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The study of education has long been a neglected subject in political science. Recently, however, scholarly interest in the field has been increasing rapidly. This review essay introduces the general readership to this burgeoning literature with a particular focus on work in comparative public policy and political economy. Particular topics discussed are the historical and political foundations of contemporary education systems, the political and institutional determinants of education policies, the internationalization and Europeanization of education, the political economy of skill formation in varieties of capitalism and the effects of education policies. The article also introduces scholarship in related disciplines such as economics, sociology and comparative education sciences, and points out avenues for future interdisciplinary dialogue between political science and these disciplines.

Established conflict theories focus on the role of incentives in the decision to join, stay, or leave an insurgency. These theories, however, disregard the pressure that an organization can impose on its members. Similar to legal organizations, we assert that a rebel organization can sustain itself by effective human resource management. Using narratives resulting from psychological trauma therapy of former combatants of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), these management strategies are examined. The analysis shows that the LRA sustains itself in the first place by the use of brute force. However, they also manage themselves by a careful selection process of their fighters, by the conscious creation of social control, and by offering their members an alternative social network in which promotion and compensation play a role.

Effective marine pollution policy strongly depends on actions coordinated at the international level. As a result, scholars tend to more closely examine the formulation and implementation of international agreements, while paying scant attention to policy making at the domestic level. How important is the protection of seas to domestic key actors? This study gives an overview of German parties’ policy agendas with respect to marine pollution. In doing this, it analyzes manifestos for nine federal elections taking place between 1980 and 2009. The findings of the qualitative content analysis show that the combat of marine pollution has persistently formed an integrative part of German parties’ policy agendas, although there is notable cross-party variation regarding the scope of attention paid to this issue. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that German parties do not limit themselves to only recognizing sea pollution as a general problem and making some vague statements about the need to enhance protection levels. On the contrary, they present concrete proposals for improving the status of German and international marine ecosystems.

Observers of U.S. criminal justice trends have noted the vast increase in spending on prison systems over the past 25 years. First, the authors empirically verify that overall spending on corrections not only increased but also that corrections spending grew compared to other budget areas. Second, the authors examine the mechanisms behind this prioritization. The authors posit that race and class dynamics of individual states affects the extent to which corrections spending is prioritized. Race acts as a central cleavage factor while class acts as a secondary cleavage in the political decision-making environment. Time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) analysis of state budget outlays between 1984 and 1999 provides strong evidence for this hypothesis. Our findings depart from previous scholarly work devoted to "underclass" theories of race and class interactions; the authors uncover a more intricate relationship between race and class. The article demonstrates that the higher the proportion of African Americans in a state, the higher the prioritization of corrections spending. Only in states with low proportions of African Americans does income inequality matter.

The aim of this article is to offer an empirical description and comparison of governance arrangements across different phases of EU cohesion policy and to offer explanations for national and regional variations in the prevalence of governance arrangements in non-Cohesion (Germany and Italy), old Cohesion (Greece and Spain), and CEE countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland), covering two regions for each country. Drivers of actor participation on the regional level are often linked to legal and normative requirements regarding the partnership principle. However, we conclude that Europeanization is far from being a straightforward process. The transformation of established vertical power relations within the political system as well as state-society relations at the national and sub-national level in accordance with the partnership principle are mediated by domestic and regional factors – including given responsibilities and administrative capabilities of regional government.

This paper uses an original dataset from a survey conducted in Switzerland in 2007 to explore the dynamics of education policy preferences. This issue has largely been neglected in that most studies on welfare state attitudes do not look at preferences for education. We argue that education policy preferences vary along two dimensions: the distribution of resources across different sectors of the education system (that is, vocational training versus academic education) and the level of investment in education both from public and private sources. With regard to the former, the findings suggest that individual educational experience matters most, that is, individuals prefer to concentrate resources on those educational sectors that are closest to their own educational background. With regard to the latter, we find that affiliation to partisan ideologies matters much more than other variables. Proponents of the left demand more investment both from the state as well as from the private sector and oppose individual tuition fees.

This study investigates visitors’ satisfaction with their subjective experience in theatres. Reconciling research on theatre marketing and theatre studies, a model of visitors’ satisfaction in theatre is suggested and an instrument to capture visitors’ satisfaction and its determinants is developed. Results from a field study (n = 158) on three performances of ‘Twelfth Night or What You Will’ (Shakespeare) in a German community theatre revealed spectators’ perception of stage direction and their emotional response as significant determinants. Comparing experienced to inexperienced visitors’ judgements, no differences were found. Conclusions for theatre marketing are drawn.

Despite the frequent call for a strengthened customer orientation in performing arts organizations, no efforts have been made to investigate customer satisfaction in opera so far. The paper aims at filling this gap by suggesting a first integrative model of customer satisfaction in opera. This model integrates insights from both services marketing literature (i.e., general services marketing and performing arts marketing) and performing arts literature (i.e., music perception and theater studies). The model is tested in a field study interviewing 116 visitors of a public German opera house. Results reveal visitors' level of appraisal to be the main antecedent of their satisfaction, followed by their perception of the artistic quality, empathy/identification with the actors on stage, and recall from memory. Furthermore, differences within the audience regarding the relative importance of the antecedents of customer satisfaction in opera are investigated. Using gender and attendance frequency as segmentation variables, only minor differences are found, though. Managerial implications for opera marketing are discussed in conclusion. First, efforts in opera marketing should rather concentrate on the core service quality instead of the peripheral service quality. Second, professional opera companies may attract broader audiences if they focus on the emotional satisfaction of their customers. Third, since only minor and mostly insignificant differences between men and women, and occasional compared to frequent visitors are found, a need for further research to explore alternative segmentation variables in the opera context is identified.