Aktuelle Publikationen

Zu den atypischen Beschaeftigungsverhaeltnissen zaehlen wir im Folgenden (im Sinne einer Nominaldefinition) Teilzeit, geringfuegige Beschaeftigung/Mini- und Midijobs, befristete Beschaeftigung, Leiharbeit, Werkvertraege sowie Solo-Selbststaendigkeit. Die dieses Schwerpunktheftes spiegeln sowohl die inhaltliche als auch die methodische Heterogenitaet der aktuellen Diskussion wider. Sie differenzieren und erweitern den Informationsstand ueber einzelne Formen und deren Folgen (vor allem von Minijobs und Leiharbeit) sowie ueber die sowohl kurz- als auch langfristigen Probleme, welche mehreren Formen gemeinsam sind (z. B. Qualifikationsrisiken, geringe Chancen der Aufwaertsmobilitaet).

The paper presents the issue of female terrorism, focusing primarily on selected examples in the United States. It additionally discusses the issues related to the attempt to answer the question of whether a system of counter-terrorism should take into account the gender of members of terrorist organizations,and whether the increasing threat of female terrorism may be one of the catalysts behind institutional and legal changes.

Der Beitrag behandelt Formen atypischer Beschäftigungsverhältnisse. Besondere Berücksichtigung findet erstmalig der öffentliche Dienst und nicht – wie üblich – die Privatwirtschaft. Im ersten Teil werden die langfristige Entwicklung, der Umfang und die Strukturmerkmale verschiedener Formen atypischer Beschäftigung beschrieben, vor allem Teilzeit, Befristung, Minijobs und Leiharbeit. Der zweite Teil behandelt anhand verschiedener Kriterien die Frage, ob die atypischen Beschäftigungsformen zugleich prekär sind. Die Analyse zeigt parallele und unterschiedliche Entwicklungen in Privatwirtschaft und öffentlichem Dienst auf.

Recently, the behaviour of individual legislators as a response to electoral systems has been a main objective of research on representation. However, as indicators of electoral incentives have been bound to particular electoral systems, comparisons across systems are hindered. This article solves the problem by presenting a unified way of measuring electoral incentives through re-election probabilities. Using the example of Germany, it is shown how such probabilities are estimated and how their analysis contributes to our understanding of representation.

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This paper introduces a new method for finding causal relationships in spatiotemporal event data with potential applications in conflict research, criminology, and epidemiology. The method analyzes how different types of interventions affect subsequent levels of reactive events. Sliding spatiotemporal windows and statistical matching are used for robust and clean causal inference. Thereby, two well-described empirical problems in establishing causal relationships in event data analysis are resolved: the modifiable areal unit problem and selection bias. The paper presents the method formally and demonstrates its effectiveness in Monte Carlo simulations and an empirical example by showing how instances of civilian assistance to US forces changed in response to indiscriminate insurgent violence in Iraq.

The special issue 'Fragile States: A Political Concept’ investigates the emergence, dissemination and reception of the notion of ‘state fragility’. It analyses the process of conceptualisation, examining how the ‘fragile states’ concept was framed by policy makers to describe reality in accordance with their priorities in the fields of development and security. The contributors to the issue investigate the instrumental use of the ‘state fragility’ label in the legitimisation of Western policy interventions in countries facing violence and profound poverty. They also emphasise the agency of actors‘ on the receiving end’, describing how the elites and governments in so-called ‘fragile states’ have incorporated and reinterpreted the concept to fit their own political agendas. A first set of articles examines the role played by the World Bank, the OECD, the European Union and the g7+ coalition of ‘fragile states’ in the transnational diffusion of the concept, which is understood as a critical element in the new discourse on international aid and security. A second set of papers employs three case studies (Sudan, Indonesia and Uganda) to explore the processes of appropriation, reinterpretation and the strategic use of the ‘fragile state’ concept.

In this research note, we carried out a 2×2×2 experimental design to investigate the impact of the design of the privacy and confidentiality assurances on the respondents’ probability to participate in or break off the Web survey. In these experiments, we examined the effect of (1) emphasizing the privacy rights in the e-mail invitation, (2) placing the privacy rights in bold on the welcome screen, and (3) having a checkbox in which the respondents have to indicate that they have read and agreed to these assurances. We expected that the more these rights were emphasized, the less likely the respondents were to complete the survey. However, the way these assurances are presented in the e-mail invitation or on the welcome screen has no significant influence on the response rate.

This article reviews the existing theoretical arguments and empirical findings linking renewable and non-renewable natural resources to the onset, intensity, and duration of intrastate as well as interstate armed conflict. Renewable resources are supposedly connected to conflict via scarcity, while non-renewable resources are hypothesized to lead to conflict via resource abundance. Based upon our analysis of these two streams in the literature, it turns out that the empirical support for the resource scarcity argument is rather weak. However, the authors obtain some evidence that resource abundance is likely to be associated with conflict. The article concludes that further research should generate improved data on low-intensity forms of conflict as well as resource scarcity and abundance at subnational and international levels, and use more homogenous empirical designs to analyze these data. Such analyses should pay particular attention to interactive effects and endogeneity issues in the resource–conflict relationship.

Machine-coded datasets likely represent the future of event data analysis. We assess the use of one of these datasets—Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT)—for the micro-level study of political violence by comparing it to two hand-coded conflict event datasets. Our findings indicate that GDELT should be used with caution for geo-spatial analyses at the subnational level: its overall correlation with hand-coded data is mediocre, and at the local level major issues of geographic bias exist in how events are reported. Overall, our findings suggest that due to these issues, researchers studying local conflict processes may want to wait for a more reliable geocoding method before relying too heavily on this set of machine-coded data.

There is no shortage of political science literature on field research regarding issues of research design, methodology, and data evaluation. Yet, the practical and organisational intricacies that precede successful fieldwork are frequently overlooked. This lack of methodical advice may be due to the impression that field research is highly contextual, and so case-specific that general guidelines, which apply to all field research endeavours alike, are inconceivable. While we acknowledge the organisational complexity of field research, we disagree with the notion that the preparatory dimension of fieldwork is by necessity unique for every undertaking. Rather, recommendations for common challenges that occur during the preparation and organisation phase of a field trip can be identified and formulated. Consequently, we present and discuss ten organisational ‘do’s’ preceding successful field research. Current graduate students and future field researchers will regard these ten pointers as useful hints in the organisation of their own endeavour. While the list is by no means exhaustive, the ten recommendations will lower the organisational entry costs of aspiring field researchers, and enable them to hit the ground running upon arrival in the field.

In den letzten Jahren sind im Politikfeld Migration neue zivilgesellschaftliche Akteure entstanden, die über keinerlei formale Legitimation und Entscheidungskompetenzen verfügen, jedoch Einfluss auf die Gestaltung von Migrationspolitik nehmen. Die Emergenz von Akteuren wie dem Sachverständigenrat deutscher Stiftungen für Integration und Migration und der Hochrangigen Konsensgruppe Fachkräftebedarf und Zuwanderung spiegelt neue Governance-Strukturen im Politikfeld Migration. Im Mittelpunkt des Beitrags steht die Frage, welche Legitimationsstrategien diese Akteure anwenden, um ihre fehlende staatliche Mandatierung zu kompensieren. Die Untersuchung dieser Frage erfolgt im Rahmen einer qualitativen Fallstudie anhand eines Methodenmix aus Experteninterviews, Dokumentenanalyse und qualitativer Medieninhaltsanalyse. Der Beitrag kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass quasi-staatliche Organisationsformen, eine intensive Medienstrategie und Formen informellen Regierens zentrale Merkmale der neuen Akteure sind. Die Voraussetzungen für ihre Emergenz liegen in Veränderungen in der Zivilgesellschaft und einer zunehmende Politisierung von Akteuren im Stiftungssektor. Diese Entwicklungen haben dazu geführt, dass in jüngster Zeit auch in der deutschen Migrationspolitik eine neue Dynamik von Governance-Prozessen und Formen informellen Regierens entstanden ist.