Aktuelle Publikationen

Ausgangspunkt dieses Beitrags ist die Frage, inwiefern zwischenmenschliches Vertrauen sowie informelle und formelle soziale Netzwerke das wirtschaftliche Wachstum beeinflussen. Ausgehend von der ökonomischen Theorie konditionaler Konvergenz argumentieren wir, dass ärmere Länder nur unter bestimmten politischen und kulturellen Bedingungen ihr Wachstumspotential ausschöpfen können. Die Datengrundlage unserer Untersuchung bildet die für die Wachstumsforschung bislang vernachlässigte vierte Welle des Word Values Survey (1999-2001). Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass der Bestand an sozialem Kapital das Wirtschaftswachstum hoch entwickelter Volkswirtschaften nicht generell beeinflusst, jedoch insbesondere für den ökonomischen Aufholprozess ökonomisch rückständiger Nationen von Bedeutung ist. Die aufgezeigte Wirkung des Sozialkapitals ist dabei indikatorenabhängig: Während ein stark ausgeprägtes interpersonales Vertrauen ein Aufholen der ärmeren Länder gegenüber den reichen Nationen zulässt, können informelle Netzwerke und das Vereinsengagement die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung nicht wesentlich beeinflussen.

This article examines the combined effects of what mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot has termed "Noah" and "Joseph" effects in U.S. national government budgeting. Noah effects, which reference the biblical great flood, are large changes or punctuations, far larger than could be expected given the Gaussian or Normal models that social scientists typically employ. Joseph effects refer to the seven fat and seven lean years that Joseph predicted to the Pharaoh. They are "near cycles" or "runs" in time series that look cyclical, but are not, because they do not occur on a regular, predictable basis. The Joseph effect is long-term memory in time series. Public expenditures in the United States from 1800 to 2004 shows clear Noah and Joseph effects. For the whole budget, these effects are strong prior to World War II (WWII) and weaker afterward. For individual programs, however, both effects are clearly detectable after WWII. Before WWII, budgeting was neither incremental nor well behaved because punctuations were even more severe and memory was not characterized by simple autoregressive properties. The obvious break that occurred after WWII could have signaled a regime shift in how policy was made in America, but even the more stable modern world is far more uncertain than the traditional incremental view.

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dc.contributor.author: Busch, Per-Olof

In this paper we ask for conditions influencing volunteering in social organizations as strongholds of social capital. Beside individual characteristics, contextual factors such as political, social, or economic settings are also taken into consideration to explain individual decisions to participate in voluntary organizations. The influences of individual and contextual level factors are tested simultaneously in several multi-level analyses. The results show that volunteering in social associations on the one hand is affected by individual characteristics and on the other hand by contextual factors such as a rural environment and institutional settings. In particular, both direct democracy and decentralization offering larger possibilities of participation facilitates volunteering in social organizations. The data for our analysis is taken from the Swiss Labor Force Survey (SLFS) and comprises over 54.000 respondents.

This article analyses the ways in which the research management apparatus set up by the European Commission and national-level research foundations contributes to the publication gap of European political science vis-a-vis the United States. I identify four structural problems in the allocation of money to individuals and institutions and derive two main recommendations from them. First, reviewers should be members of a merit-oriented European Academy of Political Science rather than stem from a group of arbitrarily chosen scholars. Second, the European Consortium for Political Research should seriously consider the introduction of individual membership and competitive leadership elections.

This study investigates the degree to which a conductor s transformational leadership and orchestral musicians positive group mood have a beneficial effect on orchestral performance. The authors study the assertion that there is an interaction effect of conductor s transformational leadership style and group mood in the orchestra. In this view, neither the conductor s transformational leadership nor the musicians positive group mood alone foster success; only the interaction between transformational leadership and positive group mood is effective at promoting orchestral performance. An empirical study of 208 musicians from 22 German symphony orchestras reveals the assumed interaction effect of a conductor s leadership style and musicians group mood on the artistic quality of the orchestra.

One of the disputed consequences of global economic integration is the possible effect that foreign economic liberalization exerts on social cohesion. Proponents of commercial liberalism see stabilization as an indirect consequence of growing economic interdependence, while globalization critics are much more skeptical. They expect, at least during the liberalization process, destabilizing effects. We examine in this paper the contradictory claims in the light of what we call the distributional theory of civil war. This variant of commercial liberalism qualifies the peace-throughtrade hypothesis and expects, based on political economy models of trade policy making, that the redistributive struggle associated with foreign economic liberalization can culminate in violent forms of protest. We demonstrate that a higher level of economic openness is indeed associated with a lower risk of civil war. At the same time, economic liberalization increases the chances of instability weakly. None of the following factors are found to exert any compensatory influence on instability: social spending, foreign aid, and financial flows from the International Monetary Fund. Discontent over the process of globalization is thus a destabilizing force despite the pacifying effect that the level of economic integration exerts.

The worldwide departmental ranking by Simon Hix and national performance evaluations have dramatically shown that European political science is not sufficiently competitive at the global level. This symposium analyses why this is the case and what kind of reform measures should be introduced to move beyond this dire state of affairs. The authors detail the problems in four domains (i) funding of teaching and research; (ii) the market for political science education; (iii) career development, salaries, and tenure decision-making; and (iv) the publication behaviour of European political scientists. Each contribution concludes with suggestions about how the situation could be improved.

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