Aktuelle Publikationen

This article addresses the role of age-based faultlines in relation to the perceived productive energy of work teams and transformational leadership as a potential moderator of this relationship. Based on social identity and social categorization theory, teams that have strong age-based faultlines - defined as age subgroup formation that is reinforced by internal alignment with other demographic characteristics (tenure and sex) - should show a lower level of perceived productive energy than do teams that have weak faultlines. In teams with high levels of perceived transformational leadership, this effect should be reversed. Study hypotheses were tested on a sample of 664 individuals in 72 teams from a multinational company. Results showed a marginally significant negative relationship between age-based faultlines and teams’ productive energy, although the moderation effect of transformational leadership was found to be significant. These results point toward transformational leadership as a promising strategy for overcoming the negative effects of age-based faultlines in team settings.

Die Ereignisse in der DDR vom Herbst 1989 bis zum Sommer 1990 waren geprägt durch eine innen- und außenpolitische Dynamik und die Festlegung von Pfadabhängigkeiten, die, auch in der historischen Rückschau, Ansätze zu einer Wirtschaftsreform überlagerten, welche in der DDR selbst entstanden waren und dort intensive Diskussionen ausgelöst hatten. Welcher Art waren diese Reformvorstellungen? Wie realistisch waren sie? Was waren die Umstände ihres Scheiterns?

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Despite increasing technical sophistication, the quantitative literature has made little progress in forecasting ethnic violence. Nevertheless, recent efforts in predicting the location of ethnic violence from the spatial ethnic distribution seem to be a major step forward. In 2007, Lim, Metzler, and Bar-Yam proposed an agent-based model that takes as input the ethnic map of a country and derives from it the predicted locations of ethnic violence. The model rests on the assumption that spatial group clusters of a certain critical size are most likely to display ethnic violence. Their model achieves a remarkable level of agreement between predicted and observed locations of violence. Our article scrutinizes this exercise. We show that their analysis suffers from a biased selection of groups and regions, and that the null hypothesis and unit of analysis are inadequate. The proclaimed usefulness of the model for predicting violence in new cases is made difficult by the fact that the model does not generalize from one case to another. We conclude that the model provides little advance on prior research.

This paper analyses how certain electoral settings affect the activity of special interest groups within US state politics. The main result of cross-sectional regression analyses suggests that informed and educated voters prevent political parties from catering to special interests, diminishing the number of lobby registrations, the total amount of campaign contributions as well as groups' overall influence. Electoral competition is believed to exert a curvilinear effect on groups' importance within the political decision making process of each state. Another finding indicates that, in a situation of high electoral competition, voters' level of information plays a pivotal role in determining interest groups' activities. Parties seem to increasingly value median voter's concerns whenever the electorate is informed and political races are expected to be close. An environment of competitive elections and uninformed voters, in contrast, furthers interest groups' activity and strengthens their position within the political arena. This is explained by the rationale that, under such circumstances, politicians increasingly exchange narrowly targeted policies for campaign contributions in order to buy the votes of impressionable citizens.

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The results of deliberations in multilateral fora are often considered ineffective+ Decision making in the European Union (EU) and in particular its key intergovernmental body, the European Council, poses no exception. Especially in the domain of EU foreign and security affairs, the unanimity requirement governing this institution allegedly allows nationalist governments to torpedo any attempt to build up a credible European defense force and a unified foreign policy stance. In this article, we take issue with the claim that multilateral summits merely result in hot air by looking at whether and how decisions made during EU summit meetings affect the European defense industry. We argue that investors react positively to a successful strengthening of Europe s military component a vital part of the intensified cooperation within the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) since such decisions increase the demand for military products and raise the expected profits in the European defense industry. Our findings lend empirical support to the view that financial markets indeed evaluate the substance of European Council meetings and react positively to those summit decisions that consolidate EU military capabilities and the ESDP. Each of the substantial council decisions studied increased the value of the European defense sector by about 4 billion euros on average. This shows that multilateral decisions can have considerable economic and financial repercussions.

The article aims at explaining visitors' overall judgment of a theatrical event. A questionnaire was constructed including the 4 dimensions of the theatrical experience identified by Eversmann (2004): perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and communicative. The authors investigated 125 visitors of a production in a German community theater and confirmed that both the emotional and cognitive dimensions were determinants of visitors' overall judgment of a theatrical event. Implications for further research on the theatrical experience are discussed.

Beginning in the mid to late 1980’s, democracy took root in most countries in the Western hemisphere. This development in conjunction with the end of the Cold War led to a revival of the OAS and the initiation of new regional security institutions. The strategic framework of the Cold War had consisted in the perception of a threat outside the hemisphere and the monopoly of the U.S. government in defi ning and identifying the enemy. As these structures lost relevance, a new security agenda came to the fore, encompassing both traditional security threats like territorial disputes and non-traditional security threats, such as terrorism and drug-traffi cking. Additionally, security was increasingly defi ned as the establishment of improved civil-military relations and the collective defense of democracy. However, the war against terrorism initiated by the U.S. after September 11, 2001 led to a revitalization of strategic framework of the Cold War. Hence, the paper analyzes how the regional security system in the Americas has changed since the early 1990s. It traces the major innovations with respect to its legal and institutional framework, the impact of the hegemonic position of the United States in the hemisphere and the challenges posed by the emergence of sub-regional organizations.

Whether qualitative or quantitative, contemporary civil-war studies have a tendency to over-aggregate empirical evidence. In order to open the black box of the state, it is necessary to pinpoint the location of key conflict parties. As a contribution to this task, this article describes a data project that geo-references ethnic groups around the world. Relying on maps and data drawn from the classical Soviet Atlas Narodov Mira (ANM), the ‘Geo-referencing of ethnic groups’ (GREG) dataset employs geographic information systems (GIS) to represent group territories as polygons. This article introduces the structure of the GREG dataset and gives an example for its application by examining the impact of group concentration on conflict. In line with previous findings, the authors show that groups with a single territorial cluster according to GREG have a significantly higher risk of conflict. This example demonstrates how the GREG dataset can be processed in the R statistical package without specific skills in GIS. The authors also provide a detailed discussion of the shortcomings of the GREG dataset, resulting from the datedness of the ANM and its unclear coding conventions. In comparing GREG to other datasets on ethnicity, the article makes an attempt to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses associated with the GREG database.