Aktuelle Publikationen

This article links insights from research on European Union (EU) decision-making and on differentiated integration to the recent negotiations about the future United Kingdom (UK)–EU relationship. We argue that since a Brexit would overturn well-established statics of EU decision-making, EU member states reacted differently to the British demands. States that feared a weakening of their position after a Brexit were more willing to grant concessions to the UK. This largely applies to most northern member states. In contrast, most other member states appeared more reluctant to meet the British expectations. First, these states hoped to improve their standing inside the EU after a Brexit. Second, reflecting deeper structural tensions, the British demands would have entailed higher prices for these member states. Anticipating heterogeneity between the other member states, and thus the stability enhancing mechanisms of the joint decision trap, the UK downscaled its demands before the European Council of February 2016. In consequence, the negotiations on the terms of Britain’s EU membership did not result in a grand overhaul of the EU, but rather in symbolic concessions aimed at pleasing British domestic politics without severely harming other member states’ interests.

A large qualitative literature on violent conflict in Nigeria has identified the importance of oil production and ethnicity as salient factors in understanding violence, especially in the oil-rich Niger Delta. This resonates with the broader literature on natural resources, ethnic exclusion, and conflict. This article advances existing research by providing the first highly disaggregated statistical analysis of oil, ethnicity, and violence for Nigerian Local Government Areas (LGAs). We test whether oil production in a weak state environment, and local groups’ access to governmental power, affect the level of violence in Nigeria. We employ unique disaggregated data on violent conflict events, proprietary data on oil production, and newly collected information on local ethnic groups’ access to the federal government for 774 LGAs. We find strong evidence that LGAs with oil infrastructure experience significantly more violence than others, while access to the federal government significantly reduces violence. We complement these findings with a qualitative investigation of violent conflicts in Nigeria.

This article explains the zigzag of the stepwise federalism reform in Germany by accessing the theoretical concept of institutional incongruity. It is argued that the existing imbalance between competencies, policy problems and fiscal resources was further exacerbated as actors adopted inconsistent institutional ‘layers’ during the sequential reform. Two case studies on higher education and unemployment policy reveal that actors finally reverted to joint decision-making and revived ideas of solidarity in order to remedy inconsistent reform results, although ‘disentanglement’ and competition had been the leitmotivs underlying the first reform step. The article confirms that institutional congruity is hardly attainable in federations. Reform attempts aiming at disentangling responsibilities and fiscal resources encounter insuperable difficulties, because policy issues more than ever transcend the borders of single territorial units and need joint financing. The study concludes by discussing the question whether joint decision-making – compared to dual resp. ‘layer-cake’ federalism – owns a specific democratic quality.

The introductory article to this Special Issue offers an analytical framework for investigating federal reforms. By looking through the lens of institutional theory, it provides an avenue for grasping the basic mechanisms which are at work in reform processes. It is argued that the German case which comprises three distinct reform steps stretching out over more than one decade represents an especially suitable example for understanding the general logics of federal reform. As a “prototype” of sequential, asynchronous reforms, it allows for generating theoretical insights beyond the findings of a single case study. The article reveals that layering, sequencing, and the linkage of different arenas are the most relevant aspects to be considered when examining federal reforms. Finally, it is established how the contributions to this Special Issue refer to the analytical categories worked out in this introduction.

The global expansion of the Internet is frequently associated with increased government transparency, political rights, and democracy. However, this assumption depends on marginalized groups getting access in the first place. Here we document a strong and persistent political bias in the allocation of Internet coverage across ethnic groups worldwide. Using estimates of Internet penetration obtained through network measurements, we show that politically excluded groups suffer from significantly lower Internet penetration rates compared with those in power, an effect that cannot be explained by economic or geographic factors. Our findings underline one of the central impediments to "liberation technology," which is that governments still play a key role in the allocation of the Internet and can, intentionally or not, sabotage its liberating effects.

In many parts of the world, people live in “dual polities”: they are governed by the state and organize collective decision making within their ethnic community according to traditional rules. We examine the substantial body of works on the traditional–state dualism, focusing on the internal organization of traditional polities, their interaction with the state, and the political consequences of the dualism. We find the descriptions of the internal organization of traditional polities scattered and lacking comparative perspective. The literature on the interaction provides a good starting point for theorizing the strategic role of traditional leaders as intermediaries, but large potentials for inference remain underexploited. Studies on the consequences of “dual polities” for democracy, conflict, and development are promising in their explanatory endeavor, but they do not yet allow for robust conclusions. We therefore propose an institutionalist research agenda addressing the need for theory and for systematic data collection and explanatory approaches.

With the growing importance of international institutions for global governance, international bureaucracies gain increasing influence on policy-making. Whereas for national bureaucracies specific administrative styles have been identified, this contribution explores for the first time administrative styles of two international organizations. The European Union (EU) Commission and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) represent most different cases in matters of scope, autonomy and resources. The analysis of their specific patterns of policy initiation, policy formulation and policy implementation reveals striking similarities. Both organizations have developed an entrepreneurial style in policy initiation, a strategic approach to policy formulation and a mediating implementation style. These similarities lead to a paradox of weakness in the case of the OSCE and a paradox of strength in the case of the EU. These paradoxes can be understood by taking a closer look at the specific settings in which they are operating, in particular their dependence on member state resources and political support.

Although we find considerable literature on international organizations and their bureaucratic interior, there has been little effort to systematically synthesize empirical research across the different academic disciplines examining how international bureaucracies affect policy-making at an international level. This contribution reviews existing research on the policy influence of international bureaucracies published during the past 50 years. Applying a keyword-based search strategy allows us to identify a core body of 83 books and articles. We find a general consensus in the literature that international bureaucrats do influence policy-making, though this influence varies with the political salience and scope of the decision at question. Yet there is still much disagreement about other context factors, including mechanisms and behavioural assumptions. The contribution advances the state of the art by extracting major disputes – mostly linked to diverging disciplinary perspectives – and existing gaps in the literature, and by suggesting areas for future research.

This article comparatively explores the driving forces behind and variations in the trend toward increasing school autonomy in England, Germany, Italy and Sweden. In a first step, we focus on the impact of processes of internationalization and the spread of post-materialist values. We hypothesize, on the one hand, that school autonomy may be a direct result of international policy promotion by transnational organizations and, on the other hand, that post-materialist values may lead to either an increase or decrease of school autonomy, depending on the specific form of school governance. In a second step, we examine the impact of partisan factors and explore the hypothesis that center-right and center-left parties pursue different objectives when introducing school autonomy policies. We assume that conservative parties will grant more extensive decision-making autonomy to schools in order to promote competition, accountability and efficiency, while leftist governments will use increased school autonomy as means of promoting political participation and democracy. In the empirical case studies we thus examine whether the partisan orientation of governing coalitions has brought about different school autonomy models in the four countries.

Multi-actor peace operations have become the dominant mode of peace operations since the end of the cold war. This article uses the literature on institutional linkages and inter-organizational relations, thus far developed independently from the literature on such operations, to shed light on the relations between the organizations involved in them. The analysis of one specific case – the interactions between the United Nations, the African Union, the Economic Community of Central African States and the European Union in the Central African Republic – shows the usefulness of merging this body of theory with the primarily empirically driven research on peace operations and UN–regional collaboration. The findings of this study are meant to facilitate further research on multi-actor peace operations and serve as a building block for a theory explaining the emergence and configuration of such operations.

We introduce a novel visual analytics approach to analyze speaker behavior patterns in multi-party conversations. We propose Topic-Space Views to track the movement of speakers across the thematic landscape of a conversation. Our tool is designed to assist political science scholars in exploring the dynamics of a conversation over time to generate and prove hypotheses about speaker interactions and behavior patterns. Moreover, we introduce a glyph-based representation for each speaker turn based on linguistic and statistical cues to abstract relevant text features. We present animated views for exploring the general behavior and interactions of speakers over time and interactive steady visualizations for the detailed analysis of a selection of speakers. Using a visual sedimentation metaphor we enable the analysts to track subtle changes in the flow of a conversation over time while keeping an overview of all past speaker turns. We evaluate our approach on real-world datasets and the results have been insightful to our domain experts.

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Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been a controversial issue in the European Union (EU). A growing number of member states and regions within the member states oppose the EU’s agro-biotechnology policy, resulting in a complex multi-level structure of policy-making. This study is interested in the regional opposition to GMOs and scrutinises the determinants of membership in the European Network of GMO-free Regions. In terms of theory, this study builds on the literature of policy diffusion. For the analytical purpose, we distinguish among four diffusion mechanisms: learning from earlier adopters, economic competition among proximate regions, imitation of economically powerful regions and deviation from national law. Our research questions are the following: How has membership developed since the foundation of the network? Which mechanisms explain the diffusion patterns observed? The empirical findings show that membership in the network has grown substantially between 2003 and 2014, which supports the general expectation that there is a diffusion of GMO-free regions. Yet, most new member regions are located in the same member states as the regions that founded the network. In other words, what is observed is intra-country diffusion rather than inter-country diffusion. The empirical findings provide support for the importance of learning from earlier adopters for the growing of the European Network of GMO-free Regions.

Governments are facing an information technology upgrade and legacy problem: outdated systems and acquisition processes are resulting in high-risk technology projects that are either over budget or behind schedule. Recent catastrophic technology failures, such as the failed launch of the politically contested online marketplace Healthcare.gov in the U.S. were attributed to an overreliance on external technology contractors and failures to manage large-scale technology contracts in government. As a response, agile software development and modular acquisition approaches, new independent organizational units equipped with fast reacting teams, in combination with a series of policy changes are developed to address the need to innovate digital service delivery in government. This article uses a process tracing approach, as well as initial qualitative interviews with a subset of executives and agency-level digital services members to provide an overview of the existing policies and implementation approaches toward an agile innovation management approach. The article then provides a research framework including research questions that provide guidance for future research on the managerial implementation considerations necessary to scale up the initial efforts and move toward a collaborative and agile innovation management approach in government.

The holding of elections has become universal but only about half of all elections are free and fair. Electoral malpractice not only distorts the quality of representation but has implications for political, social and economic outcomes. Existing datasets either provide information on election quality for a large number of elections but offer little detail, or they provide very detailed information for a small number of elections. Our data collection effort closes this gap by providing ten variables of election quality for all leadership elections for the period 1975–2011. We use these data to provide an assessment of elections that is closely tied to the commonly used term ‘free and fair’. We define ‘freeness’ of the election as the rules of the election and the process leading up to the election, and ‘fairness’ of the election refers to the events on the election day. Our data show that the quality of elections has declined over time. These electoral problems are mainly due to issues in the run-up to the elections. Using probit regressions we investigate the possible causes of election malpractice. Our analysis suggests that the freeness and the fairness of the elections are related to a number of variables, such as income, aid, executive constraints and the presence of election monitors, but that these variables have differential effects on freeness and fairness.

This article presents a case study of the use of digital tools by campaign organizations in Germany’s 2013 federal election. Based on observations and in-depth interviews with key personnel in the campaigns of six of the parties running for Parliament, I examine whether German campaigns’ use of digital tools follows the usage practices that have been identified in studies of campaigns in the United States. I group how campaigns use digital tools into four categories: organizational structures and work routines, presence in information spaces online, support in resource collection and allocation, and symbolic uses. I show that these categories capture how German parties use digital tools. U.S.-based studies can thus provide helpful interpretive frameworks for studying digital campaigning in other countries. However, I also reveal that there are important differences between German and U.S.-based online campaigning. These differences stem from the different levels of intensity with which digital tools are deployed in each country.