigkeit von Unternehmenbei der Lehrlingsausbildung zu erklären.Die Fähigkeit, wirksame politische Lösungen zu entwickeln, hängt von der Art der Zusammenarbeit zwischen Länderregierungen und Unternehmensverbänden ab, doch können Verteilungskonflikte, die immanent zu Subventionen gehören, dieKooperation zwischen Unternehmern behindern

The economic footprint of its banks helped the U.S. to have a better bank bailout than the UK

In 2008 politicians in the UK and the U.S. put in place massive bailout programs worth billions of dollars to save their ailing financial institutions. Six years on, U.S. taxpayers have made nearly $10 billion on their bailout investment, while those in the UK have lost around$14 billion. Pepper D. Culpepper writes that this difference is down to a combination of regulatory power and policy design. Regulators in the U.S. were able to require even those banks that were financially fit to accept money in exchange for stock because those banks earned the majority of their revenue locally. UK regulators on the other hand, were constrained by the vast market power of HSBC, which has only 20 percent of its business in the country, meaning that the bank was able to reject proposals that it take public money

Better political text classification using large language models

Comparative researchers in politics are deeply interested in the ways in which political discourse is conducted for different issues across a wide range of countries, and increasingly use computational methods to classify texts with low cost and high accuracy. Computer scientists are rapidly developing new deep learning models for language tasks, including supervised classification, which are not yet widely used by political scientists. These methods have the potential to improve the accuracy of current bag-of-words methods while also offering the possibility of handing non-English source texts without further work. We present such an improved method for supervised classification using a modern transformer language model, fine-tuned on a large unlabelled corpus and combined with a final softmax layer for probability estimation of category membership. We train the resulting model with hand-labeled data and validate it by analysing a large corpus of news articles on banking. The results show improved classification performance for English-language inputs compared with traditional computational approaches. We also demonstrate the ability to use the same classifier for non-English texts with good levels of classification performance. We suggest that similar methods using large deep learning models are now sufficiently mature for wider adoption by political scientists with primarily substantive, rather than methodological, interests

Deep learning models for multilingual supervised political text classification

Comparative computational research in politics is frequently based on large corpora of multilingual news or political speech. A common approach to handling the multiple-language issue is to machine translate to English before downstream modelling; this works well in many cases, but adds an extra step of introduced error. The cost of translation via the DeepL or Google Translate APIs is also high for large datasets. We present a method for supervised classification of large multilingual datasets, using a pre-trained multilingual transformer model. We fine-tune an XLM-RoBERTA textual model on a large unlabelled corpus, combine it with a final softmax layer for probability estimation of category membership, then train and validate the resulting model with hand-labeled data. Non-English texts are handled directly without producing an intermediate translated representation. We validate the method by analysing a large (N > 1M) corpus of news articles on banking written in English, French, and German. The classifications investigate aspects of the politics of post-financial crisis banking regulation, are theoretically-informed, and have complex decision boundaries. Results are compared to a conventional machine translation plus Support Vector Machine computational approach, in this case using the publicly available Opus-MT translation model running on local hardware

National interest organisations in EU policy-making

Comparative and EU interest group studies are marked by a progression towards theory-driven, large-N empirical studies in the past 20 years. With the study of national interest organisations in EU policy-making, this special issue puts centre stage a theoretically and empirically neglected topic in this research field. The individual contributions include interest group characteristics, institutional contexts as well as issue contexts as explanatory factors in their empirical analyses of multilevel interest representation. They present novel developments in the study of political alignments among interest groups and political institutions, the Europeanisation of domestic interest organisations, and the question of bias in interest group populations. Thereby, they not only contribute to the comparative study of interest groups, but also to the analysis of policy-making, multilevel governance, and political representation in the EU

Institutional Change in Industrial Relations: Coordination and Common Knowledge in Ireland, Italy and Australia. CES Working Paper, no. 127, 2005

When should we ever expect to see durable moves toward greater wage bargaining coordination? Moving to sustained coordinated wage bargaining presupposes that unions and employers can both be convinced that wage bargaining is in fact a game in which both actors prefer coordination. This can only happen when these social actors come to accept as true an idea of the economy in which their coordination through wage bargaining institutions will give them better outcomes than would bargaining through decentralized institutions. This paper argues that the process of developing common knowledge changes institutional preferences among employers. It was the development of common knowledge that changed employer preferences about the attractiveness of institutions for wage coordination in Ireland in Italy. In both cases, the development of common expectations required the emergence and joint ratification of a common set of references, in what I call common knowledge events. These events led organized employers to change their previous position about acceptable institutions of wage bargaining. This change made possible the institutionalization of coordinated wage bargaining in both countries. As demonstrated through counterfactual analysis of the Australian case, the emergence and ratification of such a common view is the necessary condition for the emergence and survival of coordinated wage bargaining institutions

The political economy of unmediated democracy : Italian austerity under Mario Monti

Published online: 14 August 2014This article explores the political economy of reform under the technocratic government of Mario Monti. Unlike the technocratic governments of the 1990s, the Monti interregnum was an experiment in unmediated democracy, in which a government is actively supported neither by political parties nor by encompassing social groups. Italian political leaders adopted unmediated democracy because of the underlying interest group conflicts in the Italian political economy. Unmediated democrats such as Monti can impose bitter medicine on a stalemated society when it is in a stage of acute crisis, but the passage of longer-term reforms requires a social coalition to support those reforms beyond the critical stage of crisis. Thus the government implemented budget cuts, but liberalisation and institutional reform stalled in the face of opposition. Italy is unlikely to be durably reformed by a government that is not anchored to society through political parties or interest groups