The current global refugee crisis puts both refugees and Western societies to the test. The challenges refugees face within their host countries depend on not only situational circumstances, but also the attitudinal climate they confront. A negative public can have severe consequences for refugees’ integration. This article asks two basic questions that have received little attention in previous studies: How do attitudes towards refugees with different flight reasons differ when compared with attitudes towards immigrants from European Union countries? What factors influence those attitudes? These questions are answered for the exemplary case of Germany based on new data from the German General Social Survey, which was conducted during the height of the refugee crisis in mid-2016. Our results reveal that refugees are perceived less positively than European Union immigrants and the origin of this negative perception mainly lies in increased feelings of threat.

This article analyses the determinants of citizens' trust in the European Commission. We examined four predictors of citizens' trust in political institutions: political participation, value congruence, performance outcomes and attributability of performance outcomes. We argue that these factors impact trust in the European Commission, which is a necessary precondition for making a risky investment and willingness to pay taxes, which can be understood as behavioural consequences of trust. To examine our hypotheses we have implemented a vignette study. Our analyses show that value congruence, the European Commission's perceived performance and attributability impact risky investments via trust, as expected. Political participation exerts a direct significant influence on risky investments.

This research studied the concept of enacted peer support during adolescence by means of the Harry Potter Series. A network approach was used. Results indicated the importance of reciprocity and transitivity for enacted peer support during adolescence. Contrary to our expectations, gender, age and personality traits did not affect enacted peer support. No homophily effects based on gender and age were detected. However, students were found to be more supportive of students with similar personality traits. We hope this study adds to the current knowledge on peer support in adolescence and promotes the use of social theories and methods in literacy research.

In the course of the New Public Management reform movement, public administrations have increasingly implemented output-oriented control schemes, including systems to evaluate employees’ performance. However, contradictory evidence exists about how such output control that fundamentally differs from traditional bureaucratic control affects performance-relevant employee attitudes and behaviors. In this article, we present evidence that performance evaluations have positive or negative consequences depending on the specific design of the system. Analyzing survey data from 184 employees and 60 supervisors from the German municipal administration by structural equation modeling, we find performance evaluations employed as Management by Objectives (MbO) have a positive impact on trust in the employer and that those designed as Systematic Performance Appraisal (SPA) affect trust negatively. Both relationships are mediated by perceived cooperative climate. These findings advocate employing performance evaluations that are participative, adaptive, learning-oriented, and transparent and thus enable fair cooperation between organizational members.

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