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Background: Following the rapid increase of asylum seekers arriving in the European Union in 2015/16, policymakers have invested heavily in improving their foresight and forecasting capabilities. A common method to elicit expert predictions are Delphi surveys. This approach has attracted concern in the literature, given the high uncertainty in experts’ predictions. However, there exists limited guidance on specific design choices for future-related Delphi surveys.
Objective: We test whether or not small adjustments to the Delphi survey can increase certainty (i.e., reduce variation) in expert predictions on immigration to the EU in 2030.
Methods: Based on a two-round Delphi survey with 178 migration experts, we compare variation and subjective confidence in expert predictions and assess whether additional context information (type of migration flow, sociopolitical context) promotes convergence among experts (i.e., less variation) and confidence in their own estimates.
Results: We find that additional context information does not reduce variation and does not increase confidence in expert predictions on migration.
Conclusions: The results reaffirm recent concerns regarding the limited scope for reducing uncertainty by manipulating the survey setup. Persistent uncertainty may be a result of the complexity of migration processes and limited agreement among migration experts regarding key drivers.
Contribution: We caution policymakers and academics on the use of Delphi surveys for eliciting expert predictions on immigration, even when conducted based on a large pool of experts and using specific scenarios. The potential of alternative approaches such as prediction markets should be further explored.
Whilst the Covid-19 pandemic affects all European countries, the ways in which these countries are prepared for the health and subsequent economic crisis varies considerably. Financial solidarity within the European Union (EU) could mitigate some of these inequalities but depends upon the support of the citizens of individual member states for such policies. This paper studies attitudes of the Austrian population - a net-contributor to the European budget - towards financial solidarity using two waves of the Austrian Corona Panel Project collected in May and June 2020. We find that individuals (i) who are less likely to consider the Covid-19 pandemic as a national economic threat, (ii) who believe that Austria benefits from supporting other countries, and (iii) who prefer the crisis to be organized more centrally at EU-level show higher support for European financial solidarity. Using fixed effects models, we further show that perceiving economic threats and preferring central crisis management also explain attitude dynamics within individuals over time. We conclude that cost-benefit perceptions are important determinants for individual support of European financial solidarity during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Struggling over crisis
(2018)
If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions.” Following the premise of this quotation attributed to Winston Churchill, varying perceptions of the European crisis by academic economists and their structural homology to economists’ positions in the field of economics are examined. The dataset analysed using specific multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) comprises information on the careers of 480 German-speaking economists and on statements they made concerning crisis-related issues. It can be shown that the main structural differences in the composition and amount of scientific and academic capital held by economists as well as their age and degree of transnationalisation are linked to how they see the crisis: as a national sovereign debt crisis, as a European banking crisis, or as a crisis of European integration and institutions.
The article explores Europeanisation as an effect of European political integration, a process driven by struggles over the legitimate political and social order that is to prevail in Europe. Firstly, an analytic framework is constructed, drawing on insights from Pierre Bourdieu’s work on similar struggles over nation-stateness. Secondly, the mechanisms identified are used to assess the role played by economic experts and expertise in the process of European political integration. It is argued that concepts arising from economic disciplines, agents educated in economics, and practising economic professionals influence European political integration and have benefited from Europeanisation initiated by this process. Special emphasis is placed on strategies of integrating Europe by law or by market, on governing Europe using economic expertise, on the role played by economic academia in researching and objectifying Europe, and on staffing European institutions with economists.