Aktuelle Publikationen

The article examines the interaction patterns between the national government and immigrant groups in Germany. The German government has established two kinds of consultation procedures: one for issues of immigrant integration in a more general sense and a separate state–Islam dialogue. It is shown here that by means of these bodies governmental actors sought to gain regular access to immigrant minorities and – at the same time – established opportunity structures through which they could organise. The specific shape and characteristics of the consultation structures and process are found to be a result of the specific historical contexts and problem constellations, established patterns of state–society relations, and the characteristics of the political system.

In this article, we theorize and empirically test the mechanisms often assumed to lie behind the "Franco-German engine". We thereby try to answer the question of what the "Franco-German engine" actually is and how it works in theory and practice. We start our analysis by discussing the "Franco-German engine" in theoretical terms. Our stylized model is then applied to a selection of empirical cases relating to different decision categories as well as policy areas. Our results show that there is little evidence for an important "Franco-German engine" in "day-to-day" policy-making in Brussels, but that there is indeed a causal effect of a "Franco-German engine" on "history-making decisions" in the realms of the Single Market, Schengen, EMU, and CFSP. Scope conditions - in particular the preference spectrum amongst all EU member states - strongly determine the functioning but also the chances of success of common Franco-German integration initiatives.

There is an enduring interest in how geographic features influence political interactions and outcomes, and many key factors highlighted in international relations and cross-national research vary spatially within countries. Starting with the pioneering research of Richardson, we show how geographic information systems (GIS) technology and the increasing availability of spatial data can provide new opportunities to answer old and new questions. We focus on key motivations for using spatial disaggregated data and show how such data can be used in current research, drawing on examples from the study of violent conflict.

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Wie sollen Unternehmen in Deutschland auf den voranschreitenden demografischen Wandel reagieren? Zur Lösung dieser Frage werden Personalmanagementmaßnahmen vorgestellt, durch die es gelingen kann, die körperliche und geistige Leistungsfähigkeit sowie die Motivation und Qualifikation Mitarbeitender aller Altersgruppen zu erhalten und eine produktive Zusammenarbeit verschiedener Altersgruppen zu ermöglichen.

It is now a widely acknowledged fact that the low-educated workers are facing important risks of labour market exclusion in modern economies. However, possessing low levels of educational qualifications leads to very different situations from one country to another, as the cross-national variation in the unemployment rates of these workers attest. While conventional wisdom usually blames welfare states and the resulting rigidity of labour markets for the low employment opportunities of low-educated workers, empirical evidence tends to contradict this predominant view. Using microdata from the International Adult Literacy Survey that was conducted between 1994 and 1998, we examine the sources of the cross-national variation in the employment disadvantage of low-educated workers in 14 industrialized nations. In particular, we test the validity of the conventional theories concerning the supposedly harmful effect of labour market regulation against a new and promising hypothesis on the importance of cognitive skills for the employment opportunities of the low-educated workers. Our findings support the latter and suggest that the greater the cognitive gap between the low-educated workers and those with intermediate education, the lower the chances of being employed for the former relatively to their higher educated counterparts.

We present a new dataset on decision-making in the European Union (DEUII) that revises and expands a previous dataset. Researchers are using this new dataset to address a range of research questions regarding the inputs, processes and outputs of the EU’s legislative system. The dataset contains information on 331 controversial issues raised by 125 legislative proposals that were introduced between 1996 and 2008. For each of these controversial issues, the dataset identifies the policy alternative favoured most by each of the main political actors: the European Commission; the European Parliament; and each of the member states’ representatives in the Council of Ministers. This information was assembled during 349 semi-structured interviews with key informants. This article describes the dataset and identifies its relevance to several research agendas in EU studies.

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How quickly, to what extent and under what conditions do voters and elites adapt to new electoral institutions in order to not waste their votes and effort on hopeless competitors? A latent-curve model of strategic adaptation is developed and fitted to district-level election data from Spain. The extent of strategic adaptation is generally found to vary with the strength of the electoral system. However, grave ethnic tensions are demonstrated to seriously retard adaptation even under favourable institutional conditions.

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dc.contributor.author: Bhavnani, Ravi

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In wichtigen europäischen Ländern hat bei der wirtschaftlichen Nutzung der Wälder über zwei Jahrhunderte das Korps der staatlichen Forstleute mit seinem Diskurs der „geregelten“ und „nachhaltigen“ Forstwirtschaft eine unbestrittene Hegemonie ausgeübt. Sein Vorrang ist inzwischen durch die Internationalisierung der Waldpolitik, den konkurrierenden Nachhaltigkeitsdiskurs des Naturschutzes und den innenpolitischen Gewichtsverlust der Forstwirtschaft bei zunehmenden fiskalischen Restriktionen ernsthaft in Frage gestellt. Der Aufsatz vergleicht vor diesem Hintergrund zwei markante Fälle der „Forstreform“ und die Überlebensstrategien der Forstverwaltungen.

Differentiated integration has been the subject of political discussion and academic thought for a long time. It has also become an important feature of European integration since the 1990s. By contrast, it is astonishing how poor our research and knowledge about the phenomenon is. Whereas there is an abundance of conceptual work and some normative analysis, positive theories on the causes or effects of differentiated integration are rare. Empirical analysis has concentrated on a few important cases of treaty law (such as EMU and Schengen) while there is no systematic knowledge about differentiated integration in secondary law. The aim of this article is therefore twofold: to review the existing typological and theory-oriented research and to outline a research agenda striving for systematic empirical and explanatory knowledge.