Aktuelle Publikationen

Der Beitrag analysiert mit den Organisations- und Verhandlungsstrukturen der Arbeitgeberverbände des öffentlichen Dienstes einen Bereich, der in der Literatur nur wenig bearbeitet wird. Besondere Bedeutung kommt hierbei den erheblichen organisatorischen Veränderungen bzw. sozio-ökonomischen Wandlungsprozessen zu, welche zu vertikalen und horizontalen Differenzierungen geführt haben. Solche Differenzierungen lassen sich auf den einzelnen Ebenen des öffentlichen Dienstes (Bund, Länder, Gemeinden) beobachten, aber auch im Bereich der privatisierten Unternehmen (Bahn, Post). Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach, welche Folgen diese weitere Ausdifferenzierung für die besondere Form der Organisation von Arbeitgeberinteressen hat. Hierbei steht neben den Verbändestrukturen auch die institutionelle Stabilität der sektoralen Arbeitsbeziehungen im Mittelpunkt. Als Fazit bleibt festzuhalten, dass sich im öffentlichen Sektor zwar Prozesse der organisierten, keinesfalls der wilden Dezentralisierung von Arbeitsbeziehungen nachweisen lassen, von einer "Erosion" der Arbeitgeberverbände kann aber nicht die Rede sein.

Aviation is a prime example of a policy area where the clash over supranational regulatory responsibilities had pronounced economic repercussions. In this article, we examine the economic effects of the European Commission's struggle to obtain competences in international air transport. Stock market reactions to key events in the political conflict between 1995 and 2004 unravel whether investor beliefs about the distribution of power in the EU follow the basic conjectures of neofunctionalism, intergovernmentalism or institutionalism. The event studies show that particularly judicial proceedings and the involvement of the ECJ send credible integration signals to financial markets. This supports the hypothesis that investors consider the subtleties of the EU's decision-making apparatus carefully and only react to developments that definitively alter the political regime and thus also the market situation. These findings are in line with an institutionalist interpretation of a reform that has radically changed the international aviation regime.

This contribution examines morality policies from the perspective of the comparative public policy literature. We analyse which concepts, theories and explanatory factors are useful given the peculiarities of this policy field. We answer the question to what extent morality policies are different by analysing these central aspects from a policy change perspective. In view of the identified problems in morality policy research, we suggest an alternative concept of measurement. It is based on the assumption that the constitutive cleavage underlying morality policies refers to a single dimension on which changes occur, namely, the degree of restrictiveness of a given regulatory provision. As such, this paper contributes to the emerging field of morality policy research by outlining future venues of research along with an overview of the different existing approaches.

Parliaments often elect holders of important extra-parliamentary offices such as heads of state, constitutional judges, heads of audit institutions and ombudsmen. What drives the behaviour of parliamentary actors and the outcome of such elections? This article explains actor behaviour theoretically, drawing on spatial factors, principal-agent arguments about the importance of nonspatial candidate characteristics and signaling arguments about competitive considerations beyond the specific election. Empirically, it provides the first comparative analysis of such elections outside the United States Senate using original data on 100 elections for four external offices in 14 Western European parliaments. The findings show that spatial variables, nonspatial candidate characteristics and features of the competitive context systematically affect the election outcome. The article contributes to comparative parliamentary research in general by demonstrating how parliamentary activities, other than lawmaking, can be analysed using established theories and by showing that consensual aggregate outcomes can be explained within a competition-based rational choice model.

Affect Listeners are applied as tools for studying the role of emotions in online communication. They need to interact both in dyads as well as in group settings with multiple users. In this paper, we present the evolution of such affective dialog systems from a focus on dyadic interaction to multi-party interaction on chat networks. Starting from experiments on the use of these dialog systems in virtual dyadic settings, we outline the requirements, design and implementation decisions necessary to apply the systems to affective interactions with multiple users. Finally, we introduce two realisations of Interactive Affective Bots designed for such interaction scenarios that integrate modelling of individuals and groups as part of their decision mechanism.

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We illustrate the power of “logical models” (Taagepera, 2007) by offering a three-parameter model of the relationship between the effective number of parties and electoral turnout that makes use of the constraints on what parameter values are internally coherent given boundary conditions to specify functional form, and seeks not optimal curve fitting but rather a direct model testing. In our model, one parameter reflects an effect that generally acts to increase turnout as the effective number of parties increases, another an effect that generally acts to decrease turnout as the effective number of parties increases, while a third parameter allows for baseline variation in turnout across countries (or within countries across elections). We fit this model to district-level data from 237 elections held in 17 countries, representing a wide range of electoral system types generating multi-party contests, with over 20,000 district-election observations. The basic intuition, that turnout rises to a peak as the effective number of parties increases and then falls slowly, fits our data pretty well.

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This essay outlines how the redesign of Georgian political institutions after the Rose Revolution was largely driven by the power-seeking strategies of the new elite. Building on previous critical assessments of the post-revolution reforms, the author argues that the new elite engaged in the “strategic institutional transfer”. While publically touting western institutions as a basis for reform, the reformers strategically neglected crucial components of the institutions which they aimed to transfer. This ultimately strengthened authoritarian institutions behind a democratic façade. To conclude, the author discusses discuss how this power-seeking strategy may have recently backfired in the recent parliamentary elections and potentially “accidentally” contributed to the democratization of Georgia.

The implementation of the US military surge in Iraq coincided with a significant reduction in ethnic violence. Two explanations have been proposed for this result: The first is that the troop surge worked by increasing counterinsurgent capacity, whereas the second argument is that ethnic unmixing and the establishment of relatively homogenous enclaves were responsible for declining violence in Baghdad through reducing contact. We address this question using an agent-based model that is built on GIS-coded data on violence and ethnic composition in Baghdad. While we cannot fully resolve the debate about the effectiveness of the surge, our model shows that patterns of violence and segregation in Baghdad are consistent with a simple mechanism of ethnically motivated attacks and subsequent migration. Our modeling exercise also informs current debates about the effectiveness of counterinsurgency operations. We implement a simple policing mechanism in our model and show that even small levels of policing can dramatically mitigate subsequent levels of violence. However, our results also show that the timing of these efforts is crucial; early responses to ethnic violence are highly effective, but quickly lose impact as their implementation is delayed.

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dc.contributor.author: Kwak, Nojin; Parycek, Peter; Skoric, Marko M.

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