http://hdl.handle.net/10900/42132 2026-09-09T12:28:13Z 2026-09-09T12:28:13Z Reiß, Lea Giulia http://hdl.handle.net/10900/182958 2026-09-04T01:08:09Z 2028-08-02T00:00:00Z

No Exit from Exit: The Party Politics of Emigration in the European Union Reiß, Lea Giulia In the last two decades, amid EU enlargement and the Eurozone crisis, many European coun-tries have experienced large-scale population loss through intra-EU mobility, fueling skill and labour shortages, population ageing and democratic backsliding. Yet emigration has attracted far less scholarly attention than immigration, and its specific political consequences for govern-ing parties in origin states remain poorly understood. This dissertation addresses that gap by asking: how do governing parties in EU origin states navigate a problem they cannot solve? The dissertation argues that emigration constitutes a structurally blame-laden issue: it is highly visible, readily attributed to domestic political and economic conditions, and nearly impossible to address through available policy instruments. Two constraints are central. Legally, EU free movement law makes it impossible for national governments to restrict exit or force emigrants to return. Structurally, the main drivers of emigration – e.g., persistent wage gaps, labour market dysfunction, and migration networks – cannot be reversed within a single legislative term. Three empirical articles examine governing parties’ responses to emigration at successive lev-els. The first (“Emigration – Who Cares?”), drawing on 938 party manifestos across all 27 EU member states (2004–2023), maps how, and under what conditions and by whom emigration is politicised. The second (“Please come back!”) analyses an original dataset of 81 national-level emigrant return policies across 17 member states (2004–2023) and gives insights into why gov-ernments adopt such programmes despite their limited effectiveness. The third (“Who Gets to Return?”) uses the same dataset alongside case studies of Ireland and Portugal to show how the universalist rhetoric of return policies masks systematic, party-family-specific selectivity in who actually receives meaningful return incentives. Taken together, the three articles point to a dual political logic of blame avoidance and distributive politics: blame avoidance explains the framing of emigration and the need for visible action, while distributive politics explains why that action takes partisan and selective forms.; Die Dissertation ist gesperrt bis zum 02. August 2028 !

2028-08-02T00:00:00Z Sandbaek, Benedikte http://hdl.handle.net/10900/182912 2026-09-03T01:04:20Z 2026-09-02T00:00:00Z

Essays on Sustainable Finance Sandbaek, Benedikte This dissertation examines sustainable finance along a continuum from regulatory implementa-tion to measurable climate impact. As the European Union's regulatory architecture for sustain-able finance continues to evolve, fundamental questions about how disclosure frameworks op-erate in practice and whether they deliver meaningful environmental outcomes remain insuffi-ciently addressed. The first part comprises studies examining the regulatory requirements and practical challenges of EU Taxonomy disclosure in banks. Drawing on data from German banks across different business models and portfolio structures, the studies document how data limitations, regulatory ambiguity, strategic incentives, and structural constraints lead to divergent interpretive decisions that substantially limit the comparability and management relevance of disclosed metrics. Re-cent regulatory developments under the Omnibus simplification package are further shown to address some but not all of the structural limitations identified. The second part provides empirical evidence on the Green Asset Ratio as the central sustaina-bility indicator for banks, examining a heterogeneous sample covering both large universal banks and small regional savings and cooperative banks. The findings reveal that reported val-ues are generally very low and that disclosed metrics do not systematically reflect stakeholder information needs, raising important questions about the effectiveness of the current framework as a disclosure-based steering mechanism. The third part introduces the Abatement Impact Factor, a metric that quantifies lifecycle green-house gas abatement per euro invested in residential building renovations. Applied to a simulat-ed sample of multi-residential buildings within the German housing stock, the analysis reveals pronounced heterogeneity in abatement efficiency across technologies and building characteris-tics, highlighting the importance of cost-efficient prioritisation in renovation investment decisions. Taken together, the three parts offer grounded analytical and empirical insights that connect regulatory intent with real-world climate impact, contributing to both academic inquiry and evi-dence-based policy design.

2026-09-02T00:00:00Z Veit, Helen Franziska Bürkert, Karin Thiemeyer, Thomas Johler, Reinhard http://hdl.handle.net/10900/182371 2026-08-20T01:02:10Z 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

Erinnern erforschen. Studien aus dem Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft Veit, Helen Franziska; Bürkert, Karin; Thiemeyer, Thomas; Johler, Reinhard Wie erinnern und gedenken Menschen? Wie entstehen Erinnerungskulturen und welche Rolle spielen dabei Institutionen und nachfolgende Generationen? Wie überlagern sich verschiedene historische Narrative in einem Stadt- oder Gedenkraum? Wie verändern digitale Infrastrukturen, technische Anwendungen und gegenwärtige politische Herausforderungen das Erinnern und seine Erforschung? Die Beiträge beleuchten Erinnern als dynamischen und auch konflikthaften Prozess: Sie arbeiten die Bedeutungen von Räumen, Dingen, Narrativen und Infrastrukturen für Praktiken des Erinnerns heraus und untersuchen, wie Geschichte von staatlichen, musealen, lokalen, diversen, aber auch rechtspopulistischen Akteur:innen verhandelt wird. Der Sammelband Erinnern erforschen bündelt aktuelle Studien aus dem Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft, die vielschichtige Perspektiven auf Praktiken, Medien und Politiken des Erinnerns eröffnen.

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z Ferdinand, Joseph http://hdl.handle.net/10900/181999 2026-08-01T01:08:47Z 2026-07-31T00:00:00Z

Integrating Motivation Into Immersive Learning: An Experimental Approach to Enhance Virtual Reality’s Effectiveness in Science Education Ferdinand, Joseph This dissertation aims to integrate motivational support into immersive virtual reality (VR) to enhance its effectiveness in science education. VR is considered a unique multimedia learning tool that affords students the possibility to experience and interact with the learning content in a unique way. From a hedonic perspective, the embedded visual representations and images, narrations, and interactive elements in VR can foster students’ motivation (e.g., interest, enjoyment, and engagement), which can positively affect their learning outcomes. From a utilitarian perspective, VR offers unique affordances that traditional classroom teaching cannot and places students at the center of the learning process, thus facilitating the learning of complex concepts that can otherwise be too abstract or difficult to learn. However, despite its unique character, VR’s effectiveness as a learning tool has not yet been established. In this regard, a growing number of empirical studies suggest that VR positively affects students’ interest, motivation, and presence in the virtual learning environment but does not necessarily lead to better academic achievement. One of the reasons often presented to explain these mixed results is that the embedded hedonic elements in virtual learning simulations—which are supposed to enhance students’ motivation—can also distract students, cause overstimulation, and increase cognitive load. Moreover, many currently available virtual learning simulations fail to incorporate instructional and motivational support. According to the cognitive theory of multimedia learning (CTML), students’ motivation plays a fundamental role in learning with multimedia; it fosters generative processing, which is the processing capacity required for students to make sense of the lesson content. At the same time, it has been shown that embedded motivational features (interactions, vivid simulations, and visual representations) and seductive details in VR (interesting elements that are irrelevant for the learning objectives) can take students’ attention away from their learning goals and thus impede effective learning in VR. Hence, the fundamental question is how to keep students focused on their learning goals and engaged in effective processing of the learning content—consequently mitigating the possible negative effects of the hedonic elements on their learning performance. It has been argued that the integration of motivational support into the instructional design of virtual learning simulations (hereafter referred to as the integrative approach) can facilitate appropriate cognitive processing of the learning content. This is because motivation and cognition are directly or indirectly linked, and motivation is an important driving force behind students’ behaviors (e.g., actions and interactions) and mental processes (e.g., attention, selection, organization, and integration of relevant learning content into prior knowledge). On the basis of the CTML and the integrative approach, this dissertation proposes that VR’s effectiveness can be enhanced when motivational cues are integrated into immersive learning environments. The concept of motivation in this dissertation is grounded in two other theoretical perspectives: the technology acceptance model (TAM) and the expectancy-value theory (EVT). Both theoretical perspectives foreground the role of motivation in learning and have practical implications for both the traditional classroom and multimedia learning tools. The TAM is the most parsimonious and widely used model to study and predict students’ attitudes towards multimedia learning tools. The TAM stipulates that students’ perceived usefulness of a given multimedia learning tool such as VR is the most important predictor of its acceptance—in terms of intention to use the learning tool—which constitutes a fundamental prerequisite for its effectiveness. In the classroom setting, EVT also highlights the role of students’ perceived usefulness of the learning activities for their learning performance. Notably, empirical research based on EVT has shown that classical usefulness interventions help to stimulate achievement-related behavior and improve learning outcomes. Most importantly, a large body of research on EVT provides clear and parsimonious methods on how to affect students’ motivation positively. Following this rationale, this dissertation pursues the following three main objectives: The first objective is to test whether integrating classical usefulness interventions (a learning usefulness or a daily-life usefulness intervention) into a virtual learning environment could also enhance VR’s effectiveness. The second is to investigate whether students’ acceptance of VR as a learning tool can be increased through motivational interventions and whether acceptance subsequently fosters students’ learning experience in VR (e.g., perceived presence in VR) and enhances their affective and cognitive learning outcomes. The third is to examine to what extent such usefulness interventions affect students’ visual attention and cognitive processing of the lesson content. To address these objectives, this dissertation applies an experimental approach in three studies and uses multimodal methods (e.g., self-report paper-pencil tests, integrated questionnaires in VR, knowledge tests, and eye-tracking analysis). The data (N = 196) used in these studies were collected from 10 different German high schools (academic track). This dissertation’s original contribution to the field is threefold: First, it considers the use of VR in education from a hedonic and utilitarian perspective and shows that the integration of motivational support into learning instruction in VR can help increase VR’s effectiveness. By using a classical motivational approach (usefulness interventions) to operationalize motivation, it also demonstrates that such parsimonious interventions can also be applied in the context of learning with VR. Second, contrary to almost all studies on TAM, this dissertation uses an experimental approach to test the assumptions of this model. Correspondently, it shows that a learning usefulness intervention can, in fact, increase students’ acceptance of VR as a learning tool, which subsequently affects their learning experience in VR. Third, using an eye-tracking-based approach, it shows that integrating motivation support into the virtual learning simulation positively affects how students process the learning content in VR: The usefulness interventions have a positive effect on students’ visual attention and cognitive processing of the lesson content in VR. From a theoretical perspective, this dissertation supports the integrative approach, according to which the integration of motivation into multimedia learning is fundamental for effective processing of the learning content and provides some evidence concerning the role of motivational support in students’ learning performance in VR. From a practical and educational perspective, this dissertation shows how a parsimonious usefulness intervention can be integrated effectively into virtual simulations and how students’ perception of VR— perceived usefulness and acceptance of VR as a learning tool—can be promoted. This dissertation also provides educators with valuable insights regarding the need for students to be pedagogically prepared and aware of the usefulness of educational tools before using them for learning and teaching purposes. Thereby, this dissertation contributes to our understanding regarding the importance of students’ motivation in learning with VR and how it can enhance VR’s effectiveness in science education. 

2026-07-31T00:00:00Z