Bernhard Kittel

University of Vienna | UniWien · Institut für Wirtschaftssoziologie

Experiments have gained prominence in sociology in recent years. Increased interest in testing causal theories through experimental designs has ignited a debate about which experimental designs can facilitate scientific progress in sociology. This book discusses the implications of research interests for the design of experiments, identifies points...

Sociology is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences. Empirically, a key goal is to find relations between variables. This is often done using naturally occurring data, survey data, or in-depth interviews. With such data, the challenge is t...

Vignette experiments are a tool to present systematically varied descriptions of traits and conditions and eliciting to survey respondent and to elicit their beliefs and normative judgments on different combinations of these traits and conditions. Using a study on the gender pay gap and an analysis of trust problems in the purchase of used cars as...

This chapter focuses in more detail on the role of incentives in experimental sociology. Providing the right incentives in an experiment is an important precondition for drawing valid inferences. This is a predominant view in experimental economics based on the induced-value theory assuming that monetary incentives override any other human motivati...

Experiments have gained prominence in sociology in recent years. Increased interest in testing causal theories through experimental designs has ignited a debate about which experimental designs can facilitate scientific progress in sociology. This book discusses the implications of research interests for the design of experiments, identifies points...

Field experiments have a long tradition in some areas of the social and behavioral sciences and have become increasingly popular in sociology. Field experiments are staged in "natural" research settings where individuals usually interact in everyday life and regularly complete the task under investigation. The implementation in the field is the cor...

This chapter focuses on different research designs in experimental sociology. Most definitions of what constitutes an experiment converge on the idea that the experimenter "control" the phenomenon under investigation, thereby setting the conditions under which the phenomenon is observed and analyzed. Typically, the researcher exerts experimental co...

Experiments have gained prominence in sociology in recent years. Increased interest in testing causal theories through experimental designs has ignited a debate about which experimental designs can facilitate scientific progress in sociology. This book discusses the implications of research interests for the design of experiments, identifies points...

Experimental practices developed in different scientific disciplines following different historical trajectories. Thus, standard experimental procedures differ starkly between disciplines. One of the most controversial issues is the use of deception as a methodological device. Psychologists do not conduct a study involving deception unless they hav...

Experiments have gained prominence in sociology in recent years. Increased interest in testing causal theories through experimental designs has ignited a debate about which experimental designs can facilitate scientific progress in sociology. This book discusses the implications of research interests for the design of experiments, identifies points...

The first sociological experiments have been conducted in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, accompanied by a fierce debate about the possibilities and limits of the approach, which anticipated many of the critiques currently raised against the method. The chapter traces the development of experimental research in sociology from...

Experiments have gained prominence in sociology in recent years. Increased interest in testing causal theories through experimental designs has ignited a debate about which experimental designs can facilitate scientific progress in sociology. This book discusses the implications of research interests for the design of experiments, identifies points...

The discipline of sociology focuses on interactions and group processes from the perspective of emergent phenomena at the social level. Concepts like social embedding, norms, group-level motivation, or status hierarchies can only be defined and conceptualized in contexts in which individuals are involved in social interaction. Such concepts share t...

This chapter addresses the often-misunderstood concept of validity. Much of the methodological discussion around sociological experiments is framed in terms of internal and external validity. The standard view is that the more we ensure that the experimental treatment is isolated from potential confounds (internal validity), the more unlikely it is...

Experiments have gained prominence in sociology in recent years. Increased interest in testing causal theories through experimental designs has ignited a debate about which experimental designs can facilitate scientific progress in sociology. This book discusses the implications of research interests for the design of experiments, identifies points...

Laboratory experiments are the type of study that most people have in mind when talking about experiments. In this chapter, we first discuss the strengths of laboratory experiments, which offer the highest degree of experimental control as compared to other types of experiments. Single factors can be manipulated according to the requirements of the...

Vignette experiments are vignettes are brief descriptions of social objects including a list of varying characteristics, on the basis of which survey respondents state their evaluations or judgments. The respondents’ evaluations typically concern positive beliefs, normative judgments, or their own intentions or actions. Using a study on the gender...

Societies are confronted with the dilemma that need satisfaction requires transparent individual needs. We study the effect of information about others’ needs on the distribution of a joint endowment in a three-player network exchange game in a laboratory experiment. Need levels are exogenously given and either transparent (known to all three netwo...

The presumption underlying the scientific engagement with need-based justice is that neither the principle of equity nor the principle of equality safeguards a distribution that ensures the preservation of human dignity through the satisfaction of needs as a fundamental proviso of human sociality. In this introductory chapter, we first show that in...

The satisfaction of needs depends on the willingness of others to forgo own payoffs to the benefit of the claimant. Given the heterogeneity and subjectivity of individual needs, it is difficult to assess whether a need claim is based on a true lack of resources or whether the claimant misrepresents the need. Hence, the recognition of a need claim b...

This chapter aggregates the results of the disciplinary and mostly experimental sub-projects of the research group “Need-Based Justice and Distribution Procedures” into an empirically informed normative theory of need-based justice. Its elements include a concept of need, the identification of need, the recognition of need, and the consequences of...

Die Arbeitseinstellungen junger Menschen werden im medialen Diskurs häufig pauschalisiert und mit fehlender Leistungsbereit- schaft sowie dem Wunsch nach mehr Freizeit verknüpft. Es wird ein Generationenkonflikt proklamiert und eine vermeintliche Unverein- barkeit zwischen Arbeitgeber- und Arbeitnehmer:innen skizziert. Doch kann ein solcher generat...

We replicate the study ‘Offers Beyond the Negotiating Dyad’ (Schwaninger et al., Social Science Research 79:258–271, 2019) with two different student samples located in Tianjin (China) and Kyoto (Japan) to examine the robustness of the original results. Extending a classical Social Exchange experiment to show the influence of social value orientati...

Young people’s early‐career unemployment experience has been found to have long‐lasting effects, resulting in lower earnings even decades later. However, while this so‐called “scarring effect” is well established, there is still little knowledge about the mechanisms through which it comes about. We take a closer look at the period that produces the...

Using data from a survey of refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, and Iraq in Vienna, Austria, most of whom arrived in 2015, we employ path analysis to study the effects of various integration resources on life satisfaction. In addition, we consider sociodemographic effects. We find that refugees who scored higher on host-country-specific languag...

A strategy frequently adopted to contain the COVID-19 pandemic involves three non-pharmaceutical interventions that depend on high levels of compliance in society: maintaining physical distance from others, minimizing social contacts, and wearing a face mask. These measures require substantial changes in established practices of social interaction,...

Refugee women from the Near and Middle East face specific challenges when entering the Austrian labour market. Particularly gender-based factors, including care and reproductive work, exert pressure on these women and constitute major hurdles for successful entry into employment in Austria. Based on nine qualitative interviews with refugee women wh...

Jobseekers, especially young people with little experience on the job market, face several challenges. They need to know which jobs are suited for them, where to find them, how to apply, and they need resilience in the face of repeated rejections. Previous research has shown that receiving information and reflecting on how to search for a job enhan...

From a traditional rational choice perspective, coalitions are inherently unstable if collective decisions involve distributional conflicts. Empirically, however, many coalitions and distribution decisions seem rather stable. While traditional explanations for the empirical stability of coalitions refer to institutions, more recent theoretical deve...

Die Zahl der Impfungen und die Impfbereitschaft in Österreich sind im Zeitraum von Jänner bis April 2021 kontinuierlich angestiegen. Weiterhin zeigt sich eine überwiegende Ablehnung einer allgemeinen Impfpflicht sowie eine breite Zustimmung, den Impfstoff gratis zur Verfügung zur Verfügung zu stellen. Gerade beim Impfstoff von AstraZeneca gibt es w...

Ethnic and gendered employment gaps are mainly explained by individual characteristics, while less attention is paid to occupational structures. Drawing on administrative data, this article analyses the impact of occupational characteristics on top of individual attributes in the urban labour market of Vienna. Both set of variables can explain obse...

We investigate how unemployment and short-time working during and after the Covid-19 lockdown affected mental health. We depart from a theory of latent deprivation to examine the nexus between employment trajectories and psychological well-being between the end of March 2020 and mid-July 2020 in Austria. Data for the analyses has been collected by...

Until a vaccine becomes available, a frequently adopted strategy to contain the COVID-19 pandemic involves three non-pharmaceutical interventions that crucially depend on high adherence in society: maintaining physical distance from others, minimizing social contacts, and wearing face masks. These measures require substantial changes in established...

Systematic and openly accessible data are vital to the scientific understanding of the social, political, and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article introduces the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP), which has generated a unique, publicly available data set from late March 2020 onwards. ACPP has been designed to capture the...

To keep up job search motivation and maintain re-employment chances, it is important that unemployed individuals do not stop believing in their ability to (re)gain satisfying employment. This article examines whether further education during unemployment has a positive effect on perceived employability (i.e. the subjective assessment of one’s chanc...

This chapter analyses the structural conditions and behavioral consequences of individual justice attitudes, values, and beliefs. The first part develops a sociological concept of need-based justice. The forms of social relations characteristic of different modes of societal integration refer to context-specific principles of justice that dominate...

Traditional survey research faces declining response rates due to changing cultural habits and technological developments. Researchers have developed novel approaches to increase respondents’ likelihood of participating in web surveys. However, we lack information about whether these methods indeed increase response rates and, if so, whether they b...

Giving more to those who need more has an intuitive appeal for determining the just allocation of resources. The need principle is considered one of the three major principles of distributive justice. In contrast to equality or equity, however, evidence on the adherence to the needs principle rests mainly on stated instead of revealed preferences....

This book explores the foundations and potential of a theory of need-based distributive justice, supported by experimental evidence. The core idea is that need-based distributive justice may have some legitimatory advantages over other important principles of distribution, like equality and equity, and therefore involves less dispute over the distr...

Young adults’ work values evolve as they are socialized into education and work. We study a core concept of work values, work centrality, and distinguish between an extrinsic dimension, that is, the relative importance of work; and an intrinsic dimension, that is, nonfinancial employment commitment. Using data collected by the CUPESSE project on tw...

We investigate whether fair behavior in negotiations depends on the frame given by an actor to a situation. To test this proposition, we study secondary data from bargaining experiments. In the experiments, subjects were asked what they thought the situation was about. We compare this perception with their behavior in the negotiations. The results...

Promoting entrepreneurship has become an important policy strategy in Europe in the hope to stimulate the crisis-shaken economy. In this paper, we caution against undue expectations. Using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor for 17 European countries, we find that a considerable proportion of the new entrepreneurs have started a business...

Die Studie untersucht den Zusammenhang zwischen Sprachverwendung, sozialer Positionierung und kollektiver Identitätsbildung in Weißrussland zwischen dem Weißrussischen, Russischen und der weißrussisch-russisch gemischten Rede (Trasjanka). Die soziodemographische und ökonomische Struktur der drei „Kodes“ wird mittels Umfrage und Interviews bei drei...

Survey response rates are especially low among young people, those with low levels of formal education and those who are not well integrated into society. These effects are amplified in panel studies, where similar factors influence the propensity of continued participation in survey waves. As a result, conducting a panel study on young, unemployed...

After online first publication of the article, it was noticed that the family name of author Panos Tsakloglou was erroneously misspelt as Tsakoglou.

Existing datasets provided by statistical agencies (e.g. Eurostat) show that the economic and financial crisis that unfolded in 2008 significantly impacted the lives and livelihoods of young people across Europe. Taking these official statistics as a starting point, the collaborative research project “Cultural Pathways to Economic Self-Sufficiency...

This study addresses the conditions for the participation in protest activities. Starting from social psychological value expectancy theory and the theory of collective action, we study the effects of political discontent, perceived political influence (efficacy), norms to participate, identity, and membership in protest encouraging networks (“soci...

The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic job preferences is a core aspect of work values. However, self-reported intrinsic and extrinsic orientations potentially exhibit acquiescence bias. Despite the fact that many individuals score high on both intrinsic and extrinsic items at the same time, there is an ongoing debate whether it is possibl...

The paper reports the results of a laboratory experiment assessing the impact of social position (endowment) and power (structurally advantaged or disadvantaged network positions) on redistributive decisions, which involve a classical efficiency-equality trade-off. The experiment involves three decision conditions: veil of ignorance, informed dicta...

Although online surveys are becoming more and more prominent, the quality of the resulting data is still contested. One potential caveat of web surveys is the absence of an interviewer who controls the interview situation, can motivate respondents and prevent them from satisficing, i.e. answering questions with minimal cognitive effort. While there...

We study the effect of competition on income distribution by means of a two-stage experiment. Heterogeneous endowments are earned in a contest, followed by a surplus-sharing task. The experimental test confirms our initial hypothesis that the existence of a middle class is as effective as institutional hurdles in limiting the power of the less able...

Die experimentelle Methode in der Policy-Forschung beruht auf den Prinzipien der Isolation des zentralen Zusammenhangs von Drittvariablen und der Identifikation durch systematische Variation des Untersuchungsdesign. Ihr Vorteil liegt vor allem in der Gültigkeit des Rückschluss von Beobachtung auf kausale Faktoren (interne Validität), während ein An...

Eine große Anzahl von Labor-Experimenten in Ökonomie, Politikwissenschaft und Soziologie beschäftigt sich nicht mehr nur mit Individualverhalten, sondern mit dem (sozialen) Verhalten von Gruppen in Entscheidungssituationen. Hierbei zeigt sich immer wieder, dass, entgegen einfacher spieltheoretischer Annahmen, eben diese individuelle oder kollektive...

In the ‘Golden Age’ of the modern state, working for the state was a special kind of employment that came with exceptional rights, obligations and remuneration schemes. Employment conditions of public employees, associated with the Weberian bureaucratic ideal, entailed guaranteed lifetime employment, defined pay scales based on formal education and...

In the introduction and in Chapter 2, we have discussed the shift from the traditional paradigm of the public employee as a civil servant to an emerging paradigm of the public employee as a provider of public services. In this vein, our core research question is: To what extent have European countries preserved a distinct status of public employees...

From an economic perspective, the network-based energy sector has traditionally been conceived of as a natural monopoly (Cameron 2007, pp. 21ff.). From a political perspective, after the Second World War, most OECD countries developed specific concepts of gas and electricity as public services that are essential for the well-being of society and th...

As noted earlier, scholarly debates agree that during the last decades, public administration regimes have undergone substantial change. The question of whether and how these changes have affected public employment is at the core of this study, assuming that public employment in the past was characterized by distinct features historically enshrined...

Waste collection is one of the long-established core public services provided at the local level. In many urban areas, public waste collection was established in the mid-19th century with the main aim of securing public health in an era of rapid urbanization and industrialization (Hafkamp 2002; Hemmer et al. 2003). Until the 1970s, municipal respon...

According to most categorizations in macro-comparative political economy and public administration, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, and Germany represent very different regimes. They all have established very specific variants of the territorial state securing the rule of law, upholding democracy, and intervening in society and economy, a count...

The societal role of the police is to prevent and fight crime, to maintain order, and to deliver a variety of related services to communities. Notwithstanding social and cultural differences (Hills 2009), the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force and its connection with what is called ‘policing a social order’ are societally accepted elem...

The term public employment refers to a large and heterogeneous group of employees who are directly or indirectly involved in the production and provision of publicly financed goods and services. This conceptual imprecision has made the term popular in political debates, but it limits its usefulness in analytical and scientific discourses. Thus, bef...

We start the first section by briefly summarizing important research traditions from which we draw insights for our own analysis of public employment regimes. The first subsection situates classifications of public employment regimes within the wider context of welfare regimes, capitalist systems, and public administration regimes. We then discuss...

The overview of quantitative developments and ‘milestone’ events in Chapter 4 has suggested that the general picture of public sector employment is one of rather rigid structures, slow processes, and contradictory trends. This conclusion, however, is the result of limited and incomplete aggregate-level data, which precludes a closer look into the p...

Der Beitrag untersucht, wie der Effekt von Korruption auf das politische Vertrauen der Bevölkerung in europäischen Staaten variiert. Ausgehend von der Annahme, dass Menschen, die in Staaten mit einer geringeren Demokratiequalität sozialisiert wurden, geringere Erwartungen an die Einhaltung demokratischer Prinzipien haben, argumentieren wir, dass di...

Der Staat als Arbeitgeber hat in den letzten Jahren zunehmend seine in der ‚goldenen Ära des Wohlfahrtsstaates‘ (etwa 1960-1980) entwickelte Rolle als vorbildlicher Arbeitgeber aufgegeben. Im Zuge effizienzorientierter Re-Regulierung und politischer Dezentralisierung nähern sich die Arbeits- und Beschäftigungsbedingungen im deutschen öffentlichen S...

Der vorliegende Band umfasst eine große Bandbreite theoretischer Beiträge und empirischer Anwendungen räumlicher Modelle auf dem Gebiet der Politikwissenschaft. Räumliche Modelle existieren in diesem Fachgebiet in unterschiedlicher Form und verschiedenen Abstraktionsstufen. Häufig werden Politikräume konstruiert, um die Positionen von Wählern, Part...

We investigate communication and costly voting in multiparty election experiments. Turnout is consistently lower in across electorate communication as compared to restricted communication within parties. Voters are more likely to choose the strategic voting option at the outset in restricted communication, but more likely to start deliberation by s...

In this study we examine the impact of communication networks on decision making in 5 person committees. Within the framework of a group dictator game the committees must reach a majority vote for one collective transfer. We focus on the effect of the group structure on the collective decisions, and explore the effect of incomplete and asymmetric i...

We introduce a three-person redistribution game with preplay communication. Three focal points of the game are derived from different equity standards and Rawls' difference principle. An experimental test confirms our hypothesis that equity in terms of effort-proportionality is not pursued at the group level. Only a large 'middle class' and/or inst...

Although having been practised in the Social Sciences for decades, it was only in recent years that process tracing has gained prominence in methodological debates in political science. In spite of its popularity, however, there has been little success in formalising its methodology, defining its standards, and identifying its range of applicabilit...

The median of independent judgments usually outperforms most individual estimates of vaguely known facts. This wisdom-of-crowd phenomenon emerges from largely dispersed individual estimates whose aggregate is typically less biased than the average individual. Since democracy is to aggregate people's diverse preferences and judgments, it is crucial...

Der Aufsatz befasst sich mit der Übertragung eines Verfahrens der Quantitativen Inhaltsanalyse, das für die Untersuchung ideologischer Texte entwickelt wurde und hier auf die Diskussion seitens der Arbeitgeber- und Arbeitnehmervertretung zum Reformprozess des öffentlichen Dienstes in Deutschland angewendet wird. Es werden theoretische Argumente vor...

Voting and committee deciscions can be considered two core elements of the democratic process. By voting, the members of a constituency determine whom they entrust as representatives with the right to decide on their behalf. By voting, the members of a committee decide which course of action they will take collectively. Hence, voting determined bot...

After a long incubating phase, experimental political science has experienced a rapid growth from the mid-1990s onwards and has now been established as a respected approach to research in the discipline (Druckman et al., 2006; McDermott, 2002). Recently, the state of the art has been summarized and organized in handbooks covering laboratory experim...

We conclude this volume by taking up a few recurrent themes that were advanced by the chapters. In the first section, we trace the aims that the chapter authors associate with experimental work. In the second section, we discuss the limitations of experimental work that are noted in the chapters. The third section summarizes the chapter authors’ re...

The problems of collective decision making and voting – as one of the models of aggregating individual to collective preferences – belong to the defining research questions of political science. In their early overview of experimental political science, Kinder and Palfrey highlight the flexibility of the experimental method to study different level...

Weißrussische Historiker_innen stehen vor dem Dilemma, dass ihr Land im Laufe seiner Entwicklung immer Bestandteil übergeordneter Herrschaftsverbände war. Während die Nationalhistoriker eine kulturelle Verortung im Westen anstreben und den Mythos eines »Goldenen Mittelalters« pflegen, betreiben die Hofhistoriker nach wie vor eine russophile Geschic...

Der Artikel untersucht das Sprachverhalten in der bilingualen Gesellschaft von Belarus. Dazu werden Sprachwahlen in Abhängigkeit von individuellen Werthaltungen betrachtet, wobei deren Entstehung aus makro- und mikrosoziologischer Perspektive plausibel gemacht wird. Der theoretische Zugang untersucht zum einen Sprachverhalten als Folge sprachpoliti...

This article reports findings from a survey on language usage in Belarus, which encompasses bilingual Belarusian and Russian. First, the distribution of language usage is discussed. Then the dependency of language usage on some sociocultural conditions is explored. Finally, the changes in language usage over three generations are discussed. We find...

This article examines the relationship between public administration regulation and market economy models in 20 OECD countries. Building on Pollitt and Bouckaert's (2004) administrative dimension, we employ explorative statistical analysis to identify three distinct public administration regimes: an Anglo-American, a French/German and a Scandinavia...

This article addresses three largely unsolved problems in theory and research on political protest. The first problem concerns feedback effects. The common assumption is that protest is determined by various factors and does not influence its determinants. We propose and test hypotheses about feedback effects of protest on its determinants. The sec...

Der Aufsatz befasst sich mit einer Bestandsaufnahme der Methodenanwendung in der deutschen Politikwissenschaft. Auf der Grundlage einer Auswertung der Aufsätze in vier deutschen politikwissenschaftlichen Fachzeitschriften wird aufgezeigt, dass nur eine Minderheit explizit theoriegeleitet-empirische Forschung betreibt. Ein Großteil der Publikationen...

Der Beitrag untersucht den Zusammenhang zwischen öffentlicher Beschäftigung und der Ausprägung des Markwirtschaftmodells in 21 OECD-Staaten. Auf Basis der Ergebnisse einer multiplen Korrespondenzanalyse können drei distinkte Regime öffentlicher Beschäftigung identifiziert werden; ein liberales, ein gemischtes und ein legalistisches. Die Regimebildu...