Aktuelle Publikationen

Die klassische Theorie des Regulierungswettbewerbs im Umweltschutz sagte im Zuge der Globalisierung Regulierungswettläufe nach unten voraus. Die empirische Evidenz scheint widersprüchlich, was auch an den verwendeten Maßen für das Regulierungsniveau liegt. Insbesondere die auf Umweltqualitätsdaten beruhende Forschung deutet eher auf eine Aufwärtsbewegung hin. Zur Erklärung für eine Aufwärtsdynamik gibt es in der Literatur einige kausale Vermutungen, jedoch bisher keinen breit abgestützten empirischen Nachweis. In diesem Artikel ergänzen wir zunächst die Theorie um einen weiteren Faktor, die internationale Harmonisierung, von der wir vermuten, dass sie eine Regulierungsbewegung nach oben verursacht. Anschließend testen wir die Theorie mit umweltpolitischen Daten aus 24 Ländern von 1970 bis 2005, wobei wir erstmals die Regulierungsniveaus direkt messen. Wir finden eine eindeutige Aufwärtsbewegung des Regulierungsniveaus, keinen Effekt ökonomischen Wettbewerbs und klare Belege für den Einfluss der internationalen Harmonisierung.

This paper presents a comparative case study of party system institutionalization in Ghana and Senegal. Both countries experienced a democratic change in government in the year 2000, but while positive development has continued in Ghana, democratic quality in Senegal decreased over time. Can the concept of party institutionalization help to explain this diverging development? Four dimensions of party System institutionalization are systematically compared: regularity, social roots, legitimacy, and party organization. It is found that party competition in Ghana is characterized by high stability and a low number of parties. The major parties are organized throughout the country and have definable support bases with deep historical roots. They give orientation to voters and are perceived as legitimate actors. In Senegal, in contrast, the party system is fluid and less predictable. Parties are not structured along social cleavages and many of them are weakly organized and highly personalistic. In summary, the case studies support the assumption that an institutionalized, well-structured party system in which relevant social cleavages are translated into electoral alternatives is positively related to democratic quality.

C’est dans le contexte du changement institutionnel et de la réforme organisationnelle que nous allons analyser la politisation de la bureaucratie de la Commission européenne. La politisation désigne généralement le fait de remplacer la neutralité bureaucratique par l’introduction de considérations politiques dans la gestion des ressources humaines et le comportement des agents de l’État. Les notions de politisation directe et de politisation professionnelle vont nous servir d’angles d’observation pour notre analyse. Les données empiriques sont issues d’une analyse documentaire et d’enquêtes en ligne et semi-structurées récemment menées auprès des agents de la Commission. Nous allons voir que les bureaucrates de la Commission, même s’ils sont très sensibles à l’aspect politique de leur fonction, sont moins politisés qu’avant, depuis les réformes Kinnock. Si le collège des commissaires est effectivement devenu plus politiquement sensible face à ses pairs supranationaux et aux gouvernements nationaux, la bureaucratie de la Commission peut être considérée comme faiblement politisée ou, selon les débats en cours, comme relativement instrumentale au sens néo-wébérien.

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How do users behave in online chatrooms, where they instantaneously read and write posts? We analyzed about 2.5 million posts covering various topics in Internet relay channels, and found that user activity patterns follow known power-law and stretched exponential distributions, indicating that online chat activity is not different from other forms of communication. Analysing the emotional expressions (positive, negative, neutral) of users, we revealed a remarkable persistence both for individual users and channels. I.e. despite their anonymity, users tend to follow social norms in repeated interactions in online chats, which results in a specific emotional "tone" of the channels. We provide an agent-based model of emotional interaction, which recovers qualitatively both the activity patterns in chatrooms and the emotional persistence of users and channels. While our assumptions about agent's emotional expressions are rooted in psychology, the model allows to test different hypothesis regarding their emotional impact in online communication.

This paper presents the first investigation of whether direct Democracy supplements or undermines the attendance of demonstrations as a form of protest behavior. A first approach assumes that direct democracy is associated with fewer protests, as they function as a valve that integrates voters’ opinions, preferences, and emotions into the political process. A competing hypothesis proposes a positive relationship between direct democracy and this unconventional form of political participation due to educative effects. Drawing on individual data from recent Swiss Electoral Studies, we apply multilevel analysis and estimate a hierarchical model of the effect of the presence as well as the use of direct democratic institutions on individual protest behavior. Our empirical findings suggest that the political opportunity of direct democracy is associated with a lower individual probability to attend demonstrations.

We show that the frequency of word use is not only determined by the word length [1] and the average information content [2], but also by its emotional content. We have analyzed three established lexica of affective word usage in English, German, and Spanish, to verify that these lexica have a neutral, unbiased, emotional content. Taking into account the frequency of word usage, we find that words with a positive emotional content are more frequently used. This lends support to Pollyanna hypothesis [3] that there should be a positive bias in human expression. We also find that negative words contain more information than positive words, as the informativeness of a word increases uniformly with its valence decrease. Our findings support earlier conjectures about (i) the relation between word frequency and information content, and (ii) the impact of positive emotions on communication and social links.

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Research linking heterogeneity and democracy usually focuses on one single dimension of heterogeneity, such as the distribution of power resources, income inequality, gender inequality, or ethnic fractionalization. Empirical results have so far been inconsistent. This article attempts a sound conceptualization of the phenomenon of heterogeneity. In order to assess whether and how heterogeneity hampers democracy, we will first define what “heterogeneity“ means and examine its various dimensions. Then we will discuss why and in which respect heterogeneity constitutes a challenge to democratic transition and consolidation and will review previous research. Our empirical analysis gauges the effect of various dimensions of heterogeneity on the political trajectory of states since the beginning of the third wave of democratization. We find that, while most facets of heterogeneity do not hinder democratic transition, most of them complicate democratic consolidation. Our final discussion offers some suggestions on how the obstacles that heterogeneity poses for democratic development could be overcome and which principles, procedures and institutions are most appropriate to deal with each of the different dimensions of heterogeneity.