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Multiple crises in the EU have sparked a renaissance of the concept of solidarity. However, discursive approaches to solidarity and the public understanding of solidarity have hardly received scholarly attention. Empirical research on solidarity is rather centered on welfare institutions as well as on individual attitudes and behavior. To shed new light on solidarity in public discourse, we investigate in which policy fields the term is most often used, which actors refer to it and how different types of solidarity are covered in the German public discourse. We investigate the coverage of solidarity in four German newspapers (Die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Tageszeitung) from 2008 to 2017. By deploying the discourse network methodology with 306 claims in 230 news articles, we analyze the co-occurrence of actors and issues over time. Our results indicate a varying set of issues in which solidarity occurs, a rather stable actor visibility, across time and a context-dependent use of different types of solidarity. Government actors, civil society actors as well as citizens drive the solidarity discourse showing that institutional as well as non-institutional actors make use of solidarity in their public actions regarding political protest, financial issues and migration. The study provides novel insights into the interdependence of actor and issue visibility and sheds new light on solidarity in media discourses.

The implementation of financial institutions such as the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) in light of the European debt crisis has sparked a hitherto unknown redistribution of financial resources among EU member states without guarantees that this debt will be repaid. Thus, the concept of European solidarity has gained momentum during the crisis. This chapter unpacks the political, legal and social implications of the ESM and sheds light on the related challenges for European solidarity on the macro and the micro-level.

This chapter thoroughly reviews the existing theoretical and empirical literature on (European) solidarity and derives a norm-based concept of individual European solidarity that distinguishes between (1) different levels (macro & micro), (2) different dimensions (attitudinal & behavioural) and (3) different types (collective good situations, sharing situations, need situations, loyalty situations). Moreover, the chapter draws upon empirical evidence to identify pivotal drivers of individual European solidarity, most notably European identity.

Algorithmic decision-making (ADM) is becoming increasingly important in all areas of social life. In higher education, machine-learning systems have manifold uses because they can efficiently process large amounts of student data and use these data to arrive at effective decisions. Despite the potential upsides of ADM systems, fairness concerns are gaining momentum in academic and public discourses. The criticism largely focuses on the disparate effects of ADM. That is, algorithms may not serve as objective and fair decision-makers but, rather, reproduce biases existing within the respective training data. This study adopted a different approach by focusing on individual perceptions of fairness. Specifically, we looked at two different dimensions of perceived fairness: (i) procedural fairness and (ii) distributive fairness. Using cross-sectional survey data (n = 304) from a large German university, we tested whether students' assessments of fairness differ with respect to algorithmic vs. human decision-making (HDM) within the higher education context. Furthermore, we investigated whether fairness perceptions have subsequent effects on three different outcome variables, which are hugely important for universities: (1) exit, (2) voice, and (3) organizational reputation. The results of our survey suggest that participants evaluated ADM higher than HDM in terms of both procedural and distributive fairness. Concerning the subsequent effects of fairness perceptions, we find that (1) distributive fairness as well as procedural fairness perceptions have a negative impact on the intention to protest against an ADM system, whereas (2) only procedural fairness perceptions negatively affect the likelihood of exiting. Finally, (3) distributive fairness, but not procedural fairness perceptions have a positive effect on organizational reputation. For universities aiming to implement ADM systems, it is crucial, therefore, to take possible fairness issues and their further implications into account.

The notion of the ‘face effect’ in political communication denotes a process by which people spontaneously infer the personal character traits of political candidates (e.g., competence, attractiveness) from campaign portrait photographs and election posters. Previous research has shown that those spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) affect people’s voting decisions. Combining survey responses, election results from official statistics, and aggregate data, the present study demonstrates that STIs of competence, attractiveness, and leadership help to predict the outcome of direct election in Germany. Furthermore, results suggest that even when controlled for context variables, judgments about a candidate’s competence solely derived from his or her face are connected to the difference in vote shares between the winning candidate and the runner-up. Effects are particularly strong when newcomers compete against each other.

In recent years, sport mega events have been frequently awarded to autocratic countries whose regimes violate democratic values and human rights. Based on the theory of cognitive dissonance, we assume that this is a potential source of internal conflict for viewers, especially for sports enthusiasts and politically aware recipients. Special attention rests on the consequences of the recipients’ strategies of addressing this predicament for important stakeholders of these events, namely the reporting media, the host country and sponsors. We conducted an online survey among 711 German respondents to examine how recipients cope with this dilemma using the forthcoming FIFA soccer World Cup 2018 in Russia as an example. Our results show that while recipients are strongly interested in soccer and politics, most of them do not necessarily perceive these two spheres as inextricably connected. Their awareness of sociopolitical issues in the context of sport events—and thus the decisive factor to explain cognitive dissonance—is arguably low. Still, when recipients experience cognitive dissonance they rely on certain strategies to reduce or avoid dissonance. They do not elude this dilemma by preferring sports broadcasting without coverage of the event’s negative circumstances, but are actually willing to pass on parts of the tournament. They also do not denigrate the credibility of the media or emphasize positive aspects of the host country Russia. In fact, the recipients would prefer if the World Cup had not been awarded to Russia in the first place. However, respondents experiencing cognitive dissonance are also more likely to engage in political consumerism, by deliberately deciding against or in favor of products and sponsors depending on whether or not those are associated with the event.

Governmental intervention in credit markets typically involves the allocation of credit in the light of market failures. In this paper we evaluate federal lending programs while presuming positive externalities and symmetrically informed market participants. For common objectives of governmental lending institutions we verify that optimal lending structures require the application of the gap lender principle. We also show that lending programs can never be selffinancing, due to the positive subsidy margin. Within this general framework, we contrast the policies of the US SBA and the German KfW and show that neither institution features an optimal lending structure., Working papers series, ISSN 2628-1724, 2006, Heft 19