TY - JOUR A1 - Forster, Timon A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa T1 - Reacting, fast and slow BT - how world leaders shaped government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic JF - Journal of European public policy N2 - The COVID-19 pandemic created extraordinary challenges for governments to safeguard the well-being of their people. To what extent has leaders' reliance on scientific advice shaped government responses to the COVID-19 outbreak? We argue that leaders who tend to orient themselves on expert advice realized the extent of the crisis earlier. Consequently, these governments would adopt containment measures relatively quickly, despite the high uncertainty they faced. Over time, differences in government responses based on the use of science would dissipate due to herding effects. We test our argument on data combining 163 government responses to the pandemic with national- and individual-level characteristics. Consistent with our argument, we find that countries governed by politicians with a stronger technocratic mentality, approximated by holding a PhD, adopted restrictive containment measures faster in the early, but not in the later, stages of the crisis. This importance of expert-based leadership plausibly extends to other large-scale societal crises. KW - crisis KW - leadership KW - expertise KW - COVID-19 KW - policy-making KW - public health Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2021.1942157 SN - 1350-1763 SN - 1466-4429 VL - 28 IS - 8 SP - 1299 EP - 1320 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Heinzel, Mirko Noa A1 - Liese, Andrea T1 - Expert authority and support for COVID-19 measures in Germany and the UK BT - a survey experiment JF - West European politics N2 - During COVID-19, various public institutions tried to shape citizens’ behaviour to slow the spread of the pandemic. How did their authority affect citizens’ support of public measures taken to combat the spread of COVID-19? The article makes two contributions. First, it presents a novel conceptualisation of authority as a source heuristic. Second, it analyses the authority of four types of public institutions (health ministries, universities, public health agencies, the WHO) in two countries (Germany and the UK), drawing on novel data from a survey experiment conducted in May 2020. On average, institutional endorsements seem to have mattered little. However, there is an observable polarisation effect where citizens who ascribe much expertise to public institutions support COVID-19 measures more than the control group. Furthermore, those who ascribe little expertise support them less than the control group. Finally, neither perception of biases nor exposure to institutions in public debates seems consistently to affect their authority. KW - COVID-19 KW - expertise KW - authority KW - survey experiment KW - institutions KW - crises KW - governance Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1873630 SN - 0140-2382 SN - 1743-9655 SP - 1258 EP - 1282 PB - Taylor & Francis CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Daviter, Falk T1 - Policy analysis in the face of complexity BT - What kind of knowledge to tackle wicked problems? JF - Public policy and administration N2 - An ever-increasing number of policy problems have come to be interpreted as representing a particular type of intractable, ill-structured or wicked policy problem. Much of this debate is concerned with the challenges wicked problems pose for program management rather than policy analysis. This article, in contrast, argues that the key challenge in addressing this type of policy problems is in fact analytical. Wicked policy problems are difficult to identify and interpret. The knowledge base for analysing wicked policy problem is typically fragmented and contested. Available evidence is incomplete, inconclusive and incommensurable. In this situation, the evidentiary and the interpretative elements of policy analysis become increasingly indistinguishable and inseparably intertwined. The article reveals the problems this poses for policy analysis and explores the extent to which the consolidation, consensualization and contestation of evidence in policy analysis offer alternative procedural paths to resolve these problems. KW - Evidence-based policy making KW - expertise KW - knowledge KW - policy analysis KW - wicked problems Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0952076717733325 SN - 0952-0767 SN - 1749-4192 VL - 34 IS - 1 PB - Sage Publ. CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Yeung, Ching-man Au A1 - Noll, Michael G. A1 - Gibbins, Nicholas A1 - Meinel, Christoph A1 - Shadbolt, Nigel T1 - Spear spamming-resistant expertise analysis and ranking incollaborative tagging systems JF - Computational intelligence N2 - In this article, we discuss the notions of experts and expertise in resource discovery in the context of collaborative tagging systems. We propose that the level of expertise of a user with respect to a particular topic is mainly determined by two factors. First, an expert should possess a high-quality collection of resources, while the quality of a Web resource in turn depends on the expertise of the users who have assigned tags to it, forming a mutual reinforcement relationship. Second, an expert should be one who tends to identify interesting or useful resources before other users discover them, thus bringing these resources to the attention of the community of users. We propose a graph-based algorithm, SPEAR (spamming-resistant expertise analysis and ranking), which implements the above ideas for ranking users in a folksonomy. Our experiments show that our assumptions on expertise in resource discovery, and SPEAR as an implementation of these ideas, allow us to promote experts and demote spammers at the same time, with performance significantly better than the original hypertext-induced topic search algorithm and simple statistical measures currently used in most collaborative tagging systems. KW - collaborative tagging KW - expertise KW - folksonomy KW - HITS KW - ranking KW - spamming Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8640.2011.00384.x SN - 0824-7935 SN - 1467-8640 VL - 27 IS - 3 SP - 458 EP - 488 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Hoboken ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Keehner, Madeleine A1 - Fischer, Martin H. T1 - Unusual bodies, uncommon behaviors individual and group differences in embodied cognition in spatial tasks JF - Spatial cognition and computation N2 - This editorial introduces a set of papers on differential embodiment in spatial tasks. According to the theoretical notion of embodied cognition, our experiences of acting in the world, and the constraints of our sensory and motor systems, strongly shape our cognitive functions. In the current set of papers, the authors were asked to particularly consider idiosyncratic or differential embodied cognition in the context of spatial tasks and processes. In each contribution, differential embodiment is considered from one of two complementary perspectives: either by considering unusual individuals, who have atypical bodies or uncommon experiences of interacting with the world; or by exploring individual differences in the general population that reflect the naturally occurring variability in embodied processes. Our editorial summarizes the contributions to this special issue and discusses the insights they offer. We conclude from this collection of papers that exploring differences in the recruitment and involvement of embodied processes can be highly informative, and can add an extra dimension to our understanding of spatial cognitive functions. Taking a broader perspective, it can also shed light on important theoretical and empirical questions concerning the nature of embodied cognition per se. KW - embodied cognition KW - spatial cognition KW - individual differences KW - spatial ability KW - strategy KW - expertise KW - mental representation Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13875868.2012.659303 SN - 1387-5868 VL - 12 IS - 2-3 SP - 71 EP - 82 PB - Taylor & Francis Group CY - Philadelphia ER -