Difference-in-differences (DiD) is one of the most popular approaches for empirical research in economics, political science, and beyond. Identification in these models is based on the conditional parallel trends assumption: In the absence of treatment, the average outcome of the treated and untreated group are assumed to evolve in parallel over time, conditional on pre-treatment covariates. We introduce a novel approach to sensitivity analysis for DiD models that assesses the robustness of DiD estimates to violations of this assumption due to unobservable confounders, allowing researchers to transparently assess and communicate the credibility of their causal estimation results. Our method focuses on estimation by Double Machine Learning and extends previous work on sensitivity analysis based on Riesz Representation in cross-sectional settings. We establish asymptotic bounds for point estimates and confidence intervals in the canonical 2 × 2 setting and group-time causal parameters in settings with staggered treatment adoption. Our approach makes it possible to relate the formulation of parallel trends violation to empirical evidence from (1) pre-testing, (2) covariate benchmarking and (3) standard reporting statistics and visualizations. We provide extensive simulation experiments demonstrating the validity of our sensitivity approach and diagnostics and apply our approach to two empirical applications.

The proceedings of a seminar held on June, 20, 2024 delves into the phenomenon of insurance-based investment products (so-called IBIPs). The analysis of the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union serves as the starting point for addressing the most relevant issues related to the distribution of IBIPs. The most significant rulings of the Luxembourg Court are thus, firstly, clarifying the application scope of the sector-specific regulations on IBIPs, as well as establishing the differences between the specialized rules provided for the insurance sector and those applicable to other contracts and regulated markets (such as the financial market, broadly speaking). Secondly, an attempt is made to understand how the issues arising from the circulation of these hybrid products can find efficient solutions through the adoption of intersectoral European disciplines, such as those concerning the protection of retail customers – for example, Directive 93/13/EEC on unfair terms in consumer contracts – and the prohibition of unfair commercial practices (Directive 2005/29/EC). In this context, the role played by the Court's precedents can only be appreciated. On the one hand, the interpretative effort of the European judge aims to ensure the so-called effet utile of Union law. On the other hand, the harmonizing scope of the decisions constitutes a necessary reference to reinforce the project of the Capital Market Union, in this case, applied to the insurance sector.

Despite being, by their own description, ‘the product of five hundred years of struggle,’ some external supporters of the Zapatistas have attempted to search for historical precedent for the movement, composed mainly of indigenous Maya people from Chiapas, Mexico, in pre-conquest Maya societies. This article interrogates the credibility of such interpretations and considers the motivations and assumptions underlying attempts to identify continuities between the Precolumbian Maya past and the Zapatista movement. It is argued that, besides from advocating a prefigurative politics that represents a radical departure from the Marxist revolutionary ideology that characterised the twentieth century, part of the novelty and appeal of neo-Zapatismo is that it is said to be rooted in indigenous Maya practices and traditions. The fixation on identity politics and hostility towards alternative political or economic possibilities in recent decades had resulted in an overemphasis on the ‘indigenous Maya-ness’ of the movement, to make public discourse more amenable to the Zapatistas’ wider goal of radical democratic transformation and struggle against neoliberal capitalism. The identification of links between the Precolumbian Maya and the Zapatistas form part of such attempts to ‘prove’ the indigenousness of the movement, which has become integral in constructing its revolutionary ‘authenticity.’

This study examines how scholars in Germany working on the Middle East have experienced the discussion of Israel and Palestine in research, teaching, and public debate since October 7, 2023. Drawing on a systematic online survey, it investigates across disciplines the perception of restrictions, practices of self-censorship, and perceived forms of institutional pressure. The findings indicate a marked intensification of political sensitivities shaping academic work and shifting boundaries of academic freedom. What becomes visible is a tension between respondents’ normative ideal of open debate and their actual experience of narrowing discourse, contestation, and sanctioning. Self-censorship and experiences of threat are widespread. In this context, respondents emphasize the protection of plural expression as a central task of academic institutions. The results correspond to U.S. surveys conducted by the Middle East Scholar Barometer and, for the first time, provide systematic evidence for the German context.

This paper examines whether giant oil and gas discoveries hinder the green transformation in post-Soviet space. Post-Soviet countries share a similar historical background but have pursued drastically different energy strategies, providing an ideal field to observe the influence of resource discoveries by minimizing the unobservable variables. Treating giant resource discoveries as natural experiments, it evaluates both short-term and long-term causal effects on the green transformation measured in four dimensions: total energy supply (TES), energy mix, energy efficiency, and international investment in renewables. The findings reveal that giant discoveries lead to a short-term decline in TES, fossil energy supply, and renewable energy supply; better (political) institutions deepen this short-term decline, while stronger economic institutions increase TES and renewable energy (excluding biofuels). However, these effects are short-lived. In the long term, discoveries result in increased TES and fossil energy supply, reduced renewable energy supply, and worsening energy efficiency. These results support the resource curse theory, showing that institutional quality moderates short-term disruptions but cannot prevent long-term fossil fuel dependence. The thesis contributes to the limited literature on the direct impact of resource discoveries on energy transition in post-Soviet countries and highlights the need for institutional strengthening and targeted international support in renewables in countries with recent resource shocks.

Nearly 2,000 forgotten letters from Hungarian Jews, sent to a Jewish aid organization in Stockholm during the summer of 1943, were uncovered in the Swedish National Archive by Elena Medvedev during her initial research into the personal micro-archive of historian Paul A. Levine. The discovered artefacts sought information about Jewish men conscripted into Hungary’s Jewish labor battalions under an increasingly repressive regime. The survival and decades-long neglect of this correspondence is both astonishing and revealing. Now housed for starting scholarly examination at the Osteuropa-Institut at Freie Universität Berlin, the letters will be studied through both quantitative and qualitative methods—initially analyzing socio- demographic variables and narrative content to explore patterns of assumed selective repression. Were intellectuals and cosmopolitan figures especially targeted? What mechanisms allowed these letters to bypass censorship? More than historical documents, the letters supposed to display logic that guided the regime’s repressive choices; they challenge us to claim the Holocaust details left in silence.

The Kyrgyz Republic forms a dynamic political context characterized by various shifts in its domestic and foreign political sphere. Thereby, informal cross-border trade has developed as a crucial pillar of the Kyrgyz economy and has become an essential source of income and stability for its citizens. Despite its relevance for society and the state, only limited research has set out to draw a connection between political shifts and informal cross-border trade, and the hidden nature of this trade has made it somewhat difficult to quantify its actual dimensions. Acknowledging the importance of informal cross-border trade, this paper analyses how shifts in the political sphere impact the informal cross-border trade of the Kyrgyz Republic between 2010 and 2022, focusing on its trade relationships with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. This process-tracing case study presents a theorized causal mechanism of how political shifts have increased informal cross-border trade founded in institutionalist theory and the everyday governance framework. The empirical analysis then tests the presence of the causal mechanism. The findings suggest that the causal mechanism is partially validated. Shifts in the political sphere of the Kyrgyz Republic did not consistently lead to an increase in informal cross-border trade during all the years under examination.

Lukashenka and his rule over Belarus are a striking example of how external autocracy support helps maintain authoritarian regimes. Still, little attention has been paid to the responses of anti- regime activists to autocracy support. Building on political opportunity literature and strategic interactionism approaches, this paper analyses qualitative interviews to study anti-regime activists’ perceptions of external autocracy support and with which strategies they respond to it. In the case of Belarus after 2020, this paper finds that anti-regime activists perceive the support by Russian president Putin to Lukashenka as a fundamental constraint to democratic change in Belarus. They respond strategically by engaging in reflection, advocacy, and support for Ukraine’s defence against Russia in the hope that Putin’s ability to support Lukashenka will be weakened. These findings show how autocracy support functions through the perception of domestic contentious actors. Also, finding that activists might decide to (support the) fight against a third player that provides autocracy support adds nuance to the variety of contentious players’ interactions in contexts of internationalized authoritarianism.

The main focus of the scholarly literature on authoritarian regimes is on the dynamics of political control and power preservation and hence tools the incumbents use against potential opposition. This paper argues that another, and a highly important, challenge for many authoritarian regimes is the behavior of actors loyal to the regime, i.e., trying to act in line with the regime goals. These actors, while incorrectly guessing the objectives of the regime, or overshooting in terms of implementation of the regime goals, could cause actual harm to the regime. We offer a sketch of the theory of this phenomenon, which we refer to as ‘excessive loyalism’, as well as test a number of hypotheses concerning the origins of excessive loyalism using the example of the reaction of Russian regional governors to the highly unpopular pension reform of 2018.

The paper offers an actor-centered perspective on the democratic backsliding, focusing in particular on the interplay of internal and international actors in preventing (or accelerating) the backsliding processes. Its main argument is without acknowledging the variation in actors’ constellations, it is also impossible to explain the variation in the outcomes of the backsliding processes. The paper is based on a mixed methods design: after the initial large-N investigation, it focuses on two empirical cases (Poland and Romania) to identify the role of actors and their interconnections in the backsliding processes.

The paper investigates how the Russian authoritarian regime managed two disastrous forest fires episodes Russia experienced in 2010 and 2021. It identifies key characteristics of the authoritarian forest fires management, as well as performs content analysis in order to identify the common features and the peculiarities of the forest fires management in both cases. It covers both response to disasters and the subsequent recovery. The paper both identifies the key characteristics of the official communication regarding forest fire management and looks at the general discourse about two forest fires episodes in the Russian media, including the role of different levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy in combatting forest fires and organizing recovery.

Die Studie widmet sich der Frage, wie Wissenschaftler*innen in Deutschland mit Arbeitsbe-zug zum Nahen Osten die Thematisierung von Israel und Palästina in Forschung, Lehre und öffentlicher Debatte seit dem 7. Oktober 2023 erfahren. Auf Grundlage einer systematischen Online-Erhebung untersucht sie disziplinübergeifend die Wahrnehmung von Einschränkun-gen, Praktiken der Selbstzensur sowie perzipierte Formen institutionellen Drucks. Die Be-funde deuten auf eine deutliche Intensivierung der politischen Sensibilitäten hin, die die wis-senschaftliche Arbeit in einschlägigen Disziplinen prägen und die Grenzen akademischer Freiheit neu verhandeln. Sichtbar wird dabei ein Spannungsfeld zwischen dem normativen Anspruch offener Debatten und der faktischen Erfahrung von Diskursverengung, Anfechtun-gen und Sanktionierung. Zugleich wird der Schutz pluraler Meinungsäußerung von den Be-fragten als zentrale Aufgabe akademischer Institutionen hervorgehoben. Die Ergebnisse kor-respondieren mit US-Erhebungen des Middle East Scholar Barometer und liefern erstmals systematische Evidenz für den deutschen Kontext.

The reduction of weekly working hours can lead to more gender equality on household level. In mixed-sex, two-adult households, the working hours of each household member have a significant effect on gender equality relevant variables. This was elaborated with a cross- sectional analysis of 2019 German Socio-Economic Panel data using OLS regressions with instrumental variables. Working hours have a strong negative effect on one’s own household- and care time. Men or women having a reduced full-time work contract (32-36 hours per week stipulated in the work contract) creates more symmetry of paid- and unpaid work per sex. A partner’s work time has a significantly negative effect on an individual’s work time but a woman’s work time is more influenced by her male partner’s working hours than the other way around. The thesis finds evidence that if a man has a reduced full-time work contract, this encourages women to work more paid hours per week; for men it is the other way around. The effect of a partner’s working time on an individual’s labor force participation is in all cases very small but significantly negative. The partner working under a reduced full-time work contract creates opposite results for men and women: It increases women’s likelihood to participate in the labor market whereas it decreases men’s probability to participate in the labor market.

This paper contributes to Elite Theory within the context of regime change, focusing on Imperial Russian Aristocrats post-1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Utilizing a survey on ancestry conducted by the Levada polling institute, this study investigates the persistence of power structures and their constituents across regime shifts. The analysis reveals a covariation between noble origin within ancestry and occupying high-ranking official roles in the Soviet Union, providing empirical support for Pareto's notion of elite circulation. A proposed causal pathway rooted in Wilfredo Pareto's theory suggests that elites, aiming to preserve their elevated status, can harness adaptability even amidst regime changes. These findings shed new light on the history of the Russian Revolution.

This paper explores the concept of “internet sovereignty” as developed and endorsed by the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). First, the concept is shown to have developed as a synthesis between the restrictive Chinese internet governance model based on the “Golden Shield” and Russian conceptions of national “information spheres”. Research then shows how this “sovereignty” model serves to legitimise refocusing internet governance around the state, allowing for stricter controls on internet access, content, data, and infrastructure in authoritarian contexts. Using causal process tracing, this paper shows that the SCO supports the transfer of digital policy between members based on this normative “sovereignty” model, the alignment of states with the legalised form of this model in institutional documentation, and the transfer of the legitimising “Three Evils” narrative frame. This shows that regional organisations can provide a significant platform for authoritarian learning, which, when successful, helped the regimes of the SCO to find policies to expand and stabilise their control over the digital realm.

The paper analyses the strategic narrative as one of the tools of legitimisation of authoritarian regimes. Using Russia's strategic narrative as an example, the author shows how this type of political communication can be used by autocrats to justify the regime's aggressive actions in the eyes of domestic audiences. The main argument of the article is that authoritarian regimes can involve external actors in this process, namely representatives of non-authoritarian states. The paper uses such qualitative research methods as document analysis, content analysis and frame analysis. The empirical material of the work is based on the analysis of speeches of representatives of pro-Russian Ukrainian parties in the talk show "60 Minutes" on the Russian state television in the period 2019-2022, which allowed to determine the role of these politicians in the process of legitimisation of the Russian authoritarian regime and its actions in preparation for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.