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Im vorliegenden Band wird das lokale Integrationsmanagement in Deutschland, Frankreich und Schweden vergleichend untersucht. Im Mittelpunkt stehen Verflechtungsstrukturen, Koordination und Leistungsfähigkeit der Integrationsverwaltung mit besonderem Fokus auf den Entwicklungen nach der Flüchtlingskrise von 2015/16. Auf der Grundlage von Fallstudien und Experteninterviews in den drei Ländern wird das institutionelle Zusammenspiel von Akteuren im Mehrebenensystem und im lokalen Raum analysiert. Dabei werden jeweils die nationalen Rahmenbedingungen, lokalen Gestaltungsvarianten und krisenbedingten Herausforderungen des Integrationsmanagement kommunen- und ländervergleichend in den Blick genommen. Gestützt auf illustrative Praxisbeispiele und Tiefeneinblicke in die lokalen Handlungsprobleme leitet die Studie Lehren und Empfehlungen für eine Optimierung des Integrationsmanagements und eine krisenresilientere Verwaltungsorganisation in diesem Aufgabenbereich ab.
Over the past decades, the traditional profile of the German administrative system has significantly been reshaped and remoulded through reforms and transformations. Manifold modernization efforts have been undertaken to adjust administrative structures and procedures to increasing challenges and pressures. In this chapter, the attempt is made to outline major institutional reform paths in Germany from Weberian bureaucracy to most recent reforms towards a digital transformation of public administration. We will show to what extent the German administrative system has moved away from the classical Weberian bureaucracy to a hybrid system where elements of the ‘old’ model and new reform paradigms such as the NPM and digital government are hybridized, labelled the Neo Weberian State. The question will be addressed as to what extent this shift has taken shape and which hurdles and path-dependencies can be identified to explain partial persistence and continuity over time.
The study explores differences between three user types in the top tweets about the 2015 “refugee crisis” in Germany and presents the results of a quantitative content analysis. All tweets with the keyword “Flüchtlinge” posted for a monthlong period following September 13, 2015, the day Germany decided to implement border controls, were collected (N = 763,752). The top 2,495 tweets according to number of retweets were selected for analysis. Differences between news media, public and private actor tweets in topics, tweet characteristics such as tone and opinion expression, links, and specific sentiments toward refugees were analyzed. We found strong differences between the tweets. Public actor tweets were the main source of positive sentiment toward refugees and the main information source on refugee support. News media tweets mostly reflected traditional journalistic norms of impartiality and objectivity, whereas private actor tweets were more diverse in sentiments toward refugees.
Risk perceptions of individuals living in single-parent households during the COVID-19 crisis
(2023)
The COVID-19 crisis had severe social and economic impact on the life of most citizens around the globe. Individuals living in single-parent households were particularly at risk, revealing detrimental labour market outcomes and assessments of future perspectives marked by worries. As it has not been investigated yet, in this paper we study, how their perception about the future and their outlook on how the pandemic will affect them is related to their objective economic resources. Against this background, we examine the subjective risk perception of worsening living standards of individuals living in single-parent households compared to other household types, their objective economic situation based on the logarithmised equivalised disposable household incomes and analyse the relationship between those indicators. Using the German SOEP, including the SOEP-CoV survey from 2020, our findings based on regression modelling reveal that individuals living in single-parent households have been worse off during the pandemic, facing high economic insecurity. Path and interaction models support our assumption that the association between those indicators may not be that straightforward, as there are underlying mechanisms–such as mediation and moderation–of income affecting its direction and strength. With respect to our central hypotheses, our empirical findings point toward (1) a mediation effect, by demonstrating that the subjective risk perception of single-parent households can be partly explained by economic conditions. (2) The moderating effect suggests that the concrete position at the income distribution of households matters as well. While at the lower end of the income distribution, single-parent households reveal particularly worse risk perceptions during the pandemic, at the high end of the income spectrum, risk perceptions are similar for all household types. Thus, individuals living in single-parent households do not perceive higher risks of worsening living standards due to their household situation per se, but rather because they are worse off in terms of their economic situation compared to individuals living in other household types.
Die Coronapandemie hat die zentrale Rolle von Staat und Verwaltung für die Krisenbewältigung deutlich gemacht sowie ins Zentrum wissenschaftlicher und öffentlicher Aufmerksamkeit gerückt. Das intergouvernementale Pandemiemanagement, das Zusammenwirken verschiedener Politik- und Verwaltungsebenen im föderalen Staat und die Einbringung wissenschaftlicher Expertise haben sich in der Pandemie als entscheidende institutionelle Stellschrauben erwiesen. Zugleich sind erhebliche Schwachstellen und Engpässe zu Tage getreten, die teilweise zu institutioneller Überforderung, Reibungsverlusten, Koordinationsschwächen oder gar Institutionenversagen geführt haben. Beklagt wurden zudem Maßnahmenpakete und Entscheidungsoutputs, die hinsichtlich ihrer Evidenz- und Wissensbasis teils umstritten waren und in ihrem Zustandekommen hinreichende Legitimation, Zurechenbarkeit, Nachvollziehbarkeit und Transparenz vermissen ließen.
Der seit März 2020 andauernde Krisenzustand hat einen neuartigen, vom bisherigen Normalzustand stark abweichenden Modus des Regierens und des Verwaltungsmanagements in Deutschland geschaffen. In diesem Bereich herrscht weiterhin ein erheblicher politik- und verwaltungswissenschaftlicher Forschungsbedarf, zu dessen Befriedigung diese Studie beitragen soll.
Background:
Like most countries, Germany is currently recruiting international nurses due to staff shortages. While these are mostly academic, the academisation of nursing in Germany has only just begun. This allows for a broader look at the participation of migrant nurses: How do care teams deal with the fact that immigrant colleagues are theoretically more highly qualified than long-established colleagues?
Methods:
Case studies were conducted in four inpatient care teams of two hospitals in 2022. Qualitative data include 26 observation protocols, 4 group discussions and 17 guided interviews. These were analysed using the documentary method and validated intersubjectively.
Results:
Due to current academisation efforts in Germany and the immigration of academised nursing staff from abroad, the areas of activity and responsibility of nursing in Germany are under negotiating pressure. This concerns basic care for example, which in Germany is provided by skilled workers, but in other countries is mostly provided by assistants or relatives. The question of who should provide basic care, whether all nurses or only nursing assistants, documents the struggle between an established and a new understanding of care. In this context, the knowledge and skills of migrant and academicised care workers become a crucial aspect in the struggle for a new professional identity for care in Germany.
Conclusions:
The specific situation in Germany makes it possible to show the potential for change that international care migration can constitute for destination countries. The far-reaching process of change of German nursing is given a further dimension not only by its academization, but by the immigration of international and academically trained nursing staff, where inclusive or exclusive effects can already be observed.
Key messages: The increasing proportion of migrant nurses accelerates the current discussion on nursing in Germany. Conflict areas show up in everyday work of care teams and must be addressed there.
The increasing introduction of non-native plant species may pose a threat to local biodiversity. However, the basis of successful plant invasion is not conclusively understood, especially since these plant species can adapt to the new range within a short period of time despite impoverished genetic diversity of the starting populations. In this context, DNA methylation is considered promising to explain successful adaptation mechanisms in the new habitat. DNA methylation is a heritable variation in gene expression without changing the underlying genetic information. Thus, DNA methylation is considered a so-called epigenetic mechanism, but has been studied in mainly clonally reproducing plant species or genetic model plants. An understanding of this epigenetic mechanism in the context of non-native, predominantly sexually reproducing plant species might help to expand knowledge in biodiversity research on the interaction between plants and their habitats and, based on this, may enable more precise measures in conservation biology.
For my studies, I combined chemical DNA demethylation of field-collected seed material from predominantly sexually reproducing species and rearing offsping under common climatic conditions to examine DNA methylation in an ecological-evolutionary context. The contrast of chemically treated (demethylated) plants, whose variation in DNA methylation was artificially reduced, and untreated control plants of the same species allowed me to study the impact of this mechanism on adaptive trait differentiation and local adaptation. With this experimental background, I conducted three studies examining the effect of DNA methylation in non-native species along a climatic gradient and also between climatically divergent regions.
The first study focused on adaptive trait differentiation in two invasive perennial goldenrod species, Solidago canadensis sensu latu and S. gigantea AITON, along a climate gradient of more than 1000 km in length in Central Europe. I found population differences in flowering timing, plant height, and biomass in the temporally longer-established S. canadensis, but only in the number of regrowing shoots for S. gigantea. While S. canadensis did not show any population structure, I was able to identify three genetic groups along this climatic gradient in S. gigantea. Surprisingly, demethylated plants of both species showed no change in the majority of traits studied. In the subsequent second study, I focused on the longer-established goldenrod species S. canadensis and used molecular analyses to infer spatial epigenetic and genetic population differences in the same specimens from the previous study. I found weak genetic but no epigenetic spatial variation between populations. Additionally, I was able to identify one genetic marker and one epigenetic marker putatively susceptible to selection. However, the results of this study reconfirmed that the epigenetic mechanism of DNA methylation appears to be hardly involved in adaptive processes within the new range in S. canadensis.
Finally, I conducted a third study in which I reciprocally transplanted short-lived plant species between two climatically divergent regions in Germany to investigate local adaptation at the plant family level. For this purpose, I used four plant families (Amaranthaceae, Asteraceae, Plantaginaceae, Solanaceae) and here I additionally compared between non-native and native plant species. Seeds were transplanted to regions with a distance of more than 600 kilometers and had either a temperate-oceanic or a temperate-continental climate. In this study, some species were found to be maladapted to their own local conditions, both in non-native and native plant species alike. In demethylated individuals of the plant species studied, DNA methylation had inconsistent but species-specific effects on survival and biomass production. The results of this study highlight that DNA methylation did not make a substantial contribution to local adaptation in the non-native as well as native species studied.
In summary, my work showed that DNA methylation plays a negligible role in both adaptive trait variation along climatic gradients and local adaptation in non-native plant species that either exhibit a high degree of genetic variation or rely mainly on sexual reproduction with low clonal propagation. I was able to show that the adaptive success of these non-native plant species can hardly be explained by DNA methylation, but could be a possible consequence of multiple introductions, dispersal corridors and meta-population dynamics. Similarly, my results illustrate that the use of plant species that do not predominantly reproduce clonally and are not model plants is essential to characterize the effect size of epigenetic mechanisms in an ecological-evolutionary context.
Nation, migration, narration
(2022)
En France et en Allemagne, l’immigration est devenue dans les dernières décennies une problématique centrale. C’est dans ce contexte qu’est apparu le rap. Celui-ci connaît une popularité énorme chez les populations issues de l’immigration. Pour autant, les rappeurs ne s’en confrontent pas moins à leur identité française ou allemande.
Le but de ce travail est d’expliquer cette apparente contradiction : comment des personnes issues de l’immigration, exprimant un mal-être face à un racisme qu’ils considèrent omniprésent, peuvent-elles se sentir pleinement françaises / allemandes ?
On a divisé le travail entre les chapitres suivants : Contexte de l'étude, méthodologie et théories (I) ; Analyse des différentes formes d’identité nationale au prisme du corpus (II) ; Analyse en trois étapes chronologiques du rapport à la société dans les textes des rappeurs (III-V) ; étude de cas de Kery James en France et Samy Deluxe en Allemagne (VI).
In den vergangenen Jahren hat der im anglo-amerikanischen Rechtsraum wurzelnde Amicus Curiae, wenn auch in unterschiedlicher Ausprägung, Eingang in die Verwaltungsgerichtsbarkeiten in Deutschland und Frankreich gefunden. Dabei erweist sich die französische Verwaltungsgerichtsordnung aus rechtsvergleichender Sicht als progressiv, da das Verfahrensinstrument hier – im Gegensatz zur deutschen Rechtslage – bereits positiv-rechtlich normiert ist. Diese Fortschrittlichkeit hat sich bisher jedoch nicht merklich auf die Drittinterventionspraxis niedergeschlagen, besitzen Amicus Curiae-Stellungnahmen doch in beiden Ländern und über alle verwaltungsgerichtlichen Instanzen hinweg noch immer Seltenheitswert.
Da mithin keine Generalisierungen zur dieser Rechtspraxis erlaubt sind, kann sich eine Analyse der möglichen funktionalen Rolle derartiger Amicus Curiae-Stellungnahmen nur auf theoretische Überlegungen stützen. Danach ist eine Informationsfunktion gegenüber dem Gericht in Bezug auf Tatsachen- und Rechtsfragen klar zu bejahen. Auch dürfte der Verfahrensmechanismus ein zusätzliches – wenngleich nicht demokratisches – Legitimationspotential für gerichtliche Entscheidungen besitzen: Indem dieser gesellschaftliche Teilhabe und damit gleichzeitig die Einbettung verwaltungsgerichtlicher Verfahren in den jeweiligen sozialen Kontext ermöglicht, kann er zur Steigerung der gesellschaftlichen Akzeptanz der zunehmend unter Rechtsfertigungsdruck geratenden Richtermacht beitragen.
Flood risk management in Germany follows an integrative approach in which both private households and businesses can make an important contribution to reducing flood damage by implementing property-level adaptation measures. While the flood adaptation behavior of private households has already been widely researched, comparatively less attention has been paid to the adaptation strategies of businesses. However, their ability to cope with flood risk plays an important role in the social and economic development of a flood-prone region. Therefore, using quantitative survey data, this study aims to identify different strategies and adaptation drivers of 557 businesses damaged by a riverine flood in 2013 and 104 businesses damaged by pluvial or flash floods between 2014 and 2017. Our results indicate that a low perceived self-efficacy may be an important factor that can reduce the motivation of businesses to adapt to flood risk. Furthermore, property-owners tended to act more proactively than tenants. In addition, high experience with previous flood events and low perceived response costs could strengthen proactive adaptation behavior. These findings should be considered in business-tailored risk communication.
Flood risk management in Germany follows an integrative approach in which both private households and businesses can make an important contribution to reducing flood damage by implementing property-level adaptation measures. While the flood adaptation behavior of private households has already been widely researched, comparatively less attention has been paid to the adaptation strategies of businesses. However, their ability to cope with flood risk plays an important role in the social and economic development of a flood-prone region. Therefore, using quantitative survey data, this study aims to identify different strategies and adaptation drivers of 557 businesses damaged by a riverine flood in 2013 and 104 businesses damaged by pluvial or flash floods between 2014 and 2017. Our results indicate that a low perceived self-efficacy may be an important factor that can reduce the motivation of businesses to adapt to flood risk. Furthermore, property-owners tended to act more proactively than tenants. In addition, high experience with previous flood events and low perceived response costs could strengthen proactive adaptation behavior. These findings should be considered in business-tailored risk communication.
Flood risk management in Germany follows an integrative approach in which both private households and businesses can make an important contribution to reducing flood damage by implementing property-level adaptation measures. While the flood adaptation behavior of private households has already been widely researched, comparatively less attention has been paid to the adaptation strategies of businesses. However, their ability to cope with flood risk plays an important role in the social and economic development of a flood-prone region. Therefore, using quantitative survey data, this study aims to identify different strategies and adaptation drivers of 557 businesses damaged by a riverine flood in 2013 and 104 businesses damaged by pluvial or flash floods between 2014 and 2017. Our results indicate that a low perceived self-efficacy may be an important factor that can reduce the motivation of businesses to adapt to flood risk. Furthermore, property-owners tended to act more proactively than tenants. In addition, high experience with previous flood events and low perceived response costs could strengthen proactive adaptation behavior. These findings should be considered in business-tailored risk communication.
From the beginning of systematic research on sexual victimization, it has been recognized that a substantial proportion of women report nonconsensual sexual experiences meeting the defining criteria of rape in response to behaviorally specific items, but do not acknowledge their experience as rape in response to broad questions about whether they have ever been raped. Recent studies suggest that rates of unacknowledged rape may be as high or even higher among men than among women. This study examined rates of unacknowledged female and male victims of rape and sexual assault by comparing responses to behaviorally specific items of the Sexual Aggression and Victimization Scale (SAV-S) with responses to broad questions using the labels of sexual assault and rape (SARA) in 593 participants (303 women) in Germany. As predicted, more women and men were classified as rape victims based on behaviorally specific items than on the basis of the broad rape item. The rates of unacknowledged rape were about 60% for women and 75% for men. The gender difference was not significant. Against our prediction, no significant differences in acknowledgement of sexual assault were found in relation to coercive strategy and victim-perpetrator relationship. Few cases of rape and sexual assault identified by the SARA items were missed by the behaviorally specific questions. The implications for establishing prevalence rates of rape and sexual assault and for comparing victims and nonvictims in terms of vulnerability factors and outcomes of sexual victimization are discussed.
Who suffered most?
(2022)
Objective:
This study examines gender and socioeconomic inequalities in parental psychological wellbeing (parenting stress and psychological distress) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany.
Background:
The dramatic shift of childcare and schooling responsibility from formal institutions to private households during the pandemic has put families under enormous stress and raised concerns about caregivers' health and wellbeing. Despite the overwhelming media attention to families’ wellbeing, to date limited research has examined parenting stress and parental psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in Germany.
Method:
We analyzed four waves of panel data (N= 1,771) from an opt-in online survey, which was conducted between March 2020 and April 2021. Multivariable OLS regressions were used to estimate variations in the pandemic's effects on parenting stress and psychological distress by various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.
Results:
Overall, levels of parenting stress and psychological distress increased during the pandemic. During the first and third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, mothers, parents with children younger than 11 years, parents with two or more children, parents working from home as well as parents with financial insecurity experienced higher parenting stress than other sociodemographic groups. Moreover, women, respondents with lower incomes, single parents, and parents with younger children experienced higher levels of psychological distress than other groups.
Conclusion:
Gender and socioeconomic inequalities in parents' psychological wellbeing increased among the study participants during the pandemic.
In 1988 the youth-led movement "Schools without racism, schools with courage" was established in Belgium and quickly spread throughout Europe. German schools adopted this movement in 1995. Decades later, racism is not yet a strong developmental science research topic for studies of youth in Germany and Europe. In this commentary we argue that it should be. With increasing hate crimes and harassment, there is also a need to understand how families are socializing young people to be prepared for, cope with, resist, and disrupt racism. This type of ethnic-racial socialization affects important developmental processes-adolescent ethnic-racial identity development and intergroup and institutional understanding and relations-and requires a more prominent place of study in a migration-diverse Germany. Studying these issues in this particular sociohistorical context will also contribute to a more context-specific understanding of youth experiences of racism.
The chapter begins with a brief historical overview of Germany’s transition in the twentieth and twenty-first century from a transit and emigration country to one of immigration. The next part of this chapter looks at the challenges and problems facing German immigration policy within a multi-level federal system. Finally, the chapter gives an analysis of some of the trends in German migration policy since the refugee crisis in 2015, such as changes in the party system and in the concepts underlying migration policies to better manage, control and limit immigration to Germany.
When the "Ostjuden" returned
(2021)
This article examines the dynamics that allowed the derogatory term "Ostjuden" to reappear in academic writing in post-Holocaust Germany. This article focuses on the period between 1980's and 2000's, complementing earlier studies that focused on the emergence of the term "Ostjuden" and on the complex representations of Eastern European Jews in Imperial and later Weimar Germany. It shows that, despite its well-evidenced discriminatory history, the term "Ostjuden" re-appeared in the scholarly writing in German and has also found its way into German-speaking public history and journalism. This article calls for applying the adjectival term "osteuropaische Juden" (Eastern European Jews), using a term that neither essentializes Eastern European Jews nor presents them in an oversimplified and uniform manner.
Models for the predictions of monetary losses from floods mainly blend data deemed to represent a single flood type and region. Moreover, these approaches largely ignore indicators of preparedness and how predictors may vary between regions and events, challenging the transferability of flood loss models. We use a flood loss database of 1812 German flood-affected households to explore how Bayesian multilevel models can estimate normalised flood damage stratified by event, region, or flood process type. Multilevel models acknowledge natural groups in the data and allow each group to learn from others. We obtain posterior estimates that differ between flood types, with credibly varying influences of water depth, contamination, duration, implementation of property-level precautionary measures, insurance, and previous flood experience; these influences overlap across most events or regions, however. We infer that the underlying damaging processes of distinct flood types deserve further attention. Each reported flood loss and affected region involved mixed flood types, likely explaining the uncertainty in the coefficients. Our results emphasise the need to consider flood types as an important step towards applying flood loss models elsewhere. We argue that failing to do so may unduly generalise the model and systematically bias loss estimations from empirical data.
Models for the predictions of monetary losses from floods mainly blend data deemed to represent a single flood type and region. Moreover, these approaches largely ignore indicators of preparedness and how predictors may vary between regions and events, challenging the transferability of flood loss models. We use a flood loss database of 1812 German flood-affected households to explore how Bayesian multilevel models can estimate normalised flood damage stratified by event, region, or flood process type. Multilevel models acknowledge natural groups in the data and allow each group to learn from others. We obtain posterior estimates that differ between flood types, with credibly varying influences of water depth, contamination, duration, implementation of property-level precautionary measures, insurance, and previous flood experience; these influences overlap across most events or regions, however. We infer that the underlying damaging processes of distinct flood types deserve further attention. Each reported flood loss and affected region involved mixed flood types, likely explaining the uncertainty in the coefficients. Our results emphasise the need to consider flood types as an important step towards applying flood loss models elsewhere. We argue that failing to do so may unduly generalise the model and systematically bias loss estimations from empirical data.
Cities can be severely affected by climate change. Hence, many of them have started to develop climate adaptation strategies or implement measures to help prepare for the challenges it will present. This study aims to provide an overview of climate adaptation in 104 German cities. While existing studies on adaptation tracking rely heavily on self-reported data or the mere existence of adaptation plans, we applied the broader concept of adaptation readiness, considering five factors and a total of twelve different indicators, when making our assessments. We clustered the cities depending on the contribution of these factors to the overall adaptation readiness index and grouped them according to their total score and cluster affiliations. This resulted in us identifying four groups of cities. First, a pioneering group comprises twelve (mainly big) cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants, which showed high scores for all five factors of adaptation readiness. Second, a set of 36 active cities, which follow different strategies on how to deal with climate adaptation. Third, a group of 28 cities showed considerably less activity toward climate adaptation, while a fourth set of 28 mostly small cities (with between 50,000 and 99,999 inhabitants) scored the lowest. We consider this final group to be pursuing a 'wait-and-see' approach. Since the city size correlates with the adaptation readiness index, we recommend policymakers introduce funding schemes that focus on supporting small cities, to help them prepare for the impact of a changing climate.