From bureaucratic capacity to legislation: how ministerial resources shape governments’ policy-making capabilities

How does ministries’ capacity to draft legislation affect the political output of modern governments? This article combines a novel dataset describing the capacity of ministerial bureaucracies to attend to about 250 distinct policy issues with content-coded data on government legislation. The sample consists of Danish, Dutch and German governments, jointly spanning the time from 1995 to 2013. The analysis reveals three main findings: firstly, issue-specific bureaucratic capacity unconditionally increases governments’ legislative activity; secondly, legislative activity is stifled if bureaucratic capacity is spread across different ministries; thirdly, against theoretical expectations the productive effect of bureaucratic capacity is not positively related to governments’ issue salience. The results indicate that the design and resources of ministerial portfolios affect policy making in western governments

Can students be encouraged to read? Experimental evidence from a large lecture

One of the structural problems of introductory lectures is that students’ learning progress is primarily assessed by taking a final exam. Weekly preparation and reading are driven only by self-motivation. Can a student’s decision to complete her weekly assignments be influenced by a simple reminder? In a pre-registered experimental design, we test if personalised reminders from the instructor delivered via text messages contribute to learning outcomes. We assess formative learning via regular quizzes at the beginning of each class, and summative learning via grades in a final exam. We do not find statistically significant differences in learning outcomes, and discuss how design features potentially drive this result. In the conclusion, we stress the importance of experimental design in assessing innovative and new learning techniques

Punctuated Equilibrium and the Comparative Study of Policy Agendas

Agenda-setting theory has a long tradition within policy studies but took a major leap forward with the work of Baumgartner and Jones and their formulation of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET). Since then, an extensive literature has developed, both evaluating the notion of punctuated equilibria from a comparative perspective and providing ideas for a broader theoretical development on political processes. The original formulation of the theory was based on the US political system, whose institutional elements make it a likely case to observe the type of political processes that PET highlights. Subsequent comparative studies have demonstrated that the theory’s idea is of general relevance in two regards. First, factors, such as issue characteristics, operate similarly across political systems. Second, political institutions shape agenda-setting processes. This paper expands on the political institutional features that are particularly important when applying PET to a West European context. We illustrate the interplay of these institutional characteristics with the political process regarding the German debate on digitalization

Content Moderation As a Political Issue: The Twitter Discourse Around Trump's Ban

Content moderation — the regulation of the material that users create and disseminate online — is an important activity for all social media platforms. While routine, this practice raises significant questions linked to democratic accountability and civil liberties. Following the decision of many platforms to ban Donald J. Trump in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, content moderation has increasingly become a politically contested issue. This paper studies that process with a focus on the public discourse on Twitter. The analysis includes over 9 million tweets and retweets posted by over 3 million unique users between January 2020 and April 2021. First, the salience of content moderation was driven by left-leaning users, and "Section 230" was the most important topic across the ideological spectrum. Second, stance towards Section 230 was relatively volatile and increasingly polarized. These findings highlight relevant elements of the ongoing process of political contestation surrounding this issue, and provide a descriptive foundation to understand the politics of content moderation

Keeping tabs through collaboration? Sharing ministerial responsibility in coalition governments

Moving past the conventional focus on ministerial portfolios, this paper investigates how coalition governments allocate and share ministerial responsibility for individual policy issues. Sharing responsibility induces coalescing parties to collaborate on policy issues, which addresses the problem of ministerial autonomy. Consequently, I argue that incumbent parties in coalition governments share ministerial responsibility for contentious and salient policy issues. This claim is corroborated based on a newly elicited dataset of over 30,000 ministerial policy responsibilities from Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. The findings have important implications for scholarship on coalition governments, as they demonstrate that incumbent parties can use the design of ministerial portfolios itself to insulate a coalition compromise from partisan deviations

Ministerial policy dominance in parliamentary democracies

To what extent do ministries dominate a particular policy domain? The policy dictator model and many principle‐agent models of governmental control that followed suit assume that governments create ministries with clear and exclusive policy responsibilities. We test this assertion using data from parliamentary bills from Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. For each bill, we observe its substantial policy content and the responsible ministry. The data show that bills on similar issues regularly are drafted by different ministries in parliamentary democracies. About 40 per cent of policy issues cannot be ascribed to one dominant ministry. The regularities elucidate that ministerial division of labour within governments is considerably more complex than commonly assumed. The variegated level of ministerial dominance across policy domains calls for a new research agenda on how governments assign responsibility for legislative action in parliamentary democracies

Tool for Online Discussions (TOD): A New Experimental Research Platform to Examine Live User Interactions on Social Media

This letter introduces the Tool for Online Discussions (TOD), a mock social media platform that advances the capabilities of experimental research tools by offering real-time, dynamic participant interaction—a feature currently absent in most other mock platforms. TOD’s distinctive attribute lies in its live interaction design and the integration of other live elements like pop-ups, which closely mimics the interactive nature of genuine social media, moving beyond the mostly static interfaces of current research tools. The platform is evaluated through a preregistered experiment with 589 participants, probing the effects of content moderation on user perceptions. TOD’s deployment reveals enhanced possibilities for investigating the mechanisms of social media dynamics, positioning it as an invaluable resource for researchers needing a more immersive, controlled and interactive environment to study online social behaviors

Punctuated Equilibrium und die vergleichende Studie politischer Agenden : Die Entwicklung von Digitalisierungspolitik in Deutschland

Agenda-setting theory has a long tradition within policy studies but took a major leap forward with the work of Baumgartner and Jones and their formulation of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET). Since then, an extensive literature has developed, both evaluating the notion of punctuated equilibria from a comparative perspective and providing ideas for a broader theoretical development on political processes. The original formulation of the theory was based on the US political system, whose institutional elements make it a likely case to observe the type of political processes that PET highlights. Subsequent comparative studies have demonstrated that the theory’s idea is of general relevance in two regards. First, factors, such as issue characteristics, operate similarly across political systems. Second, political institutions shape agenda-setting processes. This paper expands on the political institutional features that are particularly important when applying PET to a West European context. We illustrate the interplay of these institutional characteristics with the political process regarding the German debate on digitalization.publishe