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To explain the legitimation of inequality among the members of a social system, we blend system justification theory and the theory of social judgment. We identify adaptation and replacement as two major mechanisms of inequality legitimation and examine their influence in the unique setting of a natural experiment, the reunification of socialist East Germany and capitalist West Germany. We show that the new members of a society in which inequality is broadly endorsed and perceived as enduring will adapt to this perception and come to view inequality as acceptable. This process of adaptation reflects the subtle but powerful influence of collective legitimacy on an individual's tacit approval of inequality. Inequality also becomes legitimate as older cohorts are replaced by younger cohorts; however, this effect is weaker than the effect of adaptation. We contribute to the literature by demonstrating that developing and testing a theory of how inequality becomes legitimized can provide new insights into the ideational antecedents of inequality.

Endogeneity is a serious challenge for leadership research. To overcome the problem, researchers increasingly rely upon experimental designs, such as laboratory and field experiments. In this paper, we argue that natural experiments-in the form of standard natural experiments, instrumental variable, and regression discontinuity designs-o↵er additional opportunities to infer causal relationships. We conduct a systematic, cross-disciplinary review of 87 studies that leverage natural experimental designs to inquire into a leadership topic. We introduce the standard natural experiment, instrumental variable, and regression discontinuity design and use topic modelling to analyse which leadership topics have been investigated using natural experimental designs. Based on the review, we provide guidelines that we hope will assist scholars in discovering natural exogenous variations, selecting the most suitable form of natural experiment and by mobilizing appropriate statistical techniques and robustness checks. The paper is addressed to leadership and management scholars who aim to use natural experiments to infer causal relationships.

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Research on e-participation has grown significantly in the last years. This review focuses on public administrations, which are central actors in the solicitation and organization of e-participation and in the process of diffusion of more democratic decision-making in government contexts. However, research indicates that public administrations often struggle with technological and organizational changes, which suggests that e-participation initiatives may fail due to barriers within public administrations. Although researchers have paid considerable attention to the diffusion of e-participation in public administrations, research so far is multi-disciplinary and fragmented. The aim of this literature review is to structure and systematize the literature regarding phases of e-participation diffusion (adoption, implementation and institutionalization) and levels of analysis (micro, meso, and macro) to map the extant field of e-participation diffusion research and to provide a starting point for future research. The analysis shows that research has concentrated on the phases of adoption and implementation, and on the external context of public administrations (macro) and the organizational (meso) level. Overall, the review identifies major research gaps and offers avenues for future research.