Aktuelle Publikationen

Das Thema Energieeffizienz erhält seit einigen Jahren vermehrt politische Beachtung sowohl auf nationaler, als auch auf internationaler Ebene. Das Streben nach einem sparsamen Umgang mit natürlichen Ressourcen schlägt sich in einer zunehmenden Zahl politischer Maßnahmen nieder. Ziel dieser Studie ist es, die Wirkung dieser Policies auf den Stromverbrauch privater Haushalte im internationalen Vergleich zu analysieren. Im Fokus des Interesses steht dabei die Frage, welche politischen Instrumente am wirkungsvollsten sind, bzw. in welcher Kombination sie Wirkung entfalten. In methodischer Hinsicht greifen wir dabei auf Qualitative Comparative Analysis (in der Version Fuzzy-Set QCA) zurück, eine Methode, die sich zur Beantwortung dieser Art von Forschungsfragen hervorragend eignet. Die Ergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass bestimmte politische Instrumente, wenn sie miteinander kombiniert eingesetzt werden, hinreichend für eine Senkung des privaten Stromverbrauchs sind. Institutionen wie Energieagenturen haben dabei eine wichtige Funktion, insbesondere in Kombination mit Normen und Standards. Ein niedriges Wirtschaftswachstum konnte als bedeutender Kontextfaktor identifiziert werden, der die Wahrscheinlichkeit von Stromeinsparungen erhöht.

Why are some interest groups able to lobby political decisions successfully whereas others are not? This article suggests that the issue context is an important source of variation because it can facilitate or hamper the ability of interest groups to lobby decision-makers successfully. In order to test the effect of issue characteristics, this article draws on a new, unprecedented data set of interest group lobbying in the European Union. Using quantitative text analysis to analyse Commission consultations, this article studies lobbying success across 2696 interest groups and 56 policy issues. The findings indicate that lobbying success indeed varies with the issue context, depending on the relative size of lobbying coalitions and the salience of policy issues, whereas individual group characteristics do not exhibit any systematic effect.

The key idea of this paper is that the level of commitment among combatants should be analyzed to get a better understanding of civil war duration and the survival of armed groups. The empirical application focuses on a sample collected during field research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bayesian analyses show that the ways in which fighters are recruited and the amount of training and promotion they receive have a significant, reliable effect on the level of affective organizational commitment showed by the fighters.

Emotions are an important part of most societal dynamics. As with face to face meetings, Internet exchanges may not only include factual information but may also elicit emotional responses; how participants feel about the subject discussed or other group members. The development of automatic sentiment analysis has made large scale emotion detection and analysis possible using text messages collected from the web. We present results of two years of studies performed in the EU Large Scale Integrating Project CYBEREMOTIONS (Collective emotions in cyberspace) Our goal is to understand the role of collective emotions in creating, forming and breaking-up ICT mediated communities and to prepare the background for the next generation of emotionally-intelligent ICT services. Project results have already attracted a lot of attention from various mass media and research journals including the Science and New Scientist magazines. Nine Project teams are organised in three layers (data, theory and ICT output).

Parliaments are more than legislative bodies. However, we lack an adequate understanding of the theoretical relationship between different facets of parliamentary activity or ‘parliamentary functions’. Relying on the principal–agent framework, this article argues theoretically that parliamentary power is a multidimensional concept comprising three distinct mechanisms to ensure policy outputs in line with the collective preferences of parliaments: direct influence on policymaking, the ex ante selection of external officeholders, and the ex post control of the cabinet. These mechanisms mirror the classic legislative, electoral, and control functions of parliaments. Empirically, the paper uses factor analysis of newly developed indicators for electoral powers and established measures of legislative and control resources to show that the institutional powers of 15 Western European parliaments comprise four distinct dimensions. These dimensions match the three theoretically derived mechanisms with committee power as an additional factor. Locating the 15 parliaments in this multidimensional space of parliamentary powers demonstrates that classifications based solely on lawmaking lead to biased assessments of parliamentary strength and weakness. Instead, the paper provides a more nuanced picture of the ways in which Western European parliaments can influence policymaking under the conditions of delegation.

In the last 15 years a remarkable string of contentious mobilizations has emerged, challenging the normative and institutional frameworks that regulate how knowledge is produced, appropriated, and used. In this article I argue that these conflicts are more than contingent phenomena of fluctuating protest patterns. They are rooted in the growing global economic and political importance of immaterial goods, and – on a more fundamental level – they address a set of new cleavages which originate in the social transformations of the knowledge society.

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The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of differing decentralisation strategies – political, administrative and horizontal – on administrative performance subsequent to reform. In this respect, the paper presents core results from a comprehensive research project that has been carried out between 2006 and 2009 on the impact of decentralisation in three European countries. The aim of the project has been to develop and apply an analytical framework for the measurement of the effects of national decentralisation policies on local government performance. A total of six reform ventures were scrutinised in French, German and English local communities applying a multidimensional set of performance measures. Surprisingly, many of the theoretical assumptions about the effects of decentralisation strategies could not be confirmed. Moreover, straightforward relations were not discovered between decentralisation strategies and performance effects but between policy fields, political interests and the time elapsed since the reform and performance.

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dc.contributor.author: Toens, Katrin