2023, Karimo, Aasa, Wagner, Paul M., Delicado, Ana, Goodman, James, Gronow, Antti, Lahsen, Myanna, Lin, Tze-Luen, Schneider, Volker, Satoh, Keiichi, Schmidt, Luisa

Collaboration between public administration organizations and various stakeholders is often prescribed as a potential solution to the current complex problems of governance, such as climate change. According to the Advocacy Coalition Framework, shared beliefs are one of the most important drivers of collaboration. However, studies investigating the role of beliefs in collaboration show mixed results. Some argue that similarity of general normative and empirical policy beliefs elicits collaboration, while others focus on beliefs concerning policy instruments. Proposing a new divisive beliefs hypothesis, we suggest that agreeing on those beliefs over which there is substantial disagreement in the policy subsystem is what matters for collaboration. Testing our hypotheses using policy network analysis and data on climate policy subsystems in eleven countries (Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Sweden, and Taiwan), we find belief similarity to be a stronger predictor of collaboration when the focus is divisive beliefs rather than normative and empirical policy beliefs or beliefs concerning policy instruments. This knowledge can be useful for managing collaborative governance networks because it helps to identify potential competing coalitions and to broker compromises between them.

2020-10, Rinscheid, Adrian, Eberlein, Burkard, Emmenegger, Patrick, Schneider, Volker

Why do junctures become critical in some cases but not in others? Building on the critical juncture framework and perspectives on the formation and diffusion of beliefs, we develop a theoretically parsimonious and empirically traceable account of divergence in institutional outcomes. By illuminating the role of agency and joint belief shifts we further open the “black box” of critical junctures. In particular, we develop the argument that the role agents play is conditioned by conflict lines that structure an institutional field before a juncture sets in. Empirically, we trace political discourses around the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Canada, Germany, and Japan using discourse network analysis. Through comparative investigation, we empirically show that discursive interactions during potential critical junctures indicate institutional outcomes that are shaped by causally relevant historical legacies.

2020, Schneider, Volker, Feistner-Schneider, Gabriele

Die gegenwärtige Pandemie ist ein einmaliges natürliches Experiment – ein globales ›Reallabor‹ – wie Gesellschaften und ihre spezialisierten Teilsysteme, zu dem nicht nur Politik gehört, ein akutes gesellschaftliches Problem im globalen Maßstab verarbeiten. Innerhalb weniger Monate hat sich das Virus in über 180 Ländern ausgebreitet. Nicht wie beim Klimawandel, wo die Katastrophe schleichend über Jahrzehnte und Jahrhunderte abläuft, sondern eher wie bei einer Sintflut verläuft sie über Tage und Wochen.

2018-11, Ylä-Anttila, Tuomas, Gronow, Antti, Stoddart, Mark C.J., Broadbent, Jeffrey, Schneider, Volker, Tindall, David B.

Why do some countries enact more ambitious climate change policies than others? Macro level economic and political structures, such as the economic weight of fossil fuel industries, play an important role in shaping these policies. So do the national science community and the national culture of science. But the process by which such macro-structural factors translate into political power and national climate change policies can be analyzed through focussing on meso level policy networks. The Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks (COMPON) research project has studied climate change policy networks in twenty countries since 2007. Along with some findings, this paper presents some methodological challenges faced and the solutions developed in the course of the project. After a presentation of the project, we first outline some practical challenges related to conducting cross-national network surveys and solutions to overcome them, and present the solutions adopted during the project. We then turn to challenges related to causal explanation of the national policy differences, and propose Qualitative Comparative Analysis as one solution for combining different levels of analysis (macro and meso) and different data types (quantitative, network and qualitative).

2022-12, Satoh, Keiichi, Nagel, Melanie, Schneider, Volker

We examined how scientific information influences policy beliefs among organizations in climate change policy networks in Germany and Japan. Different combinations of information types, policy beliefs, and organizational roles were found to play instrumental roles. Ideational influence can occur when (1) the sender is a credible information source, (2) the receiver can understand the “message,” and (3) the receiver depends on the sender’s information. Organizational roles involved in this ideational influence are different in technical and political information exchange. The leverage of influence depends on the organizational ecology of different roles in each country.

2020-03-01, Schneider, Volker

A key thesis of this contribution is that the analysis of policy processes in the last decades has focused too much on governmental and conventional political actors, on the one hand, and too much on actor-centered bottom-up perspectives. As the microfoundation of social explanations has moved to the fore, actor constellations became the core of policy explanations and contextual factors and systemic perspectives moved into the background. The chapter proposes a renewed perspective on public policy with the aim to bring social factors back into play, particularly at macrostructural level. This means not only that non-governmental, civil society organizations and social relations should be given greater consideration, but even more important are various forms of structural differentiation at the macro level of societies which should be reintegrated into policy explanations.

2019-08-14, Kenis, Patrick, Schneider, Volker

This chapter introduces network analysis as a method for media policy research. We point to the fact that the use of network analysis implies a specific perspective: the explanation of phenomena in terms of relationships among a system of interdependent actors. We demonstrate that this perspective is by now highly recognized and that it is relevant in all areas where we expect the interdependencies between actors to be more important or complementary to the attribute characteristics of the actors. The chapter gives an overview of the network method by pointing to the type of data which are collected, how they can be presented and visualized and what type of descriptors are helpful in making theoretical and practical sense of the data. We present concepts such as density, centralization and subgraphs and components. The relevance of the method for media policy research is demonstrated by presenting two studies: The introduction of a new electronic medium and Discourse networks in anti-hate speech regulation of Social Media in Germany. Both studies are a good example of the fact that the use of network analysis has produced different and innovative insights.

2022-01-13, Westenberger, Gina-Julia, Schneider, Volker

Umwelt- und Klimapolitik ist in den letzten Jahren zu einem äußerst relevanten Themenfeld des Parteienwettbewerbs in Deutschland avanciert, an welchem sich gut beobachten lässt, welche bedeutende Rolle spezifische Themen und Probleme im Wettbewerb um Wählerstimmen spielen. In diesem Artikel demonstrieren wir erstmalig, wie die Methode der Diskursnetzwerkanalyse zur Analyse solcher Themenwettbewerbe eingesetzt werden kann. Diskursnetzwerkanalysen verbinden die qualitative Inhaltsanalyse von Medienberichten mit Methoden der Sozialen Netzwerkanalyse und erlauben es so, über exakte Zeitfenster hinweg die Dynamik eines Themenwettbewerbs und die Interaktion von Parteien detailliert zu verfolgen und zu vergleichen. Dieses Potenzial demonstrieren wir am Beispiel des Issue-Wettbewerbs in der bayrischen Umweltpolitik in den Jahren 2018 und 2019. Ein besonderer Fokus liegt dabei auf der staatstragenden CSU, die im Landtagswahlkampf 2018 noch versuchte, mit ausgeprägten migrationspolitischen Forderungen Wähler der AfD abzuwerben. Ein Jahr später zündete Ministerpräsident und Parteichef Markus Söder hingegen ein ganzes „Feuerwerk“ an umwelt- und klimapolitischen Vorschlägen. Wie kam es zu dieser Neuausrichtung des Diskurses? Anhand von Zeitungsartikeln aus der Süddeutschen Zeitung und im Vergleich dreier Diskursperioden zeigen wir, wie sich die Salienz der Umweltpolitik im Diskursverlauf veränderte. Eine entscheidende Rolle spielte dabei vor allem das überaus erfolgreiche Volksbegehren „Rettet die Bienen“, infolgedessen sich der umweltpolitische Diskurs deutlich intensivierte und diversifizierte. Unsere Analyse zeigt, dass sich die CSU bedingt durch diese Dynamik und die Bedrohung durch die elektoralen Erfolge der Grünen, daraufhin gezwungen sah mit diesen in einen Wettkampf um die Issue-Ownership grüner Themen einzutreten.

2020, Schneider, Volker

The chapter discusses two major questions regarding the impact of digitization on the role of the state vis-à-vis society. First, will the new technologies (‘smart’ homes and cities, new forms of mobility, communication, and social control, and so on) weaken or strengthen the infrastructural power of the state? Will state power have to retreat in social coordination and regulation, or will we see a renaissance of public control of infrastructure sectors? This will be no mere problem-solving adaptation, but a power-based conflictual process. In this respect, the second question is important: How are these possible shifts reflected in changing patterns of policy-making? Will networked policy processes undermine or reinforce traditional structures involving conventional political and social actors in politics and policy-making, or will new ones emerge? Is the state becoming more dependent on the private sector, for example in the regulation of social media using forms of private governance?

2019, Schneider, Volker

Das Buch präsentierte Mitte der 1970er Jahre ein breites Spektrum innovativer Methoden der sozialen Strukturanalyse. In der Studie geht es um eine mittelgroße Stadt im Rheinland, der die Autoren das Pseudonym Altneustadt gaben. Ihnen ging es dabei weniger um den spezifischen empirischen Fall selbst, der eher untypisch war für Deutschland. Durch die Ansiedlung eines großen naturwissenschaftlichen Forschungsinstituts in den 1950er Jahren war diese nicht nur stark angewachsen, sondern hatte sich auch sozialstrukturell stark verändert.