2023-08-25, Schneider, Gerald

The theoretical and empirical literature on the reciprocal topics of economy and war have developed a fertile debate. Most contributions examine the liberal hope that growing economic bonds between or within nations reduce the risk of violent conflict, while an increasing number of studies also examine the destructive and redistributive effect of war, terrorism, and genocides. Most studies in the field do not provide clear micro-foundations for the opportunity-cost arguments that are typically made to justify the deterring effects of increased economic interactions. To move the field forward, contributions need to focus more on how the relationship between business leaders and the government shapes decision-making in periods of crisis. Recent advances have been made to understand the economic impact of massive political violence that can be better understood through the use of temporally disaggregated data.

2022-07-04, Bätz, Konstantin, Klöckner, Ann-Cathrin, Schneider, Gerald

This article addresses the discrepancy between the explanation and the prediction of political violence through the development of different models that approximate the decision-making on war and peace. Borrowing from the crisis bargaining literature, the prediction models particularly consider the situational attributes through which players can challenge the status quo. We distinguish between direct and indirect proxies of a weakening of the status quo and show that adding decision-making data can improve the accuracy of cross-sectional forecasting models. The study, which demonstrates the increased conflict risk due to the COVID-19 pandemic and thus another development upsetting the status quo, discusses the usefulness of decision-making forecasts through various case study illustrations.

2022, Ruhe, Constantin, Schneider, Gerald, Spilker, Gabriele

Dieses Kapitel gibt einen Überblick über die Verwendung quantitativer Methoden in den Internationalen Beziehungen. Nach einer kurzen Diskussion der verschiedenen Probleme, die sich in einer quantitativen Untersuchung ergeben können, präsentieren wir im zweiten Teil die mannigfachen Herausforderungen, die beim ersten Schritt jeglicher empirischer Untersuchung – dem Messen der theoretischen Konstrukte – entstehen können. Danach beschreiben wir, wie sich zwei unterschiedliche Datentypen – Experimental- und Beobachtungsdaten – analysieren lassen. In diesem Zusammenhang diskutieren wir ausführlich anhand einiger prominenter Beispiele zentrale Schwierigkeiten bei der Durchführung einer Regressionsanalyse: die Wahl eines passenden Modellierungsverfahrens, die Drittvariablenkontrolle sowie das Problem der Stichprobenverzerrung. Der Aufsatz endet mit einer Schlussbetrachtung und einem Überblick über einige neuere Trends in der Verwendung von quantitativen Methoden in den Internationalen Beziehungen.

2022, Genovese, Federica, Schneider, Gerald

2023, Mayer, Jana, Schneider, Gerald

2022, Bettecken, Julia, Schneider, Gerald

The gender gap pervades almost all aspects of the academic world. Drawing on a recent co-authored study, Julia Bettecken and Gerald Schneider show the imbalance is also present at the journal European Union Politics (EUP). The gap at EUP manifests itself not only in the underrepresentation of females as editors, authors, or reviewers, but also in their correspondence with the editorial office.

2022, Bettecken, Julia, Kelle, Friederike Luise, Schneider, Gerald

This chapter introduces two concepts – brinkmanship and backsliding – to explain why integration referendums are frequently successful and why the unsuccessful ones have seldom had consequences for the incumbent leader. We argue that governments typically engage strongly in referendum campaigns, profiting from institutional advantages and the possibility to link their political fate to the outcome of the vote (brinkmanship). What is more, a bad economic situation seems to lower the chances of a positive vote, that is a vote in favor of the government stance or further integration steps. The EU’s growing influence over economic policy could account for this relationship. If the responsibility for the economic distress was attributed to the EU, this shift in responsibility from the national to the supranational level would also explain why governments who lose referendums do not systematically resign or perform badly at the next election. Finally, those governments who are defeated at the ballot box, often engage into diversionary strategy by distancing themselves from their campaign (backsliding). The chapter offers some anecdotal and statistical evidence in support of these behavioral patterns

2022-09, Bettecken, Julia, Klöckner, Ann-Cathrin, Kurch, Charlotte, Schneider, Gerald

The gender gap pervades many core aspects of political science. This article reports that females continue to be under-represented as authors and reviewers in European Union Politics and that these differences have only diminished slightly since the second half of the 2000s. We also report that females use more cautious and modest language in their correspondence with the editorial office, but do not find evidence that this under-studied aspect of the gender gap affects the outcome of the reviewing process. The authors discuss some measures European Union Politics and other journals might take to address the imbalance.

2022, Schneider, Gerald

Capitalist peace theory (CPT) has gained considerable attention in international relations theory and the conflict literature. Its proponents maintain that a capitalist organization of an economy pacifies states internally and externally. They portray CPT either as a complement to or a substitute for other liberal explanations, such as the democratic peace thesis, but disagree about the facet of capitalism that is supposed to reduce the risk of political violence. Key contributions have identified three main drivers of the capitalist peace phenomenon: the fiscal constraints that a laissez-faire regimen puts on potentially aggressive governments, the mollifying norms that a capitalist organization creates, and the increased ability of capitalist governments to signal their intentions effectively in a confrontation with an adversary. CPT should be based on a narrow definition of capitalism and should scrutinize motives and constraints of the main actors more deeply. Future contributions to the CPT literature should pay close attention to classic theories of capitalism, which all considered individual risk taking and the dramatic changes between booms and busts to be key constitutive features of this form of economic governance. Finally, empirical tests of the proposed causal mechanism should rely on data sets in which capitalists appear as actors and not as “structures.” If the literature takes these objections seriously, CPT could establish itself as central theory of peace and war in two respects: First, it could serve as an antidote to “critical” approaches on the far left or far right that see in capitalism a source of conflict rather than of peace. Second, it could become an important complement to commercial liberalism that stresses the external openness rather than the internal freedoms as an economic cause of peace and that particularly sees trade and foreign direct investment as pacifying forces.

2022-01, Weber, Patrick M., Schneider, Gerald

The European Union, the United Nations, and the United States frequently use economic sanctions. This article introduces the EUSANCT Dataset—which amends, merges, and updates some of the most widely used sanctions databases—to trace the evolution of sanctions after the Cold War. The dataset contains case-level and dyadic information on 326 threatened and imposed sanctions by the EU, the UN, and the US. We show that the usage and overall success of sanctions have not grown from 1989 to 2015 and that while the US is the most active sanctioner, the EU and the UN appear more successful.