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As the COVID-19 pandemic motivated a shift to virtual teaching, exams have increasingly moved online too. Detecting cheating through collusion is not easy when tech-savvy students take online exams at home and on their own devices. Such online at-home exams may tempt students to collude and share materials and answers. However, online exams' digital output also enables computer-aided detection of collusion patterns. This paper presents two simple data-driven techniques to analyze exam event logs and essay-form answers. Based on examples from exams in social sciences, we show that such analyses can reveal patterns of student collusion. We suggest using these patterns to quantify the degree of collusion. Finally, we summarize a set of lessons learned about designing and analyzing online exams.

Can constitutional court decisions shape public opinion on a governmental policy? Previous studies have focused on the US Supreme Court, which enjoys a high degree of public support as the major resource of power for courts. In this study, we examine the extent to which courts can influence public opinion regarding a government bill at European courts. First, we argue that the public support for courts also allows them to move public opinion on policies into the direction of their decisions. This works in both directions: they can confer legitimacy to a policy that they support, but they can also de‐legitimize a policy that they oppose. Second, we argue that this mechanism strongly depends on the amount of support that a court receives. It only has an effect for courts that possess a higher institutional legitimacy and among the group of citizens trusting a court. We test our arguments by combining a most different systems design for France and Germany with a survey priming experiment on a school security bill. France and Germany are selected for a most different systems design as they exhibit different institutional designs as well as different levels of support for the court at the aggregate level. The survey experiment is implemented within large national election surveys, the German Internet Panel and the French National Election Study. Both experiments contain more than 2,600 respondents each. Our survey experiment primes for decision outcomes and different institutions to understand whether there are differences between an institution supporting and opposing a policy and between a court and alternative institutions. Our findings confirm that with higher public support, courts can move the opinion of citizens to both legitimize and de‐legitimize a policy. This effect can be found at the aggregate level for a court enjoying higher public support, but also at the individual level for respondents with higher trust in the court. Interestingly, courts can even move the opinion of citizens with strong prior attitudes in the opposite direction, if these citizens highly trust the court. These findings have implications beyond the study itself. First, they confirm that the legitimacy‐conferring effect can also be observed for European courts, not only for the US Supreme Court. Second, they show that the relevance of a mechanism identified for a single case, like the US Supreme Court, might only hold for specific conditions. As public support for courts strongly varies across countries in Europe, we also expect the impact of any mechanism relying on public support to strongly vary, as we can observe in our own analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does a government in a bicameral system strategically alter the length of the legislative process in the first chamber in anticipation of future majorities in the second chamber? Drawing on an existing formal model of dynamic policymaking, we argue that governing majorities strategically accelerate or delay their agenda when a potential majority change in the second chamber is imminent. If the government fears losing control over the second chamber, then the government accelerates their agenda. By contrast, if the government hopes to gain control over the second chamber, the government decelerates their agenda. We test our argument in Germany's symmetric and asymmetric bicameralism by analyzing 1,966 governmental bills from 1998 to 2013. The analyses confirm our expectations for symmetric bicameralism, thus suggesting that the synchronicity of election cycles should be taken into account both in the analysis of bicameral systems and in institutional design of such systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of citizens' compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures routinely rely on survey data. While such data are essential, public health restrictions provide clear signals of what is socially desirable in this context, creating a potential source of response bias in self-reported measures of compliance. In this research, we examine whether the results of a guilt-free strategy recently proposed to lessen this constraint are generalizable across twelve countries, and whether the treatment effect varies across subgroups. Our findings show that the guilt-free strategy is a useful tool in every country included, increasing respondents' proclivity to report non-compliance by 9 to 16 percentage points. This effect holds for different subgroups based on gender, age and education. We conclude that the inclusion of this strategy should be the new standard for survey research that aims to provide crucial data on the current pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Committee of the Regions (CoR) and the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) are two consultative bodies in the European legislative arena. While they have privileged access to the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of Ministers through submitting opinions on draft European Union (EU) legislation, EU legislators do not always read the opinions and are consequently often unaware of what the CoR and the EESC propose. This article examines how and under which conditions consultative committees can secure the awareness of legislative bodies. Based on two case studies focusing on the European Citizens Initiative and the liberalization of the postal market, we find that the level of awareness of the work of the two committees is overall rather limited. However, awareness increases if the committees proactively promote their positions through extracurricular activities (e.g., seminars, participation in hearings, circulation of additional information) from early on, rather than simply formally submitting their opinions to the EP and the Council. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The European Economic and Social Committee ( EESC) and the Committee of the Regions ( CoR) are two advisory bodies of the European Union involved in a broad array of policy areas. However, little is known about the effects of the two committees on the positions of the other institutions or final policy outcomes. This article investigates to what extent and under what conditions the CoR and the EESC can exert influence. Based on a comprehensive survey conducted in 2010, a series of hypotheses derived from a neo-institutionalism framework are tested. It is found that consultative committees are not very influential overall. Nevertheless, they can exert influence under certain scope conditions, including the speed with which they produce recommendations, the quality of the recommendations and the resonance with the addressees' prior beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constitutional courts play an increasing role in policymaking and the concepts of comparative politics. Traditionally, research has focused on the Judicialization hypothesis for European courts. This article argues that there is a major research gap regarding justices' preferences, intra- and inter-institutional rules and that it is necessary to move beyond the Judicialization hypothesis to integrate courts in concepts of comparative politics. It outlines four theoretical and methodological challenges for future research on constitutional courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two crucial devices for governmental control of the parliamentary agenda in Germany from the point of view of comparative politics. The vote of confidence procedure makes a contested policy an up-or-down proposal by linking it to the continuity of government, whereas the Gesetzgebungsnotstand gives government a last-offer privilege on a bill. The peculiarities of constitutional norms and political practice of the German procedures are singled out vis-à-vis the expectations assumed by internationally applicable standard rational choice models. It turns out the empirical German-style rules of the devices do not meet requirements being considered important for models to work. In contrast to most other parliamentary democracies, the German design makes the two instruments useful only under very special conditions, which explains why the Gesetzgebungsnotstand has never been used so far and the vote of confidence to control the agenda only on one occasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an advisory body the Committee of the Regions' influence on policy-making in the EU depends on its ability to structure internal decision-making according to major lines of conflict. Given its heterogeneous composition, which cleavages do exist and what effects do collective actors and institutional rules have? Based on quantitative analysis of decisions and qualitative interpretation of interviews we find a low level of conflict. Where conflict exists this is overwhelmingly structured by a national cleavage with the partisan cleavage being a distant second factor. The relevance of cleavages varies depending on policy areas and the organizational capabilities of parties and national delegations as collective actors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]