Managing Refugee Protection Crises: Policy Lessons from Economics and Political Science

We review and interpret research on the economic and political effects of receiving asylum seekers and refugees in developed countries, with a particular focus on the 2015 European refugee protection crisis and its aftermath. In the first part of the paper, we examine the consequences of receiving asylum seekers and refugees and identify two main findings. First, the reception of refugees is unlikely to generate large direct economic effects. Both labor market and fiscal consequences for host countries are likely to be relatively modest. Second, however, the broader political processes accompanying the reception and integration of refugees may give rise to indirect yet larger economic effects. Specifically, a growing body of work suggests that the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees can fuel the rise of anti-immigrant populist parties, which may lead to the adoption of economically and politically isolationist policies. Yet, these political effects are not inevitable and occur only under certain conditions. In the second part of the paper, we discuss the conditions under which these effects are less likely to occur. We argue that refugees’ effective integration along relevant linguistic, economic, and legal dimensions, an allocation of asylum seekers that is perceived as ‘fair’ by the host society, and meaningful contact between locals and newly arrived refugees have the potential to mitigate the political and indirect economic risks

Managing Refugee Protection Crises: Policy Lessons from Economics and Political Science

We review and interpret research on the economic and political effects of receiving asylum seekers and refugees in developed countries, with a particular focus on the 2015 European refugee protection crisis and its aftermath. In the first part of the paper, we examine the consequences of receiving asylum seekers and refugees and identify two main findings. First, the reception of refugees is unlikely to generate large direct economic effects. Both labor market and fiscal consequences for host countries are likely to be relatively modest. Second, however, the broader political processes accompanying the reception and integration of refugees may give rise to indirect yet larger economic effects. Specifically, a growing body of work suggests that the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees can fuel the rise of anti-immigrant populist parties, which may lead to the adoption of economically and politically isolationist policies. Yet, these political effects are not inevitable and occur only under certain conditions. In the second part of the paper, we discuss the conditions under which these effects are less likely to occur. We argue that refugees’ effective integration along relevant linguistic, economic, and legal dimensions, an allocation of asylum seekers that is perceived as ‘fair’ by the host society, and meaningful contact between locals and newly arrived refugees have the potential to mitigate the political and indirect economic risks

Religious reasons in the public sphere: an empirical study of religious actors' argumentative patterns in Swiss direct democratic campaigns

The ‘going public' of religious actors is taking central stage both in religious studies and political philosophy. But this ‘going public' of religious actors is controversial. The debate revolves around the question of whether religious actors must frame their religious convictions in terms of secular reasons or whether they should be allowed to introduce religiously grounded beliefs into public political argument without constraints. Despite vigorous and ongoing debate, there is little systematic and empirical research on this question. This article focuses on the public statements of religious actors in the context of Swiss direct democratic votes on abortion and immigration. Our empirical findings reveal an interesting gap: while many political philosophers and religious thinkers have moved to a position where religious actors can - and even should - openly employ religious arguments, the practice of religious actors in Switzerland is different. The larger denominations of Catholics and Protestants especially have a tendency to use a great amount of secular vocabulary. In addition, our findings also reveal that the use of religious or secular reasons varies considerably according to different issues, different media types (religious vs. secular press), different religious traditions, different alliance structures, and different media genres, while there is no clear time tren

Translations of new public management: a decentred approach to school governance in four OECD countries

Despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of New Public Management (NPM) that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule. Adopting a ‘decentred approach’ to governance (Bevir, M. 2010. “Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance.” European Journal of Social Theory 13 (4): 423–441), this paper compares the development of NPM in four OECD countries: Australia, England, Spain, and Switzerland. A focus of the paper is how certain policy instruments are created and sustained within highly differentiated geo-political settings and through different multi-scalar actors and authorities yet modified to reflect established traditions and practices

Sabine Bollig / Michael-Sebastian Honig / Sascha Neumann / Claudia Seele (Hrsg.): MultiPluriTrans in Educational Ethnography. Approaching the Multimodality, Plurality and Translocality of Educational Realities. Bielefeld: transcript 2015 (318 S.) [Rezension]

Rezension von: Sabine Bollig / Michael-Sebastian Honig / Sascha Neumann / Claudia Seele (Hrsg.): MultiPluriTrans in Educational Ethnography. Approaching the Multimodality, Plurality and Translocality of Educational Realities. Bielefeld: transcript 2015 (318 S.; ISBN 978-3-8376-2772-5; 34,99 EUR)

Inferring individual preferences from group decisions: judicial preference variation and aggregation in asylum appeals

While many democracies nominate partisan judges, empirical research has struggled to assess whether such judges adhere to Aristotle’s maxim that like cases should be treated alike. One fundamental problem hindering empirical research is that many courts only report decisions of panels, not the opinions of individual judges. We propose a methodology that tests which of several decision-theoretic models of group decision-making best fit the panel decisions, infers judges’ individual preferences, and quantifies the proportion of cases that would be decided differently if the courts’ consensus were consistently applied (an inconsistency rate). Applying this methodology to the Swiss asylum appeal process, where cases are assigned conditionally at random and have a common, unidimensional structure, we find a persistent inconsistency rate of about 5% due to variation in decision-making between judges, and that judges’ estimated preferences are correlated with party membership in expected ways

Bedrängte lokale Schulbehörden

Bei aller Aufregung über HarmoS, Lehrplan21 und Pisa-Studie: Oft vergessen wird die Ebene der Gemeinden und Schulen, wo die Reformen umgesetzt und Schulqualität täglich geschaffen werden muss. Dabei sind gerade auf lokaler Ebene grosse Umwälzungen im Gange, welche grundlegende Fragen zur demokratischen Verankerung der Volksschule aufwerfen