Aktuelle Publikationen

How do we understand political polarization within the U.S. climate change debate? This article unpacks the different components of the debate to determine the source of the political divide that is so noted in the mainstream media and academic literatures. Through analysis of the content of congressional hearings on the issue of climate change, we are able to explain political polarization of the issue more fully. In particular, our results show that, contrary to representations in the mainstream media, there is increasing consensus over the science of the issue. Discussions of the type of policy instrument and the economic implications of regulating carbon dioxide emissions, however, continue to polarize opinion. This article concludes by exploring how these findings help us understand more recent political events around climate change.

Mit der Bildung der Regierung im Dezember 2011 wurde neben dem Koalitionsvertrag ein Abkommen über die sechste Staatsreform in Belgien geschlossen. Die im Jahr 2012 beschlossenen Reformen betrafen zunächst den Gemeinschaftskonflikt im Brüsseler Umland, die Teilung des Wahlkreises Brüssel-Halle-Vilvoorde sowie die Institutionen der Region Brüssel. Der Artikel erläutert die bisherigen Ergebnisse der Reform und zeichnet die Konfliktlinien während der Verhandlungen nach. Die ausgehandelten Kompromisse fügen sich in die Tradition vorangegangener Reformen ein, bei denen die Forderungen der flämischen Seite gegen Zugeständnisse an die frankophone Minderheit bedient wurden. Letztere bieten weiteres Konfliktpotential und Ansatzpunkt für Kritik von den flämischen Nationalisten, welche bei den Provinz- und Kommunalwahlen erneut Wahlsiege feiern konnten und weiterhin die Unabhängigkeit Flanderns als finales Ziel ihrer Bestrebungen ankündigen.

dc.title:

Under what conditions and to what extent do external officeholders in parliamentary democracies constrain the cabinet's freedom of action? The article argues that we must analyse both institutional powers and officeholders’ incentives to use them to obtain an unbiased estimate of the expected constraint. It measures the incentives dimension via the selection method of external officeholders and develops an index to capture the likelihood that such officeholders hold preferences deviant from those of the cabinet. Analysing original data on four external constraint institutions in 25 European democracies, the article shows major variation in the incentives to constrain the cabinet across both offices and countries. Furthermore, it demonstrates that institutional powers and incentives for their use are empirically largely independent dimensions.

This article presents the Konstanz One-Sided Violence Event Dataset (KOSVED) which allows researchers to study the dynamics of civilian abuse in 17 civil wars. The dataset provides, based on a multitude of sources, detailed information on the number of civilians killed or harmed by government or rebel troops. Where information is available, KOSVED also documents the dates of these events as well as the identities of the perpetrators and the means used in terrorizing the civilian population. The authors argue that the content analysis of news reports offers relatively accurate figures on those events that the perpetrators cannot hide from the public and that receive prominent media attention. Presumably, such information motivates potential short-term retaliatory acts by the group that has been the target of one-sided violence. The analysis suggests that, over the course of a conflict, almost all actors attack unarmed citizens, although to radically different degrees and relying on different means.

The analysis of the association between welfare state institutions and individual-level attitudes has become an important research topic in the past years. This article focuses on the association between the institutional set-up of the education system, the division of labour between public and private sources in funding human capital formation, and preferences for redistribution. Applying a multilevel research design with International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) survey data for 20 OECD countries, the main empirical finding of this article is that individuals in countries with high levels of private spending on education are less willing to support government-induced redistribution. One possible interpretation of this finding is that the specific kind of education financing influences the prevailing norms of social solidarity and expectations vis-à-vis the state.

dc.title:

dc.title:

dc.contributor.author: Bruch, Heike

Much of the International Relations literature assumes that there is a “depth versus participation” dilemma in international politics: shallower international agreements attract more countries and greater depth is associated with less participation. We argue that this conjecture is too simple and probably misleading because the depth of any given cooperative effort is in fact multidimensional. This multidimensionality manifests itself in the design characteristics of international agreements: in particular, the specificity of obligations, monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, dispute settlement mechanisms, positive incentives (assistance), and organizational structures (secretariats). We theorize that the first three of these design characteristics have negative and the latter three have positive effects on participation in international cooperative efforts. Our empirical testing of these claims relies on a dataset that covers more than 200 global environmental treaties. We find a participation-limiting effect for the specificity of obligations, but not for monitoring and enforcement. In contrast, we observe that assistance provisions in treaties have a significant and substantial positive effect on participation. Similarly, dispute settlement mechanisms tend to promote treaty participation. The main implication of our study is that countries do not appear to stay away from agreements with monitoring and enforcement provisions, but that the inclusion of positive incentives and dispute settlement mechanisms can promote international cooperation. In other words, our findings suggest that policymakers do not necessarily need to water down global treaties in order to obtain more participation.

In this article I analyse the changing contours of public sector employment relations in Germany during and after the financial and debt crisis. In order to understand what is distinctive in German experience and what is similar with that elsewhere, I provide a comparative perspective of selected EU member states, especially Austria. First, I describe in some detail the impact of various austerity measures on public sector employees. Second, I analyse collective consequences and challenges for corporate actors and labour market institutions, especially unions and collective bargaining. Third, I offer a brief prognosis for future developments.

Comparing two different geographical blocks is not easy given their structural differences. This is more pronounced when we compare realities whose data is insufficiently consistent and accurate. That is the case of a large number of African countries but also of some zones on the “Old Continent” whose data is hard to manage, being the Balkans a good example of this. Both regions have or had internal conflicts. Democracy and the democratization processes seem to be the path towards a peaceful resolution of conflicts in these regions, in spite of a persistent geopolitical framework of latent conflict. Will democracy, having as its basis the liberal thesis of peace between States, be a sufficient element to have a stable State? Or, how the theory sees the combination of a recent democracy with existing ethnical divisions in a certain country? Having the previous in mind we will make a comparative study aiming at the understanding of recent third wave democratization processes and ethnic conflicts influence on political stability.

Purpose – The steady increase of data on human behavior collected online holds significant research potential for social scientists. The purpose of this paper is to add a systematic discussion of different online services, their data generating processes, the offline phenomena connected to these data, and by demonstrating, in a proof of concept, a new approach for the detection of extraordinary offline phenomena by the analysis of online data. Design/methodology/approach – To detect traces of extraordinary offline phenomena in online data, the paper determines the normal state of the respective communication environment by measuring the regular dynamics of specific variables in data documenting user behavior online. In its proof of concept, the paper does so by concentrating on the diversity of hashtags used on Twitter during a given time span. The paper then uses the seasonal trend decomposition procedure based on loess (STL) to determine large deviations between the state of the system as forecasted by the model and the empirical data. The paper takes these deviations as indicators for extraordinary events, which led users to deviate from their regular usage patterns. Findings – The paper shows in the proof of concept that this method is able to detect deviations in the data and that these deviations are clearly linked to changes in user behavior triggered by offline events. Originality/value – The paper adds to the literature on the link between online data and offline phenomena. The paper proposes a new theoretical approach to the empirical analysis of online data as indicators of offline phenomena. The paper will be of interest to social scientists and computer scientists working in the field.

In March 2012 Abdoulaye Wade was defeated by Macky Sall in the hotly contested presidential elections in Senegal. This article uses the concept of party-voter linkage to examine how and why Wade and his party, the Parti Démocratique Sénégalais (PDS), lost touch with the electorate. It is argued that this failure must be viewed within the context of a complex process of social change that challenged traditional, often clientelistic, forms of linkage. As an alternative strategy, the PDS emphasised the personal charisma of its leader. Charismatic linkage, however, is naturally unstable, and the PDS began to lose public support. These findings suggest that political parties in Senegal cannot build their strategies on clientelism and charisma alone, they will have to begin to compete over issues and develop programmatic visions. If this challenge is not taken up, the long-term prospects for democratic representation and effective linkage are uncertain.

In this contribution, we comparatively analyse the discourse networks generated by three shooting rampages. We formulate hypotheses on the extent to which (a) the framing cohesion of the status quo coalition and (b) the perceived causal complexity of the event are associated with varying degrees of subsequent gun policy change. Drawing on news reports in major newspapers, we collect information on actors and frames and systematically analyse those data with the tool Discourse Network Analyzer. The networks show that major gun policy change is possible if the status quo coalition is internally divided and the event's causal complexity is low. Incremental adjustments are also likely if the status quo coalition lacks cohesion, but if additionally causal complexity is high, i.e., the problem signified by the event is disputed. Finally, if the status quo coalition manages to retain its framing cohesion, deadlock is likely to occur regardless of the event's perceived causal complexity.