Three LUF Grants Awarded to Faculty Governance and Global Affairs
The ‘Leids Universiteits Fonds’ (LUF) award grants to research and educational project in various academic fields once a year. This year, Honorata Mazepus, Tanachia Ashikali, and Jaroslaw Kantorowicz of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs were three of the recipients of such a grant.
Winners
Of the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs (FGGA), the following researchers were awarded a grant:
Institute of Public Administration
- Tanachia Ashikali received €11,075 for the project: ‘What does it take to be an inclusive leader? Unravelling determinants of inclusive leadership in public organisations.’
Institute of Security and Global Affairs
- Honorata Mazepus received €10,000 for the project: ‘Information as a battle-ground: why do people believe in ‘fake news’?’
- Jaroslaw Kantorowicz received €10,000 for the project: ‘The Price of Creativity: An Experimental Investigation of Authors’ Remuneration Models.’
Springboard
The grants for academic talent of the ‘Leids Universiteits Fonds’ (LUF), varying roughly between €5,000 and €25,000, often function as an important springboard for submitting requests with NWO and other institutions.
The funding for the grants comes from the general LUF funds, several Named Funds which are managed by LUF, and from various collaborations with, for example, the ‘Gratama Stichting’, the ‘Stichting Elise Mathilde Fonds’, and the ‘Stichting Verpakking en Milieu’.
Tanachia Ashikali
What does it take to be an inclusive leader? Unravelling determinants of inclusive leadership in public organizations
In order to improve their services, more and more public organisations are striving towards creating an inclusive work environment. Inclusive leadership contributions towards this goal by providing a work environment where employees feel free to express themselves, can work together effectively in a team, and can identify with the organisation. Unfortunately, there is not much known about under which conditions inclusive leadership is formed and how it can be developed. This projects aims to gain more insight in the precedents for inclusive leadership. We know from scientific research that both personal traits as well as contextual circumstances play a crucial role in other types of leadership. For this project, the focus will be on gender, ethnic cultural diversity, and managerial diversity beliefs. Organisational influences such as structure, culture, and organisation of work will be taken into consideration as possible explanatory factors. The project will start by mapping the various personal and organisational factors that may play a dampening or stimulation role when it comes to showcasing inclusive leadership by means of in-depth interviews with managers in several governmental departments. The various obtained factors and an assessment of inclusive leadership will subsequently become part of a survey that will be submitted to a representative group of managers within the public sector. And finally, resulting propositions on the influence of various factors of inclusive leadership will be tested by using statistical analysis.
Jaroslaw Kantorowicz
The Price of Creativity: An Experimental Investigation of Authors’ Remuneration Models
If you created your first poem, or composed a song, or wrote a book, how much compensation should you receive for it? Which price would be fair given the uncertainty of your success? The question of fair compensation of creators occupies many countries, and different models of copyrights’ protection were proposed. Some countries set a minimum price intermediaries (e.g. publishing houses, record companies) should pay creators for their piece, others require intermediaries to provide creators with some percentage of the income derived from their creation. Alternative models include a requirement to renegotiate the price if the creation was more successful than expected, or simply give a fair price given the common practice. Which model reaches the goal of improving creators’ position in their negotiations with intermediaries is an empirical question. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, it was not tested empirically, and those models were not compared to a world without any legal rule. Most of the interventions are based on assumptions about the behavior of the parties. However, to better inform policy makers, evidence-based conclusions should be provided. Therefore, we intend to employ experimental methods to try to assess the efficiency of each model in reaching its goal to better inform policy makers, benefit creators, and advance the research in this field (including stimulating the use of new methodology to answer legal and public governance questions).
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Dr. Honorata Mazepus
Information as a battle-ground: why do people believe in “fake news”?
Getting reliable information is important for people to navigate their daily lives and to make (political and other) decisions and choices. However, the recent spread of fake news through traditional and online media shows that various agents are supplying misinformation, while simultaneously their audiences are eager to pick it up, forward it, and believe in it. Why do people believe false information? Thanks to the LUF grant, I will continue the work started with colleagues from Leiden and Aarhus University to understand whether conflict perceptions and prior exposure to fake news influences the belief in misinformation. I will apply insights from motivated reasoning theory to understand what makes people believe fake news about different international actors. In particular, I will use experiments to research why citizens in Eastern Europe believe misinformation about the European Union and Russia. Countries in this region are strongly affected by disinformation battles, influencing their fragile political systems and the success of EU policy in the region. However, there is an abundance of examples of the spread of misinformation (e.g. US election, downing of the MH17, annexation of Crimea) that shows that this research is relevant beyond the studied region.