Aktuelle Publikationen

This article 1 explores the recent higher education governance reforms in France, which can be viewed as the result of tensions between historical legacies and transnational competitive pressures. While most recent research on the i nternationalization or Europeanization of higher education focusses on the Bologna Process, I show that other factors such as in ternational compar a- tive rankings and domestic public sector reforms are crucial variables in explaining changing patterns go v- ernance. In a state of gradual change since the mid - 1980s (Musselin 2001), French higher educ ation has recently undergone extensive reforms, which were a c- celerated after the very poor performance of French uni versities in the Shanghai Ranking. Once considered to be the epitome of state -centeredness and educational immobilisme , French educational policy -makers have recently embarked on a quest for international legitim a- cy and increasingly aligned themselves with external models perceived as successful. While the ongoing reforms have most frequently been described as “mar- ketization”, I show that the reality is more complex and that Frenc h higher education has also taken on nume r- ous characteristics of Humboldtism (i.e., research - centered universities) while maintaining its traditionally strong degree of state design and intervention

Africa experienced a wave of democratization over the past 20 years and this increase in democracy, we find, positively and significantly affects income per capita. Our dynamic panel data results suggest that countries only slowly converge to their long-run income values as predicted by current democracy levels, however. African countries may therefore be currently too democratic relative to their income levels. In keeping with this possibility, a significant number of countries are experiencing political ‘back sliding’: elections are won by the use of illicit tactics, term limits on political leaders have been overturned and there have been unconstitutional seizures of power.

Recent debate has highlighted the importance of communication and arguments to explanations of the progress and results of international negotiations. Various studies have indicated that member states taking part in EU negotiations do indeed use arguments, either owing to a normative conception of arguing as a ‘truth seeking discourse’ or a conception of strategic arguing. We also know that contextual conditions, such as the extent to which negotiations are publicized, or the characteristics of the issue being negotiated, affect the degree of arguing. This contribution takes a different view, focusing on actor-specific use of arguments. I find that some member states are more inclined to use arguments than others and try to find explanations that could account for this variation. I hypothesize that the availability of power resources derived from bargaining theory should affect the use of arguments. The subject under investigation here is the EU Intergovernmental Conference leading to the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997). By means of an automated content analysis of member states' position papers, I show that member states who have good alternatives to the agreement being negotiated are less likely to use arguments.

The German election year 2009 saw the first attempts by political parties to include Web 2.0 services in their online campaigns. The 2009 election therefore offers the opportunity to examine how political parties outside the USA – where online campaigning has become commonplace – choose to use online tools in their campaigns. This paper examines the online campaign of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with a special focus on the campaign's use of Web 2.0 services. The different elements of the campaign will be discussed with regard to three basic functions of online campaigning provided by the relevant literature: 1) presence in the online information space; 2) support of the infrastructure of politics; 3) creation of symbols for political support and participation. This paper shows that these functions were all present in the CDU's use of online tools in the campaign of 2009.

This paper analyses how macro-societal conditions determine educational inequality between migrants and natives in the Western EU member states. The education system, with its ability to integrate young immigrants, is often seen as the foundation for successful integration in later curricular stages. By means of linear hierarchical models, this paper demonstrates that EU standards of good practice in integration policy are ineffective in producing equal educational opportunities for immigrant pupils. Educational inequality between migrants and natives is mainly a result of the political-institutional settings. The paper thus rejects the widely held belief that consensus democracies are in fact kinder and gentler. By contrast, the analyses reveal that majoritarian democracies are more effective in equalising educational opportunities between immigrants and natives.

It is well known that different types of electoral systems create different incentives to cultivate a personal vote and that there may be variation in intra-party competition within an electoral system. This article demonstrates that flexible list systems – where voters can choose to cast a vote for the list as ordered by the party or express preference votes for candidates – create another type of variation in personal vote-seeking incentives within the system. This variation arises because the flexibility of party-in-a-district lists results from voters' actual inclination to use preference votes and the formal weight of preference votes in changing the original list order. Hypotheses are tested which are linked to this logic for the case of Belgium, where party-in-a-district constituencies vary in their use of preference votes and the electoral reform of 2001 adds interesting institutional variation in the formal impact of preference votes on intra-party seat allocation. Since formal rules grant Belgian MPs considerable leeway in terms of bill initiation, personal vote-seeking strategies are inferred by examining the use of legislative activity as signalling tool in the period between 1999 and 2007. The results establish that personal vote-seeking incentives vary with the extent to which voters use preference votes and that this variable interacts with the weight of preference votes as defined by institutional rules. In addition, the article confirms the effect of intra-party competition on personal vote-seeking incentives and illustrates that such incentives can underlie the initiation of private members bills in a European parliamentary system.

This article places developments in French higher education (HE) in the broader context of the literature on HE governance and, in particular, marketization. In order to trace developments over three time frames spanning from the mid-1980s to 2010, the author develops three ideal-type models of governance and empirical indicators to reflect the balance of power between the state, universities and market forces. This framework provides the basis for analyzing the extent to which French universities have moved away from the primarily state-centered HE model and converged on the market-oriented paradigm of HE governance. The article demonstrates how changes in French HE have been driven both by domestic reform pressures and policy instruments as well as transnational forces of competition and harmonization.

The accumulation and maintenance of emergency oil stocks in accordance with the requirements of the European Union involve changes in legislation, the strengthening of national stockholding institutions and the attraction of investment. Despite these challenges, almost all Southeastern and Eastern European countries have begun to align their oil stockholding arrangements with the European model, albeit there is variation in the actual degree of convergence. The greatest convergence is observed for Croatia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In marked contrast, the oil stockholding system of Moldova continues to be different from the European model. This study provides an overview of the Southeastern and Eastern European countries’ progress in approximating the European requirements for emergency oil stocks and identifies the factors responsible for the cross-country variation. The differences observed stem from the extent to which the countries are legally obliged to comply with the European provisions, their membership aspirations, levels of energy-related investment from the European Union, and dependence on oil imports.

This article identifies factors that have influenced the chances for Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to become rapporteurs in the European Parliament after the 2004 eastern enlargement. More specifically, it answers the question of how the MEPs from the new member states were integrated into the report allocation process under different legislative procedures. Controlling for a whole range of alternative explanations such as legislative experience, attendance rates or party group membership, we find that MEPs from the accession countries were at a disadvantage when reports were distributed. Their chances of becoming rapporteurs were lower than those of their peers from the old member states. Most importantly, this pattern still holds when comparing MEPs from the accession countries with first-time MEPs from the old member states.

In their article “Predicting Elections with Twitter: What 140 Characters Reveal About Political Sentiment,” the authors Andranik Tumasjan, Timm O. Sprenger, Philipp G. Sandner, and Isabell M. Welpe (TSSW) the authors claim that it would be possible to predict election outcomes in Germany by examining the relative frequency of the mentions of political parties in Twitter messages posted during the election campaign. In this response we show that the results of TSSW are contingent on arbitrary choices of the authors. We demonstrate that as of yet the relative frequency of mentions of German political parties in Twitter message allows no prediction of election results.

How do public administrators find information about the problems they confront at work? In particular, how and when do they reach across organizational boundaries to find answers? There are substantial potential obstacles to such searches for answers, especially in a system of decentralized governance such as the U.S. government. In this article, we examine the alternative mechanisms within the public sector that compensate for this dispersion of expertise, focusing on knowledge sharing across public DNA forensics laboratories. In particular, we propose that the emergence of informal interpersonal networks plays an important role in providing access to necessary expertise within a highly decentralized system. Our findings point both to the need for further research on knowledge sharing networks within the public sector as well as practical implications around the value of investments into facilitating the creation and maintenance of networks of practice.