Jana Lipps

Last Name

Lipps

First Name

Jana

ORCID

0000-0003-0850-9525

Organisational unit

03714 - Schimmelfennig, Frank / Schimmelfennig, Frank

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Publications 1 - 9 of 9

Understanding Preferences over Borders
Lipps, Jana; Sczepanski, Ronja; Malet, Giorgio (2025)
International Studies Quarterly
The governance of international borders has evolved into a contentious issue of political competition along the cosmopolitan-nationalistic divide. Despite a strong polarization over the level of border openness, many border security policies are carried by a strong cross-partisan support base. This puzzle suggests that public preferences toward border security might be more context-dependent and prone to framing strategies than previously assumed. We develop a theoretical argument that explains under what conditions citizen preferences over borders are more likely to polarize or to converge, and we examine the effect of concrete border security measures, their justification, and the neighboring country to which they apply. We test our argument with a novel open-ended question on border mental associations and a conjoint experiment among 4,700 Germans. Results show that people attach very similar meanings to the concept of border, and that securitization frames and joint EU border guards are a first-rank choice leading to lower levels of polarization. Greater agreement is driven by left-leaning respondents shifting toward a more favorable view of border closure in response to such proposals. Building fences and migration-related justifications polarize the most across different subgroups. These results contribute to our understanding of the polarization potential of border policies and have important implications for the freedom-security trade-off.
Voting with Putin: Gender, LGBT Rights, and Tacit Support for Russia among Europe's Parliamentarians
Lipps, Jana; Voeten, Erik (2025)
Comparative Political Studies
What explains the variation between and within Europe's political parties over how to respond to Russia's international aggression and domestic illiberalism? We examine this question using a unique dataset of votes on 1140 resolutions and amendments that explicitly target Russia in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) between 2007 and 2021. We argue that Putin's portrayal of Russia as a defender of traditional family values against liberal egalitarianism, especially against LGBT rights, contributes to divisions between and within Europe's parties. Consistent with this argument, we find that women and parliamentarians who express support for LGBT rights have become less likely to support Russia compared to other members of their national parties. However, this applies mostly to female MPs within culturally liberal parties and only becomes apparent after Putin's culturally conservative turn. In addition, parties with more women in leadership become less likely to support Russia. We identify these effects using national party fixed effects and by matching on observables. We discuss the implications for understanding European responses to Russia as well as the literature on gender, foreign policy, and legislative behavior.
Regional inequality and institutional trust in Europe
Lipps, Jana; Schraff, Dominik (2021)
European Journal of Political Research
Inequality is a central explanation of political distrust in democracies, but has so far rarely been considered a cause of (dis-)trust towards supranational governance. Moreover, while political scientists have extensively engaged with income inequality, other salient forms of inequality, such as the regional wealth distribution, have been sidelined. These issues point to a more general shortcoming in the literature. Determinants of trust in national and European institutions are often theorized independently, even though empirical studies have demonstrated large interdependence in citizens’ evaluations of national and supranational governance levels. In this paper, we argue that inequality has two salient dimensions: (1) income inequality and (2) regional inequality. Both dimensions are important antecedent causes of European Union (EU) trust, the effects of which are mediated by evaluations of national institutions. On the micro-level, we suggest that inequality decreases a person's trust in national institutions and thereby diminishes the positive effect of national trust on EU trust. On the macro-level, inequality decreases country averages of trust in national institutions. This, however, informs an individual's trust in the EU positively, compensating for the seemingly untrustworthiness of national institutions. Finally, we propose that residing in an economically declining region can depress institutional trust. We find empirical support for our arguments by analysing regional temporal change over four waves of the European Social Survey 2010–2016 with a sample of 209 regions nested in 24 EU member states. We show that changes in a member state's regional inequality have similarly strong effects on trust as changes in the Gini coefficient of income inequality. Applying causal mediation techniques, we can show that the effects of inequality on EU trust are largely mediated through citizens’ evaluations of national institutions. In contrast, residing in an economically declining region directly depresses EU trust, with economically lagging areas turning their back on European governance and resorting to the national level instead. Our findings highlight the relevance of regional inequality for refining our understanding of citizens’ support for Europe's multi-level governance system and the advantages of causal modelling for the analysis of political preferences in a multi-level governance system. (© 2020 European Consortium for Political Research).
Undermining liberal international organizations from within: Evidence from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
Lipps, Jana; Jacob, Marc S. (2025)
The Review of International Organizations
International organizations promoting democratic governance and human rights are increasingly challenged by some of their own member states. To better understand this dynamic, we propose a distinction between the illiberal ideology of political parties and their regime environment, aiming to examine the international behavior of actors extending beyond autocratic governments. We argue that the domestic regime environment plays a pivotal role in influencing the extent to which illiberal parties engage in contestation to undermine liberal norms on the international stage. We expect contestation behavior to be primarily driven by illiberal parties seeking to diminish the influence of liberal international politics on domestic power structures. Moreover, we contend that government participation moderates illiberal parties’ contestation behavior. To test our expectations empirically, we study roll call votes in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), one of the most powerful international parliaments promoting liberal values. Drawing on an original dataset that records approximately 500,000 individual votes cast in PACE decisions, we find evidence for substantive contestation by illiberal parties, especially those representing illiberal regimes. Only illiberal governments in liberal systems moderate themselves at the amendment stage. Our study has implications for the potential threat that emerging illiberal actors pose to international liberal institutions.
Pandemic bordering: domestic politicisation, European coordination, and national border closures in the COVID-19 crisis
Freudlsperger, Christian; Lipps, Jana; Nasr, Mohamed; et al. (2024)
Journal of European Public Policy
When the member states imposed unilateral restrictions on the cross-border movement of persons and goods in their initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU appeared to relapse into the 'politics trap' of earlier integration crises. However, our analysis of entry restrictions for persons in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland from the end of 2019 to the summer of 2022 shows no systematic relationship between domestic politicisation and national border closures. Rather, border closures followed the course of the pandemic as well as EU recommendations. Our findings suggest that the EU was able to escape the 'politics trap' thanks to the exogenous and symmetrical nature of the crisis and effective EU-level policy coordination.
The Rise of International Parliaments
Schimmelfennig, Frank; Winzen, Thomas; Lenz, Tobias; et al. (2020)
International parliamentary institutions (IPIs) are on the rise. Around the world, international organizations have increasingly established or affiliated parliamentary assemblies. At the same time, IPIs have generally remained powerless institutions with at best a consultative role in the decision-making process of international organizations. This book pursues the question why the member states of international organizations create IPIs but do not vest them with relevant institutional powers. It argues that neither the functional benefits of delegation nor the internalization of democratic norms provide convincing answers to this question. Rather, IPIs are an instrument of strategic legitimation. By establishing IPIs that mimic a highly esteemed domestic democratic institution, governments seek to ensure that audiences at home and in the wider international environment recognize their IOs as democratically legitimate. At the same time, they seek to avoid being effectively constrained by IPIs in international governance. In a statistical analysis covering the world’s most relevant international organizations and a series of case studies from diverse world regions, we find two major varieties of international parliamentarization. IOs with general purpose and high authority create and empower IPIs to legitimate their region-building projects domestically. Alternatively, IOs are induced to create parliamentary bodies by international diffusion.
The Inequality of Integration
Lipps, Jana (2021)
There is now a broad consensus that economic liberalization in the course of European integration has substantially contributed to regional divergence. Economic integration kick starts a cumulative process resulting in the spatial concentration of economic activity. Current accounts however fall short of demonstrating how European integration is distinct from the process of globalization. This thesis analyses the relationship between integration and regional inequality with respect to three phenomena: i) international labour mobility, ii) the way national institutions alter liberalization pressure and iii) the impact on citizen attitudes. International labour mobility is a cornerstone of European integration, but not part of most trade agreements, nor other regional integration projects. This thesis shows that introducing free movement of labour in the European Union has o ered asymmetric gains to the regions. It contributes to the growing income gap between poor and rich regions, net of the integration of goods and capital markets. Further, this thesis provides a new theoretical account of why integration does not produce the same pattern of regional inequality across countries. European economies are governed by a variety of capitalist institutions, which lter external pressures of liberalization. Although Europeanization has supported institutional convergence, in some countries domestic actors still uphold centralized labour market coordination. This results in di erentiated patterns of regional inequality, in which high employment rates and high productivity are not always correlated. The second part of the thesis addresses how citizens respond to the shift in regional prosperity. It shows that the interregional distribution of economic output is a salient determinant of trust in political institutions, on par with income inequality. The rising inequality leads citizens to lower their trust in the multi-layered governance system. A mediation analysis suggests that the e ect runs through deteriorating trust in national institutions. In declining regions a direct and strongly negative e ect emerges. In sum, the territorial clustering of integration losers nurtures a backlash against integration. However, further research on political preferences at the regional level is complicated by a lack of adequately sampled surveys. The thesis concludes with a comparison of methods to improve estimations from nationally sampled surveys.
Estimating subnational preferences across the European Union
Lipps, Jana; Schraff, Dominik (2021)
Political Science Research and Methods
Intertwined parliamentary arenas: Why parliamentarians attend international parliamentary institutions
Lipps, Jana (2021)
European Journal of International Relations
The internationalisation of political authority elongates the chain of delegation between the citizen and elected representatives. It increases executive dominance while weakening parliamentary control. International Parliamentary Institutions (IPIs), parliamentary assemblies affiliated with international organisations, could potentially mitigate the 'parliamentary deficit' of global governance but are commonly criticised for their weak authority. This paper revisits this critical perspective and argues that IPIs provide access to information circumventing the privileged access of governments. Thereby, IPIs strengthen national parliaments' capability to control the executive. This benefit explains the motivation of national MPs to attend IPIs. The study is based on novel data on the attendance of parliamentarians to the sessions of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly from 2007 to 2015. The results speak in favour of intertwined parliamentary arenas, as attributes of national parliaments drive attendance. For one, parliaments with higher scrutiny capacity participate more in delegations to IPIs. Moreover, the composition of delegations is related to control incentives, causing a difference in attendance patterns of government and opposition parties.

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Jana Lipps

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