Patrick Emmenegger

Wonderful news. The paper “High Skills for High Tech:  Higher Education as Industrial Policy” (together with Niccolo Durazzi and Alina Felder-Stindt) has been accepted for publication in Governance. It will be part of a special issue on new industrial policy (edited by Donato Di Carlo, Kathleen McNamara, and Manuela Moschella). Here is the abstract:

How do states create the skills needed for high technology economic activities that hold an increasingly important role in contemporary societies? Examining economic statecraft in the higher education sector, this article shows that the policies employed by governments to expand the supply of high skills vary depending on their economies’ most advanced sectors. Governments who seek to meet the demand of the high-end services sectors pursue a strategy of ‘open-ended’ higher education expansion. ‘Targeted’ expansion of higher education, instead, is the preferred option for governments in countries characterized by large advanced manufacturing sectors. The latter strategy, however, is hampered by the presence of a partly private higher education system since the ability of governments to successfully pursue their strategies is mediated by the existing institutional framework in the realm of higher education policy. Empirically, the argument finds strong support through three country case studies – Germany, South Korea, and the United Kingdom – that allow to simultaneously leverage a most-similar and most-different research design.

A great way to start the week. The Socio-Economic Review just accepted our paper entitled “Skill Requirements versus Workplace Characteristics: Exploring the Drivers of Occupational Gender Segregation” (together Scherwin M. Bajka, Benita Combet, and Sabine Seufert).

Here is the abstract: What role do skill requirements play in gendered occupational preferences? Previous research has emphasized workplace characteristics such as salaries and family-friendly work hours. Less attention has been paid to skill requirements, even though they are an important part of job descriptions and serve as reference points for individuals’ assessment of their suitability for occupations. Using a choice experiment among Swiss adolescents who are in the process of choosing their vocational training occupation, this paper demonstrates that women and men have surprisingly similar preferences for workplace characteristics. In contrast, skill requirements are better predictors of gender differences in occupational preferences. We find that technical skills are critical in explaining gendered occupational preferences, with occupations that rely more heavily on new technologies attracting fewer women. At the same time, both genders prefer occupations that emphasize social interactions, suggesting that the prominent ‘people’ versus ‘things’ distinction does not adequately capture gendered occupational preferences.

In parallel, the Zeitschrift für Berufs- und Wirtschaftspädagogik has accepted a paper from the same project entitled “Zukunft der Arbeit: Geschlechtervergleich in der Berufsorientierung im Zeitalter der Künstlichen Intelligenz” (together with Sabine Seufert, Mandana York, and Scherwin M. Bajka). This paper focuses on the potential of AI in reducing the occupational gender segregation.

And now the summary of our article “Who Counts? Non-Citizen Residents, Spatial Sorting, and Malapportionment” (with André Walter), forthcoming in the British Journal of Political Science, has appeared on DeFacto, entitled: “Wer zählt? Wie Wahlsysteme und Immigration politische Repräsentation prägen.” Here is the link to the German and the English version.

The blog DeFacto just published our summary of the paper “Vox Populi: Popular Support for the Popular Initiative” (in German). The post is entitled: “Vox Populi: Unterstützung des Volkes für die Volksinitiative” (with Lucas Leemann and André Walter). Here is the link.

The new dataset containing the municipality-level outcomes of all direct democratic votes in the period 1866 to 2023 is now publicly available. You find it on the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DDIVS8

The Swiss Political Science Review has accepted the paper, entitled “Municipality-Level Outcomes of Direct-Democratic Votes in Switzerland, 1866-2023” (with Lucas Leemann, Andreina Thoma, and André Walter). The paper introduces a new dataset of the municipality-level outcomes of all direct-democratic votes in Switzerland. The dataset will be made publicly available on the Harvard Dataverse.

Congratulations to Cecilia Ivardi from CPE@HSG for winning the 2024 Political Economy and Welfare network prize of the Council of European Studies (Lyon conference) for her single-authored paper on the role of the state in the transformation of vocational education and training! The paper will appear in the Journal of European Public Policy.

Oxford University Press has accepted our manuscript “Stacking the Deck: The Party Politics of Electoral System Choice” (co-authored with André Walter) for publication. In the book, we analyze how incumbent parties contain new electoral threats by means of electoral alliances, gerrymandering, and malapportionment. Moreover, we show how the success of containment measures (or lack thereof) influences parties’ preferences for electoral system change. Finally, we show that also in PR systems, electoral district design is influenced by parties’ seat maximization interests. The book should be available as open access some time in 2025.

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the EU Industrial Policy Report 2024 by the LUISS Hub for New Industrial Policy and Economic Governance (LUHNIP). The contribution is entitled “A Continent in Search of Skills? Aiding the Twin Transition through Skill Formation Policy” and is co-authored with Niccolo Durazzi and Alina Felder. The entire report can be found here.