Aktuelle Publikationen

A political system cannot be imagined without opposition. Despite this crucial position in politics, political science has largely neglected to study oppositions. Attempting to fill this gap, this article analyses the institutional opportunities of parliamentary oppositions. It offers a parsimonious framework by distinguishing two dimensions of opposition influence: some institutions enable oppositions to control governments, while others offer opportunities to present alternatives. A comparison of oppositions’ opportunities in 21 democracies shows that countries fall into four groups along these dimensions: in majoritarian democracies, weak control mechanisms are countered by excellent opportunities to publicise alternatives. Consociational democracies are characterised by strong control mechanisms, but provide only weak opportunities to present alternatives. Moreover, in Southern Europe, control mechanisms and opportunities to present alternatives are weak, while both are pronounced in Nordic Europe. The results are summarised in three indices that can easily be applied in future research examining oppositions and their power.

This Essay provides an introduction to the general challenges of predicting political violence, particularly compared with predicting other types of events (such as earthquakes). What is possible? What is less realistic? We aim to debunk myths about predicting violence, as well as to illustrate the substantial progress in this field.

Many ethnic minorities demand (adequate) descriptive representation in parliament because they expect it to affect the responsiveness of governments towards their demands. However, the mechanism of how minority representatives affect policy outcomes remains unclear. I argue that descriptive representation mainly has an effect if representatives possess additional leverage to influence policy outcomes. The argument is tested with hierarchical time-series models from 88 minority groups in 47 countries multiethnic democracies. The analysis shows that descriptive representatives are most successful in influencing policy outcomes if they are included in the government, the legislature is powerful, and a group is comparatively large.

An increasing number of children are actively participating in armed groups, drawing attention to the issue of child soldiering from both international humanitarian organisations and the academic community. Despite this interest, there is a lack of explicit attempts to bring the insights of these two arenas together. More specifically the theoretical issues raised by the scholarly community have not been incorporated into disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) practices. This article combines these two arenas to show that questions related to age, gender, agency and the recruitment of child soldiers in particular have not yet been resolved, leading to problems in the implementation of child-centred DDR programmes.

On the occasion of the Federal Election 2009, Germany experienced a drastic decline in turnout. In 2013, the most recent Federal Election, turnout was thus a political issue hotly debated in the media and the Social Democrats ran an explicit non-voter campaign. Nevertheless, turnout rates remained at a low level, and the election resulted in the second lowest turnout in the entire history of post-war Germany. At the same time the SPD, one of the traditionally cleavage-based parties in Germany, suffered equally dramatic losses in terms of electoral support in 2009 from which it did not recover in the succeeding election. While the sudden decline of the vote share of a cleavage-based party may cast doubt on previous findings of a relative stability of cleavage voting in Germany, the almost parallel decline in turnout points to a blind spot in the cleavage voting literature. This research has focused exclusively on the role of social cleavages in shaping choices between parties, and thus has neglected the possibility that cleavages erode due to a decline in electoral mobilisation of cleavage groups. The present article looks at the long-term and short-term changes in party choice and turnout in the social groups that traditionally formed the constituency of the main cleavage parties, the SPD and the CDU/CSU. In doing so, the article also examines whether and how these changes in party vote and electoral participation are related to cohort and period effects. Empirically, we show that a decline in the support for the SPD among the working class consists of both long-term and short-term components, but it does not lead to vote defection yet mostly to abstention from voting. Further it shows that the CDU/CSU is unaffected by the mobilisation problems that plague Social Democracy in Germany. However, first long-term effects are visible across birth cohorts. Younger core religious groups are increasingly opting for other parties.

dc.title:

dc.contributor.author: Lelong, Bettina

Is the public EU membership evaluation similar to the support for further integration or different? Starting from the assumption that the EU is – compared to stable nation states – still a ‘polity in the making’, the paper answers the question which factors can explain the desired speed of integration. I first hypothesise that the standard economic, political and cultural explanations have the same effect for the (prospective) desired speed of integration than they have for the (retrospective) membership evaluation analysed in previous studies. Additionally, I develop two temporal explanations specifically for the explanation of future support. The results on the basis of Eurobarometerdata from 2008 suggest that the canonical economic and political theories work only for the explanation of the membership evaluation and not for the desired speed.

This article reports on a Digital Humanities research project which is concerned with the automated linguistic and visual analysis of political discourses with a particular focus on the concept of deliberative communication. According to the theory of deliberative communication as discussed within political science, political debates should be inclusive and stakeholders participating in these debates are required to justify their positions rationally and respectfully and should eventually defer to the better argument. The focus of the article is on the novel interactive visualizations that combine linguistic and statistical cues to analyze the deliberative quality of communication automatically. In particular, we quantify the degree of deliberation for four dimensions of communication: Participation, Respect, Argumentation and Justification, and Persuasiveness. Yet, these four dimensions have not been linked within a combined linguistic and visual framework, but each single dimension helps determining the degree of deliberation independently from each other. Since at its core, deliberation requires sustained and appropriate modes of communication, our main contribution is the automatic annotation and disambiguation of causal connectors and discourse particles.

What factors determine firms’ attitudes toward trade policy? This paper considers producers’ policy preferences and political behavior in light of two key patterns in modern international trade: industries that face import competition often have many exporters, and foreign sales are concentrated in the hands of a small number of “superstar” exporters. Using a new survey of Costa Rican firms matched to systematic firm-level data on export behavior, we find that firm features are generally more important predictors of attitudes toward trade liberalization than industry-wide comparative advantage. We also show that export intensity is strongly associated with interest and lobbying activity on trade policy. The largest exporters, who are the strongest supporters of global integration, dominate trade politics.

dc.title:

Le présent article contient une analyse comparative des réformes de l’enseignement supérieur en France et en Italie. Grâce à un ensemble d’indicateurs empiriques, l’auteur s’intéresse aux évolutions divergentes et convergentes dans ces deux pays qui ont fait œuvre de précurseurs dans l’européanisation de l’enseignement supérieur. Si la France n’a eu de cesse de se rapprocher d’un modèle de marché, l’Italie a, quant à elle, dans un premier temps renforcé les vestiges de l’autonomie des universités, avant de mettre en œuvre, plus récemment, des réformes destinées à réprimer les abus de pouvoir des universités. Pour expliquer ces évolutions stratégiques, l’auteur propose un argument théorique double en reliant l’isomorphisme institutionnel et l’institutionnalisme historique.
Remarques à l’intention des praticiens
Dans cet article, nous examinons l’évolution des structures de gestion et d’administration de l’enseignement supérieur en France et en Italie. Nous nous intéressons essentiellement aux nouvelles fonctions attribuées à l’État, aux responsables des universités et aux parties prenantes externes et tâchons de déterminer si ces deux systèmes se rapprochent d’un paradigme de marché. L’auteur explique comment et pourquoi différents instruments de direction innovants ont été introduits. Notre analyse, étant donné qu’elle porte sur les nouveaux modes de pouvoir dans la gouvernance de l’assurance qualité, de l’administration des universités et de la recherche, devrait intéresser aussi bien les théoriciens que les praticiens.

The literature on conflict management offers two explanations of why the effectiveness of third parties to settle militarized disputes differs. The structural research tradition focuses on conflict characteristics, while the individualist approaches highlight the background, skills and power of a mediator, as well as the mediation strategy. This article reconciles these two approaches, and examines especially the effectiveness of mediation strategies. Accounting for the selection of mediation and the success of mediation attempts, we use the CWM 1945–2004 dataset. The analysis demonstrates that mediators who were able to pursue a determined strategy face a higher chance of success.