Aktuelle Publikationen

Environmental concerns have played a key role for institutionalizing energy policy at the level of the European Union. There is thus a tendency in research literature to assume that the objectives of these cognate policy areas are compatible and mutually reinforcing. There have been only few efforts, however, to critically assess the quality of this relationship. The contributions to this mini-special issue reveal that the instruments employed in these two policy fields are markedly different. Environmental policy instruments are mostly based on the command-and-control logic whereas environment-related European energy policy is characterized by the use of ‘softer’ measures. The second main finding is that despite the centrality of climate change concerns in the rhetoric of the European Commission, an effective integration of environmental goals into energy policy is difficult to achieve.

Der Beitrag untersucht die Implementation des deutschen Konjunkturprogramms auf kommunaler Ebene. Die Maßnahmen des Konjunkturpakets II stellen einen hervorragenden Fall zur Untersuchung der intendierten und nicht intendierten Wirkungen zeitlich begrenzter distributiver Policies dar. Am Beispiel der baden-württembergischen Kommunen werden anhand quantitativer Analysen zwei typische nichtintendierte Effekte untersucht: Die relative Ungleichverteilung der Investitionsmittel unter den Kommunen sowie das Auftreten von Mitnahmeeffekten. Die Analyse zeigt verschiedene Einflussfaktoren auf, die diese Effekte beeinflussen. So variieren Investitionsmittel und Mitnahmeeffekte deutlich nach administrativer Kapazität, Haushaltslage und Gemeindegröße. Die aufgezeigten Zielverschiebungen führen zur abschließenden Frage, ob diese von den Gestaltern des Programms billigend in Kauf genommen oder gar im Sinne einer schnellen Programmdurchführung befördert wurden.

Social scientists spend considerable energy constructing typologies and discussing their roles in measurement. Less discussed is the role of typologies in evaluating and revising theoretical arguments. We argue that unsupervised machine learning tools can be profitably applied to the development and testing of theory-based typologies. We review recent advances in mixture models as applied to cluster analysis and argue that these tools are particularly important in the social sciences where it is common to claim that high-dimensional objects group together in meaningful clusters. Model-based clustering (MBC) grounds analysis in probability theory, permitting the evaluation of uncertainty and application of information-based model selection tools. We show that the MBC approach forces analysts to consider dimensionality problems that more traditional clustering tools obscure. We apply MBC to the "varieties of capitalism", a typology receiving significant attention in political science and economic sociology. We find weak and conflicting evidence for the theory's expected grouping. We therefore caution against the current practice of including typology-derived dummy variables in regression and case-comparison research designs.

In this article we provide an integrated framework for the analysis of higher education governance which allows us to more systematically trace the changes that European higher education systems are currently undergoing. We argue that, despite highly insightful previous analyses, there is a need for more specific empirically observable indicators of policy change and inertia. We therefore propose a systematic classification of empirical indicators of higher education governance. To do so, we look at three historically entrenched and still highly relevant European models of higher education—academic self-governance, the state-centered model and the market-oriented model. Based on these broader overarching models which reflect the tensions between the state, market and academia, we develop three ideal-types that take internal university governance as well as the role of the state and external stakeholders into account. Against this background, we derive empirical indicators with regard to the institutional balance of power, financial governance, personnel autonomy and substantive matters. Our analytical contribution shall enable scholars, and in particular political and social scientists, to trace ongoing patterns of change and convergence as well as persistence and inertia in higher education governance arrangements.

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Taking the example of a German public professional theater, this study is the first to analyze how stakeholder interests are managed in the process of program planning. We address the following questions: (1) What are the goals and interests of the most influential stakeholders? (2) How are these goals and interests reflected by theater management when deciding the season's program? (3) Which strategies does theater management apply to balance conflicting stakeholder goals and interests? Results of our qualitative study identify five decisions to be made with regard to program planning: selection of the season's theme, plays, stage directors, cast, and chronological order of productions. Four strategies of balancing conflicting stakeholder goals and interests are identified: setting priorities, combining stakeholder interests, focusing on neutral goals, and developing audiences.

As a result of growing economic globalization and rapid technological changes governance in the field of information and communication policy increasingly requires policy co-ordination across multiple arenas, not only including vertical co-ordination across different institutional levels, but also horizontal coordination across different policy sectors. In view of these new co-ordination demands the mediation and accommodation of heterogeneous interest positions at the interfaces of various institutional levels and sectoral boundaries become a crucial governance function. The specific political, economic and technological conditions underlying information and communication technology policy favour this function being carried out by European interest associations - a development which coincides with significant strengthening and structural integration of the system of European interest representation.

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dc.contributor.author: Jürgens, Pascal

The political blessings of federalism are the core of our discussion. These benefits can be operationalized as a decrease in the number of outvoted people in a federal system with majority voting which is an important source of regime satisfaction. The approach originates from the work of Roland Pennock who developed a similar methodology about 50 years ago. Measuring inverse regime satisfaction by the maximum of the outvoted, our results show that regime satisfaction decreases if total population rises. Additionally, the share of the maximum outvoted decreases if the top level cooperates with lower-level jurisdictions and if all jurisdictions of one level are included. However, while the inclusion of an additional lowest-level jurisdiction always reduces the relative number of the outvoted, the effect of including other levels depends on the structure of jurisdictions already intertwined.

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