Aktuelle Publikationen

While political scientists concur about the increasing importance of regulation, the extant literature features a notable diversity of contemporary definitions of regulation. The various understandings of regulation put different emphasis on the role of the state and regulation as an instrument or a process, respectively. This article scrutinizes and clarifies the notions of regulation and self-regulation in the Political Science literature. Along three analytic questions – what is regulated, who regulates, and how is it being regulated? –, the essay illustrates developments from regulation as government intervention to regulation as governance and finally, regulation as various mechanisms of social control. The latter includes hybrid, private, transnational, voluntary and self-regulation. The article discusses the usefulness of modern notions of regulation, as well as potential future research trajectories. It concludes that there is a need for a conceptual consolidation that integrates different regulatory processes, actors and instruments and enables comparative, explanatory empirical assessments of regulatory impacts.

This article presents an anatomy of power relations and policymaking within the ranks of the former liberation movement South West African People's Organization (SWAPO) in Namibia. It summarizes the features of Namibia's dominant party state and argues that Namibia is a case of competitive authoritarian rule. Our analysis documents how the first generation of SWAPO activists, in exile after the early 1960s, has since independence in 1990 remained the most influential segment of the former anti-colonial movement. This continuity is personified in the country's third president, Hage Geingob, and parts of his team in cabinet. Despite some gradual and increasingly visible shifts in the composition of SWAPO MPs, the party's first generation has so far remained largely in control of the country's political affairs. Analysing the background of the ministers serving since independence also shows that a second generation of SWAPO activists, in exile after the mid-1970s, gradually expanded their influence and took over leading positions. Given the dominance of SWAPO and the lack of any meaningful political opposition, a new leadership depends on upward inner-party mobility. Given the limited scope for a younger generation to move into higher offices, the strengthening of democracy through new leadership and innovative thinking is very limited. Rather, politics tends to be reproduced through established networks and bonds with a low degree of permissiveness, which reinforces the nature of the competitive authoritarian regime under the control of ‘old men’.

The pervasive presence of online media in our society has transferred a significant part of political deliberation to online forums and social networking sites. This article examines popularity, reputation, and social influence on Twitter using large-scale digital traces from 2009 to 2016. We process network information on more than 40 million users, calculating new global measures of reputation that build on the D-core decomposition and the bow-tie structure of the Twitter follower network. We integrate our measurements of popularity, reputation, and social influence to evaluate what keeps users active, what makes them more popular, and what determines their influence. We find that there is a range of values in which the risk of a user becoming inactive grows with popularity and reputation. Popularity in Twitter resembles a proportional growth process that is faster in its strongly connected component, and that can be accelerated by reputation when users are already popular. We find that social influence on Twitter is mainly related to popularity rather than reputation, but that this growth of influence with popularity is sublinear. The explanatory and predictive power of our method shows that global network metrics are better predictors of inactivity and social influence, calling for analyses that go beyond local metrics like the number of followers.

Português brasileiro:

Até que ponto as reformas que promoveram a formação dual foram bem sucedidas em países que não possuem tradições tão sólidas de parceria social nas relações industriais, a saber: Austrália, Irlanda e Reino Unido. Com base nestes três estudos de caso, demonstra-se que o aparato governamental é um fator importante e que molda os resultados das reformas da aprendizagem; os governos progressistas promoveram abordagens cooperativas que reuniram sindicatos e empregadores nas reformas da aprendizagem, enquanto que o governo, neoliberal, de Tatcher, reduziu a influência dos sindicatos e impulsionou a sua mercantilização.

Voluntary contributions – often earmarked for specific purposes – have become an indispensable source of revenue for international organizations (IOs) and the UN organizations in particular. While the reasons for this trend are regularly studied, its effects on the internal functioning of the organization (especially on the ‘international public administration’ (IPA) as the organization's secretariat) remain unclear. Given this gap, we study the consequences of increasing financial dependence for the autonomy of IPA staff. Using financial and personnel data of 15 UN agencies over time, our results are in line with the intuitive expectation that more financial resources in the form of voluntary contributions increase the number of staff. We also find evidence, however, that the more an organization depends on voluntary resources (within its broader financial portfolio), the more it reduces the ratio of permanent staff among its total workforce in the subsequent years. The underlying adaption of IPAs’ recruitment and career structures to growing financial insecurities has important implications for the autonomy of international bureaucrats and needs to be considered also in terms of its long-term impact on administrative professionalism and organizational performance.

This work examines whether the size, as well as the composition, of legislative coalitions is an additional factor that affects the incidence of protests against national governments in Latin America. Based on aggregate data for 18 democracies from 1980 to 2014, the analysis reveals that the relationship between the size of legislative coalitions in the lower house of national assemblies and the odds of antigovernment protests is U-shaped. Specifically, the odds of antigovernment protests occurring decrease until the president has a coalition comprising 50–55 percent of the national assembly; once this threshold is passed, the odds of protests taking place increase as the coalition grows. This result holds after controlling for the party composition of the governing coalition and other factors previously linked to the occurrence of antigovernment protests. The evidence thus indicates that both minority and supermajority scenarios can be socially destabilizing for Latin American democracies.

Research on implementation in the European Union (EU) is characterized by a strong focus on legal conformance with EU policy. However, this focus has been criticized for insufficiently accounting for the implications of the EU’s multilevel governance structure, thus providing an incomplete picture of EU implementation, its diversity and practice. The contributions of this collection represent a shift towards a more performance-oriented perspective on EU implementation as problem-solving. They approach implementation fundamentally as a process of interpretation of superordinate law by actors who are embedded within multiple contexts arising from the coexistence of dynamics of Europeanization, on the one hand, and what has been termed ‘domestication’, on the other. Moving beyond legal compliance, the contributions provide new evidence on the diversity of domestic responses to EU policy, the roles and motivations of actors implementing EU policy, and the ‘black box’ of EU law in action and its enforcement.

Der Beitrag bietet eine kompakte Übersicht über die zentralen Ergebnisse des Forschungsprojektes „Finanzaufsicht 2020“. Im Rahmen dieses Projektes wurde die Umsetzungspraxis kommunaler Finanzaufsicht in den Ländern Nordrhein-Westfalen, Hessen und Sachsen empirisch untersucht. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Aufsichtspraxis durch eine hohe Heterogenität der Aufsichtsstile, eine enge Kooperation zwischen Gemeinden und Aufsichtsbehörden sowie einer Dominanz der Beratungsfunktion gegenüber der Kontrollfunktion geprägt ist. Außerdem werden zukünftige Risiken und Herausforderungen für die Arbeit der Aufsichtsbehörden kursorisch beleuchtet.

How ambitious are MPs in European parliaments and how does progressive ambition affect their strategies? We argue that progressively ambitious members of parliament try to generate individual visibility and seek the support of party leaders who decide on promotion while at the same time ensuring reelection by adjusting to electoral system incentives. Using novel data from a 15-country MP survey we show that progressive ambition is widespread in Europe and Israel. As hypothesized, progressively ambitious MPs are more likely to favor personal rather than party-centered electoral campaigns and to address the national or regional party leadership instead of their local party. Electoral system features and party ideology also have the theoretically expected effects.

Der Beitrag präsentiert zentrale Ergebnisse der DFG Forschergruppe „International Public Administration“ (IPA). Zentrale These ist, dass es sich bei internationalen Verwaltungen um einen eigenen Verwaltungstypus handelt. Dies gilt weniger im Hinblick auf Besonderheiten formeller Strukturen, sondern vielmehr in Bezug auf organisationsspezifische Verhaltensmuster, in denen sich internationale von nationalen Verwaltungen unterscheiden. Die in diesem Schwerpunktheft versammelten Beiträge fokussieren diese Unterschiedlichkeit und beschäftigen sich insbesondere mit der Frage, was die beobachtbaren Verhaltensmuster internationaler Bürokratien für den politikgestaltenden Einfluss von Verwaltungen jenseits des Nationalstaates bedeuten. Anschließend wird diskutiert, welche Implikationen sich aus der Beschäftigung mit internationalen Verwaltungen für die disziplinäre Verwaltungswissenschaft ergeben. Dabei vertreten wir die These, dass sich nationale Verwaltungen den hier untersuchten internationalen Bürokratiemustern umso stärker annähern, je mehr diese in einem Kontext transnationaler Einflüsse operieren. Daran knüpfen wir abschließend ein Plädoyer für die systematische Integration internationaler Bürokratieanalysen in eine Wissenschaft der Verwaltung als Teilbereich der Erforschung der Transformation von Staatlichkeit.

The results of this collection allow for preliminary conclusions about the nuanced interplay between Europeanization and domestication forces in European Union (EU) implementation, which await testing in different contexts. Some policies lend themselves more to a strategy allowing for extensive domestication than others; but to be effective, decentralized implementing actors need both power and capabilities. Europeanization dynamics strongly influence the direction of domestication of EU policy, but if EU requirements are incompatible with national political preferences domestication trumps Europeanization. Domestication equally prevails if the relationship between EU and national policy is ambiguous and frontline implementers have high discretion. The trend toward the Europeanization of direct EU enforcement challenges its legitimacy. This has implications for EU researchers and practitioners, and suggests methodological challenges and future research trajectories for a performance perspective on EU implementation. More comparative research is needed about the trade-offs between conformance, diversity, and performance in EU multilevel governance.