Esther Ademmer’s research while affiliated with Kiel Institute for the World Economy and other places

This article addresses how both external democratic and non-democratic actors impact the persistence of non-democratic regimes in third countries. We focus on asymmetrical interdependences and advance the literature on the role of transnational flows by highlighting under which conditions and based on which mechanisms interdependences contribute to the persistence of non-democratic regimes. We investigate if the dominant mechanisms emerging from interdependences vary with the type of interdependence (vulnerability or sensitivity). We draw on evidence from empirical studies of Armenia, Belarus and Azerbaijan and their interdependences with Russia and the EU in the period of 2005–2015.

This article provides the first-ever analysis of the structure of public preferences for asylum and refugee policy, a highly politicized policy area that has attracted little scholarly attention to date. We first conceptualise the core dimensions of asylum and refugee policy and then conduct an original conjoint experiment with 12,000 respondents across eight European countries to examine how different policy designs impact on public support. Our results demonstrate that Europeans are generally committed to policies that provide protection to asylum-seekers and refugees but this commitment tends to be contingent upon policy features which allow for a means of control, namely through the implementation of limits or conditions. We find this pattern of preferences to be remarkably similar in both the old and more recent EU Member States that we surveyed. Our results imply that some aspects of the current model of the international refugee system are misaligned with the more control-based model that Europeans would prefer. We conclude by discussing our findings in the context of existing research and ongoing political debates about policy reforms.

This policy brief shows that there is no consensus across partisan groups in Germany when it comes to ODA as a tool to tackle refugee inflows. Rather, attitudes toward refugees predict whether respondents consider development aid an effective tool for addressing migration issues or not. We concluded that relying on development aid per se as a tool to address immigration issues is likely to prove ineffective in bridging in the divides in the German population that have opened during the European ‘refugee crisis.’

This article advances our understanding of differences in hybrid stability by going beyond existing regime typologies that separate the study of political institutions from the study of economic institutions. It combines the work of Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast (NWW) on varieties of social orders with the literature on political and economic regime typologies and dynamics to understand hybrid regimes as Limited Access Orders (LAOs) that differ in the way dominant elites limit access to political and economic resources. Based on a measurement of political and economic access applied to seven post‐Soviet states, the article identifies four types of LAOs. Challenging NWW's claim, it shows that hybrid regimes can combine different degrees of political and economic access to sustain stability. Our typology allows to form theoretical expectations about the kinds of political and/or economic changes that will move different types of LAOs toward more openness or closure.

The widespread view that the refugee crisis has sparked unprecedented levels of European Union politicisation has rarely been backed by systematic empirical evidence. We investigate this claim using a novel dataset of several thousand user comments posted below articles of German regional media outlets on Facebook. Despite considerable European Union authority in the policy area, extensive media coverage of the crisis and the rise of a populist party in Germany, our results suggest that the politicisation of Europe remains low among social media users, especially when compared to national and subnational levels of governance. When talking about Europe, users hardly refer to European Union institutions or policies. Instead, other member states and notions of the geographic or cultural space dominate the debate.

This paper investigates whether different capitalist varieties in Central and Eastern Europe have different records of post-accession compliance. Drawing on an explorative cluster analysis of 25 EU member states and additional case study evidence, its results suggest that there are two broader clusters of Central and East European countries, which are associated with different Varieties of Capitalism and privilege certain explanatory factors for (non-) compliance over others: I identify a cluster comprising the Baltic States and Slovakia that leans toward a liberal market economy type. I argue that post-accession compliance processes in this cluster are dominated by market-based modes of coordination, in which government ideologies and effectiveness gain greater explanatory power. The second cluster is associated with coordinated market economies marked by a more inclusive political process that privileges the interplay of preferences of various state and non-state actors to explain compliance after EU accession.

This paper reconsiders the policy trilemma in an open economy by incorporating political economy concerns. We argue that the impact of government ideology on monetary independence, exchange rate stability, and capital flow restrictions should be analyzed in the broader context of restrictions imposed by the impossible trinity instead of the usual single-dimensional constraints. Employing a de facto measurement of these restrictions for a sample of 111 countries from 1980 to 2010, we show that the impact of government ideology on a country's position in this trilemma is highly context dependent: We find that the impact of partisan preferences on exchange rate stability and monetary independence varies between developed and developing countries. We also show that the impact of government ideology on these two trilemma components is contingent on the stance of the respective economy's business cycle. Left-leaning governments seem to favor exchange rate stability over monetary independence in case of a negative output gap; suggesting a reversal of their commonly assumed partisan preferences in economically tight times.

Russia's impact on EU policy transfer to the post-Soviet space has not been as negative as often perceived. EU policies have traveled to countries and issue areas, in which the dependence on Russia is high and Russian foreign policy is increasingly assertive. This book explores Russia's impact on the transfer of EU policies in the area of Justice, Liberty, and Security and energy policy - two policy areas in which countries in the EU's Eastern neighborhood are traditionally strongly bound to Russia. Focusing especially on Armenia and Georgia, it examines whether it is the structural condition of interdependence, the various institutional ties and similarities of neighboring countries with the EU and Russia, or their concrete foreign policy actions that have the greatest impact on domestic policy change in the region. The book also investigates how important these factors are in relation to domestic ones. It identifies conditions under which different degrees of EU policy transfer occur and the circumstances under which Russia exerts either supportive or constraining effects on this process. This book will be of key interest to students and scholars of EU and European politics, international relations and comparative politics.