Aktuelle Publikationen

This article ventures to be one of the first studies that examines the relationship between corruption and electoral turnout on the sub-national level. Taking Portugal, a southern European country with nationally relatively high levels of corruption and relatively low levels of turnout, as a case, we examine the relationship between the two concepts across Portugal’s 304 out of 308 municipalities for the legislative elections in 2005 and 2009. Controlling for municipal level GDP per capita, unemployment, the percentage of senior citizens, and population density, as well as the closeness of the election and the district magnitude, we find corruption to be a rather strong mobilizing agent. Compared to “clean” municipalities, our results indicate that turnout is several percentage points higher in “very corrupt” municipalities.

As part of the Open Government Initiative, the Barack Obama administration has called for new forms of collaboration with stakeholders to increase the innovativeness of public service delivery. Federal managers are employing a new policy instrument called Challenge.gov to implement open innovation concepts invented in the private sector to crowdsource solutions from previously untapped problem solvers and to leverage collective intelligence to tackle complex social and technical public management problems. The authors highlight the work conducted by the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies at the General Services Administration, the administrator of the Challenge.gov platform. Specifically, this Administrative Profile features the work of Tammi Marcoullier, program manager for Challenge.gov, and Karen Trebon, deputy program manager, and their role as change agents who mediate collaborative practices between policy makers and public agencies as they navigate the political and legal environments of their local agencies. The profile provides insights into the implementation process of crowdsourcing solutions for public management problems, as well as lessons learned for designing open innovation processes in the public sector.

Social media applications are extending the information and communication technology landscape in the public sector and are used to increase government transparency, participation and collaboration in the U.S. federal government. The success, impact and performance of these new forms of bi-directional and networked interactions can provide insights to understand compliance with the mandate of the Open Government Initiative. Many government agencies are experimenting with the use of social media, however very few actively measure the impact of their digital interactions. This article builds on insights from social media directors in the U.S. federal government highlighting their current lack of measurement practices for social media interactions. Based on their articulated needs for measurement, existing rules regulating the extent of measurement practices and technological features of the main social media platforms, a framework is presented that traces online interactions to mission support and the resulting social media tactics. Implications for both researchers and practitioners are discussed.

We investigate whether uranium, similar to other resources, is associated with armed conflicts. The analysis uses grid cells in Africa to test this hypothesis. Results from logistic regressions reveal that uranium operations are not an independent conflict risk; however, it is significantly linked to local conflict events when interacting with ethnic exclusion. The analysis is supplemented by process tracing in four countries, where armed conflict broke out after uranium operations started (DR Congo, Central African Republic, Niger and South Africa). We find substantial evidence for a link only in the case of Niger. Our results suggest that uranium promotes intrastate conflict only under specific circumstances.

The outbidding model of ethnic party competition predicts that ethnic parties adopt radical strategies to maximize support among voters of an ethnic group. In contrast, this article argues that ethnic parties have a wider range of strategies at their disposal. Integrating recent findings, ethnic party strategies are defined by the criteria of appeal and policy position as ‘static bidding‘, ‘ethnic underbidding‘, ‘ethnic outbidding‘, ‘lateral bidding‘, ‘lateral underbidding’ and ‘lateral outbidding‘. Empirically, a comparison of strategies adopted by ethnic parties competing for votes of the Hungarian and Bosniak minorities in Serbia shows variance of strategies within and across groups despite an environment conducive to outbidding and while holding institutional context factors constant. Factors causing this variance are explored through content analysis of 18 semi-structured interviews with ethnic party elites. An explanation that links strategies to parties' goals and the incentives of the structure of intra- and inter-ethnic competition is suggested for further research.

How does ideological congruency affect the speed of legislative decision-making in the European Union? Despite the crucial importance of actor preferences, the effect of partisan alignments and ideological composition of the European institutions has largely been neglected. However, we argue that the ideological congruence between legislative bodies has an important effect on the duration of policy-making. We test our theoretical expectations based on a large new dataset on decision-making speed in the European Union using event history analysis. The findings confirm our theoretical claim indicating that the ideological distance between the European institutions slows down policy-making which has important implications for the problem-solving capacity of political systems more generally.

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dc.contributor.author: Bates, Robert H.; Block, Steven A.; Fayad, Ghada

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While Europarties have received increasing attention in recent years, little is known about how they arrive at common policy positions, given their strong internal ideological heterogeneity. In order to explain position formation within Europarties, this article argues that national parties compete with each other in an attempt to upload their own policy positions to their Europarty. The article hypothesizes that their ability to succeed in these attempts depends on their legislative resources. The argument is tested by analysing position formation within the four major Europarties for all European Parliament elections between 1979 and 2004. The empirical results confirm that position choice is skewed towards parties with a large seat share, which has important implications for political representation in Europe.

With the post-industrialization and flexibilization of European labour markets, research on social and economic correlates of labour market vulnerability and weak labour market attachment is growing. Part of this literature conceptualizes these correlates in terms of dualization and insider–outsider divides in an attempt to explore their political implications: this article is written in order to contribute to this strand of research. In this article, we propose a conceptualization and measurement of labour market insiders and outsiders, based on their respective risk of being atypically employed or unemployed. We propose both a dichotomous measure of insiders/outsiders and a continuous measure of the degree of an individual’s ‘outsiderness’. We argue that such risk-based measures are particularly suited for research on the policy preferences and political implications of insider–outsider divides. On the basis of EU-SILC and national household panel data, we provide a map of dualization across different countries and welfare regimes. We then explore the correlates of labour market vulnerability – that is, outsiderness – by relating it to indicators of income and upward job mobility, as well as labour market policy preferences. The results consistently confirm an impact of labour market vulnerability, indicating a potential for a politicization of the insider/outsider conflict.

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dc.contributor.author: Rost, Katja

The US federal government has set up social media accounts on popular platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to make government more participatory, transparent, and collaborative. Challenges facing the US and other governments in the increasing usage of social media include expectations of citizens, civil society organizations, and the media of radical transparency as well as citizen relationship management and customer service. In general, social media keeps challenging the existing status quo of governments around the world.

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Social media applications are slowly diffusing across all levels of government. The organizational dynamics underlying adoption and use decisions follow a process similar to that for previous waves of new information and communication technologies. The authors suggest that the organizational diffusion of these types of new information and communication technologies, initially aimed at individual use and available through markets, including social media applications, follows a three-stage process. First, agencies experiment informally with social media outside of accepted technology use policies. Next, order evolves from the first chaotic stage as government organizations recognize the need to draft norms and regulations. Finally, organizational institutions evolve that clearly outline appropriate behavior, types of interactions, and new modes of communication that subsequently are formalized in social media strategies and policies. For each of the stages, the authors provide examples and a set of propositions to guide future research.

In 2009, the departments in the executive branch of the U.S. federal government received the presidential marching order to “harness new technologies” in order to become more transparent, collaborative and participatory. Given this mandate, this article sets out to provide insights from qualitative interviews with social media directors to understand the factors that influence internal adoption decisions to use social media applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, or blogs. Three distinct factors influence the adoption decisions of social media directors: information about best practices in their informal network of peers, passive observations of perceived best practices in the public and private sector, and “market-driven” citizen behavior. The resulting adoption tactics include: (1) representation, (2) engagement, and (3) networking. The findings point to the need for higher degrees of formalized knowledge sharing when it comes to disruptive technology innovations such as social media use in highly bureaucratic communication environments. Recommendations based on the lessons learned are provided for practitioners and social media researchers to develop social media tactics for different organizational purposes in government.

Die Wahlkampf-Kampagne Barack Obamas von 2008 machte Twitter auch in Deutschland bekannt. Aber erst eine Kampagne gegen vermeintliche Internetzensur brachte die Veränderungen durch den Dienst auch hierzulande zum Vorschein: Politik wird zugänglicher und die Kommunikation schneller. Kann die Politik dem folgen?

This article examines the first direct elections to minority councils in Serbia. It seeks to build hypotheses on the interplay between minority council elections and the overall patterns of intra-ethnic party competition in divided societies. Following an introduction to minority politics in Serbia, the authors analyse the campaign for the Bosniak and the Hungarian minority council. Evidence from field research suggests that minority council elections reflect the situation of intra-ethnic competition and provide an additional arena for ethnic outbidding for new ethnic parties.

The outbidding model of ethnic politics focuses on party competition in an ethnically perfectly segmented electoral market where no party appeals to voters across the ethnic divide. The power sharing model retains this assumption, yet tries to prevent outbidding through moderation-inducing institutional design. Empirically, imperfectly segmented electoral markets and variance of ethnic party strategies beyond radical outbidding have been observed. To provide a stepping stone towards a more complete theory of ethnic party competition, this article introduces the notion of nested competition, defined as party competition in an imperfectly segmented market where some – but not all – parties make offers across ethnic divides and where competition in intra-ethnic arenas is nested within an inter-ethnic arena of party competition. The notion of nested competition helps explain why ethnic outbidding is not omnipresent in contemporary multi-ethnic democracies. A moderate position on the ethnic dimension that appears inauspicious from the perspective of intra-ethnic competition can turn into the strategically superior choice once ethnic parties take the whole system of competitive interactions within intra- and inter-ethnic arenas into account. A case study of nested competition for Hungarian votes in the Vojvodina region of Northern Serbia illustrates the conceptual innovations.