Aktuelle Publikationen

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dc.contributor.author: Landwehr, Claudia

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dc.contributor.author: Linhart, Eric

In this study we scrutinize the strength of the European Union s external governance in the area of environmental policy. We explore whether accession candidates and third countries adopted European environmental legislation along with the member states. In doing so, we focus on Community laws that limit nitrogen oxides in the emissions into the air from large combustion plants, and introduce the European ecolabel scheme and environmental impact assessments. Our analysis reveals that hierarchical governance is the most significant and robust determinant of policy adoption. Additionally, our results lend some support to the relevance of network governance, indicating that this mode could become more effective at greater length.

Contrary to many other areas, international and, in particular, European influences on national policymaking in higher education (HE) have remained limited. This picture, however, changed fundamentally from the late 1990s onward. In 1999, 29 countries signed the Bologna Declaration, denoting the start of the so-called Bologna Process. Thus, a collective supranational platform was developed to confront problem pressure, which has in turn fostered considerable domestic reforms. However, we still have limited knowledge on whether the Bologna Process has actually led to the convergence of national HE policies toward a common model. This article analyzes these questions by focusing on Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. Because of its tumultuous and inconsistent path of development and the sheer magnitude of the current reform processes, CEE HE stands out as a particularly worthwhile object of analysis for scholars interested in policy convergence as well as policy legacies and path dependencies.

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The prevailing but not unchallenged ‘conventional wisdom’ in the literature dealing with the impact of globalisation on public spending is that the effects of increased openness can be compensated through the welfare state. Repeatedly, studies have found little evidence for a ‘race to the bottom’ in taxation or spending. This research note shows that it is premature to conclude that globalisation has no negative impact on public spending. By extending the period of observation into the 2000s, by looking at changes in openness and spending instead of their levels, and by disentangling the effects of openness in the cross-sectional and over-time dimensions of variation, this article shows that the association between increased openness and spending is clearly negative. Although the contribution of this research note is mainly empirical, some theoretical arguments are presented, emphasising the long-term nature and complexity of policy making in the politics of globalisation.

Recent research has increasingly questioned the link between natural resources and violent conflict while stressing the importance of resource-specific context conditions under which internal conflicts become more likely. This paper engages in a systematic analysis of six of these resource-specific conditions comparing 15 African oil and diamond producing countries. Employing a Boolean logic, the results of our analysis indicate that, typically, a conflict-ridden diamond or oil producer is highly dependent on resources, its revenues are hardly spent on distributional policies and the security apparatus and, moreover, it suffers from intercommunal problems in the producing regions. Little income from resources per capita and substantial production of lootable resources in peripheral regions seem to constitute necessary conditions for civil war. Thus, our findings imply that future theoretical models and empirical strategies should integrate the full set of (resource specific) context conditions. Efforts to raise a more integrative approach combining quantitative and qualitative research designs seem particularly promising.