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When scrutinising the literature on EU environmental policy, it becomes apparent that there has been a comprehensive transition in underlying governance ideas during the last two decades. At the core of these changes is the abolition of traditional patterns of interventionist command-and-control regulation in favour of economic instruments and ‘context-oriented’ governance. In view of these developments, this article has two objectives: first, it looks into which causes and factors initiated these discussions; second, it analyses the effects these reform ideas had on actual patterns of governance. As will be shown, changes in governance ideas are only partially expressed in changes in policy instruments.

Government agenda-setting rights in the Bundestag are weak. The theoretical part of this article discusses various aspects of agenda setting and their theoretical relevance in the context of the Bundestag. It will be argued that analyses of agenda setting should distinguish between two analytical foci, one concentrating on policy effects in the context of spatial models, the other analysing executive–legislative relations in the broader context of political competition. In addition, agenda setting among veto players should be distinguished from agenda setting between veto players and non-veto players. While the article's theoretical part drives the subsequent empirical analysis, readers more interested in the empirical aspects of agenda setting in the Bundestag may wish to turn directly to the article's second section, which provides an empirical and descriptive account of the formal rules of agenda setting in the Bundestag. In this part, it will be argued that the weakness of the government under the Bundestag's first permanent rules of procedure introduced in the early 1950s can be explained by historic circumstances. Since then, party system characteristics and the strong role of the Bundesrat have made it unattractive for the federal government to seek increased agenda control in the Bundestag. Overall, agenda setting rules in the Bundestag underscore the characterisation of Germany as a consensus democracy.

In this article, we examine long-term state budget trends to find evidence of punctuated equilibrium. We use the American states as a broad set of institutional variation with which to examine the nature of policy change through the lens of incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium theories of policymaking. The strength of this article is its sensitivity of variations in policy outcomes across time (18 years), across space (50 state institutions), and across issue space (10 budget categories). This research advances the characterization of policy outcomes by employing a quantitative measure that is both less sensitive to outliers and one that characterizes budget distributions on a simple numeric scale. Our general findings are: (i) state budget categories are interdependent; (ii) state budgets are generally punctuated; but (iii) to varying degrees: Thus, considerable stability (indicated by tall peaks) and punctuations (represented by fat tails) are a central feature of policy outcomes in the American states. This result confirms the logic of punctuated equilibrium theory, but raises future questions about the impact specific variations in institutional costs have on policymaking across the 50 states.

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dc.contributor.author: Pappi, Franz Urban

The study investigates the degree to which the conductor s transformational leadership style and a cooperative climate in the orchestra favorably effect the orchestra s artistic quality. The authors study the assertion that the conductor s transformational leadership style promotes the orchestra s artistic quality only if there is a cooperative climate in the orchestra. An empirical study of 208 musicians from 22 professional German symphony orchestras confirms the assumed interaction effect of the conductor s transformational leadership style and the cooperative climate among the musicians on the orchestra s artistic quality. Conclusions for the effectiveness of transformational leadership in organizations are drawn.

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The second winner of the Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award (in 2004) was Professor Erich Weede from the University of Bonn, Germany. The prize, which is sponsored by two sections of the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR), goes tri-annually to a political scientist who made major contributions to peace and conflict research in the tradition of Lewis Frye Richardson (1881 1953), a British meteorologist and pioneering scientific analyst of international war. This essay summarises some of the most important insights of the present award holder.

Case studies as well as cross-country studies suggest that countries with an abundance of natural resources are more prone to violent conflict. This collection of articles analyzes the link between natural resources and civilwar in a number of differentways. So far the literature falls broadly into two camps. First, in the economics literature the well-documented “resource curse” leads to low-income growth rates and low levels of income. These in turn constitute lowopportunity costs for rebellion and make civilwar more likely. On the other hand, political science literature concentrates on the link between natural resources and weak institutions. States with natural resources often rely on a system of patronage and do not develop a democratic system based on electoral competition, scrutiny and civil rights. Based on further empirical evidence in this volume we conclude with a brief overview of current policy initiatives.

Realism and liberalism disagree over the source of bargaining power in international relations. Realists believe that the success of a negotiator is a linear function of the capabilities that its home state possesses. Liberals stress the crucial importance of either the relative salience a country attaches to a contested issue or the importance negotiating governments have to attribute to powerful domestic actors. In this essay, I clarify some of the channels through which these different facets of power influence multilateral negotiations. To examine the competing theoretical claims in international negotiations, I rely on the canonical contribution to the formal theory of bargaining, the Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS), as the unifying analytical framework. I distinguish several causal mechanisms through which varying forms of resources affect the negotiation outcomes. The formal analysis points out severe limitations of the thesis that different forms of bargaining power are fungible. Whether different facets of power can be substituted at all depends on how specific a channel is through which power is exerted. The empirical application uses the saliency approach as the baseline model and compares it with a realist capability and a liberalist domestic politics model. The analysis of the Uruguay round negotiations in the tourism sector shows that the realist bargaining model outperforms the domestic politics model. The saliency version of the NBS on which the competing models are based also fares relatively well in forecasting the concessions that 29 member states made in this policy realm.