Aktuelle Publikationen

A large body of literature finds a negative relationship between oil abundance and economic growth. The existing empirical evidence on the oil curse, however, does not account for variations in the ownership of oil. This article investigates whether the effect of oil abundance on growth varies with ownership structures. It also investigates whether pre-existing institutional conditions influence the effect of oil abundance across different ownership structures. Using a novel database on ownership structures and employing a panel fixed effects estimation method, it analyzes a sample of oil-exporting developing countries during the period 1984–2005. The results show that the effect of oil abundance on growth varies with ownership structures and is also influenced by the quality of pre-existing institutions. Under state ownership and control, oil abundance reduces growth when the institutional quality is poor, but increases growth when the institutional quality is good. Under private ownership, on the other hand, oil abundance increases growth when the institutional quality is poor, but reduces growth when the institutional quality is good. The results suggest that ownership matters and countries can avoid the oil curse by choosing an appropriate ownership structure given their pre-existing institutional circumstances. The policy advice in this article is: adopt state ownership and control if the institutions are strong, if the institutions are weak, transfer ownership to foreign oil companies.

In this article we study to what extent the academic peer review process is influenced by social relations between the authors of a manuscript and the editor handling the manuscript. Taking the open access journal PlosOne as a case study, our analysis is based on a data set of more than 100,000 articles published between 2007 and 2015. Using available data on handling editor, submission and acceptance time of manuscripts, we study the question whether co-authorship relations between authors and the handling editor affect the manuscript handling time, i.e. the time taken between the submission and acceptance of a manuscript. Our analysis reveals (1) that editors handle papers co-authored by previous collaborators significantly more often than expected at random, and (2) that such prior co-author relations are significantly related to faster manuscript handling. Addressing the question whether these shorter manuscript handling times can be explained by the quality of publications, we study the number of citations and downloads which accepted papers eventually accumulate. Moreover, we consider the influence of additional (social) factors, such as the editor’s experience, the topical similarity between authors and editors, as well as reciprocal citation relations between authors and editors. Our findings show that, even when correcting for other factors like time, experience, and performance, prior co-authorship relations have a large and significant influence on manuscript handling times, speeding up the editorial decision on average by 19 days.

In two of the busiest migration corridors of the twentieth century, namely Mexico-US and Turkey-Germany, migrants can today be dual citizens. However, the acceptance of dual citizenship did not occur automatically; instead, it followed a period of legal statuses short of full citizenship. This paper conceptualises such statuses as quasi-citizenship, a transitional equilibrium between the absence of plural citizenship and the existence of transnational migration. Focusing on sending states, the emergence of emigrant quasi-citizenship is thus explained, first, in terms of whether the reciprocal regimes of emigration and immigration states diverge on the acceptance of plural citizenship. Second, the stance towards plural citizenship is explained in terms of the experience with emigration. It is then shown that, in the case of Mexico, the legacy of undesired emigration weakened the incentives to adapt the territorial conception of citizenship to expatriates, hence creating quasi-citizens, and in the case of Turkey, the higher political relevance of expatriates, who could have the host country citizenship, reinforced the external dimension of the ethno-cultural conception of citizenship.

The recent data revolution, and with it the emergence of big data on social processes, holds enormous promise as a new paradigm for policy monitoring and evaluation. This is of particular relevance in the context of measuring and monitoring the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While there remain many practical and methodological obstacles to the applicability of big data technologies as a policy instrument, recent work has made significant progress. Focusing specifically on SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, this article discusses recent advances in using big data for monitoring political instability. After clarifying what constitutes big data, a term that is often used without clear definition or a shared understanding, the article reviews the potential of big data in the specific context of monitoring political instability. It then derives a set of best practices based on recent innovative and empirically grounded approaches, illustrating how big data could be responsibly used for policy-relevant analyses with implications for the measurement and monitoring of the implementation of the SDGs more broadly.

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Europeanization research often neglects that the implementation of European Union (EU) policy results in diverse national outcomes, even if member states comply with EU law. Such fine-grained Europeanization patterns have been explored as ‘gold-plating’ and ‘customization’. This contribution builds and expands on this research to propose a general conceptualization and measurement of customization as the changes that provisions of EU Directives undergo in their regulatory density and restrictiveness during legal transposition. Using unique data on the customization of EU directive provisions from two policy areas in 27 countries, our empirical analysis reveals distinct changes in density and restrictiveness, pronounced policy-specific and state-level customization patterns. The findings illustrate how national customization strategies often follow specific EU regulatory logics in different integration contexts. We outline implications for future research on the causes and consequences of the inherent diversity of EU implementation regarding dimensions of customization, issues of legitimacy and effectiveness.

Research on social processes in the production of scientific output suggests that the collective research agenda of a discipline is influenced by its structural features, such as "invisible colleges" or "groups of collaborators" as well as academic "stars" that are embedded in, or connect, these research groups. Based on an encompassing dataset that takes into account multiple publication types including journals and chapters in edited volumes, we analyze the complete co-authorship network of all 1,339 researchers in German political science. Through the use of consensus graph clustering techniques and descriptive centrality measures, we identify the ten largest research clusters, their research topics, and the most central researchers who act as bridges and connect these clusters. We also aggregate the findings at the level of research organizations and consider the inter-university co-authorship network. The findings indicate that German political science is structured by multiple overlapping research clusters with a dominance of the subfields of international relations, comparative politics and political sociology. A small set of well-connected universities takes leading roles in these informal research groups.

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dc.contributor.author: Beck, Andrea

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dc.contributor.author: Lelong, Bettina

Policy implementation by private actors constitutes a “missing link” for understanding the implications of private governance. This paper proposes and assesses an institutional logics framework that combines a top-down, policy design approach with a bottom-up, implementation perspective on discretion. We argue that the conflicting institutional logics of the state and the market, in combination with differing degrees of goal ambiguity, accountability and hybridity play a crucial role for output performance. These arguments are analyzed based on a secondary analysis of seven case studies of private and hybrid policy implementation in diverging contexts. We find that aligning private output performance with public interests is at least partly a question of policy design congruence: private implementing actors tend to perform deficiently when the conflicting logics of the state and the market combine with weak accountability mechanisms.

The idea of an integrated Latin American region goes back to the early post-independence period, and yet, in substance, Latin American regionalism has remained far behind its stated aims. The perceived implementation gap has raised the question why policymakers continued to talk about something they appeared to avoid in practice. This article contributes to the debate on Latin America’s integration gap by exploring the phenomenon of declaratory regionalism - the practice of referring to the region and its institutions in political speeches. Based on quantitative text analysis of the speeches presidents delivered annually at the UN’s General Assembly between 1994 and 2014, we show that this practice has not been uniform. Presidents distinguish between different forms of regionalism, integration and cooperation, and frame the geographical region they refer to accordingly. In motivating presidents to speak about integration as opposed to cooperation, ideology and democratic performance stand out as crucial factors.