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In the last 10 years, the governments of most of the German Länder initiated administrative reforms. All of these ventures included the municipalization of substantial sets of tasks. As elsewhere, governments argue that service delivery by communes is more cost-efficient, effective and responsive. Empirical evidence to back these claims is inconsistent at best: a considerable number of case studies cast doubt on unconditionally positive appraisals. Decentralization effects seem to vary depending on the performance dimension and task considered. However, questions of generalizability arise as these findings have not yet been backed by more ‘objective’ archival data. We provide empirical evidence on decentralization effects for two different policy fields based on two studies. Thereby, the article presents alternative avenues for research on decentralization effects and matches the theoretical expectations on decentralization effects with more robust results. The analysis confirms that overly positive assertions concerning decentralization effects are only partially warranted. As previous case studies suggested, effects have to be looked at in a much more differentiated way, including starting conditions and distinguishing between the various relevant performance dimensions and policy fields.

Points for practitioners
In multi-level systems, reformers of public administration have to decide which level is most appropriate for the implementation of a certain task. In the last years, reformers have often decided to decentralize state functions in the hope of creating an effective and efficient government. Yet, in reality, the claim to deliver public tasks better and, at the same time, cheaper in decentralized units proves unfeasible. We provide empirical evidence on the performance effects of decentralization and show that it has other advantages and other disadvantages compared to state service delivery. Reformers of public administration have to ponder these pros and cons in each particular case.

The 2008 global financial crisis came with fears—and, for some, hopes—that a new wave of public mobilization would emerge in industrialized countries. Especially throughout the European Union (EU), the epicenter of the crisis, large protests were expected. Yet, the energy with which social groups mobilized against the proposed austerity measures quickly fizzled. This article provides new evidence for why this was the case. In line with Neo-Keynesian theory, we argue that the interest rate adjustments and political announcements of the European Central Bank (ECB) limited the potential for mass unrest in the member states of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) affected by the crisis. We provide evidence for our argument with yearly panel data and a new original data set of monthly political protests between 2001 and 2013. Our analyses support the hypothesis that the ECB was able to successfully assuage dissatisfaction with the limited reform options of the Eurozone member states in the wake of the Eurocrisis.

Can voters infer candidates' political orientations from their faces? We report evidence that observers make systematic judgment errors, ascribing their own political views to attractive or competent-looking candidates. Subjects judged headshot images of student candidates running in university elections (Experiment 1), as well as professional politicians from state election races in Germany (Experiment 2), according to whether the person(s) displayed held ideologically leftist or rightist views. While prediction accuracy was above chance level in both experiments, candidate attractiveness (Experiment 1) and perceived competence (Experiment 2) increased a subject's likelihood of attributing her political views to a candidate. These findings suggest that the value of face-based inferences in choosing the candidate who best represents one's views is more limited than previously assumed. They also suggest that good looks may help extremist candidates in presenting themselves as more moderate.

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dc.contributor.author: Blum, Christian

The existent work on child soldiering began only recently to systematically study its consequences, both theoretically and empirically. The following article seeks to contribute to this by examining the impact of rebels’ child soldier recruitment practices during war on the risk of armed conflict recurrence in post-conflict societies. We argue that child soldiering in a previous dispute may increase both the willingness and opportunity to resume fighting in the post-conflict period, while disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programmes could decrease these aspects of conflict recurrence. Empirically, we analyse time-series cross-section data on post-conflict country-years between 1989 and 2005. The findings highlight that the risk of conflict recurrence does, indeed, increase with child soldiers who fought in an earlier dispute, but — counter-intuitively — is unlikely to be affected by the presence of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programmes in post-conflict societies. This research has important implications for the study of armed conflicts, child soldiering and research on post-conflict stability.

Co-authorship is an important indicator of scientific collaboration. Co-authorship networks are composed of sub-communities, and researchers can gain visibility by connecting these insulated subgroups. This article presents a comprehensive co-authorship network analysis of Swiss political science. Three levels are addressed: disciplinary cohesion and structure at large, communities, and the integrative capacity of individual researchers. The results suggest that collaboration exists across geographical and language borders even though different regions focus on complementary publication strategies. The subfield of public policy and administration has the highest integrative capacity. Co-authorship is a function of several factors, most importantly being in the same subfield. At the individual level, the analysis identifies researchers who belong to the “inner circle” of Swiss political science and who link different communities. In contrast to previous research, the analysis is based on the full set of publications of all political researchers employed in Switzerland in 2013, including past publications.

Focusing on German and EU support with assisting local police reform in the context of international peacebuilding in Afghanistan since 2001, this article scrutinizes whether the two organizations exhibit a strategic fit between their policy mandate and the design of management tasks. Comparison of two vastly different institutions —Germany, a nation state, and the EU, an international organization—sheds analytical light on the way different bodies manage a similar policy problem. By way of empirical research, the paper finds that incremental planning, decentralization and autonomous leadership enhance performance as they enable peacebuilders to respond flexibly to the dynamic challenges they face in the field. This was the case with Germany, however not with the EU. No strategic fit prevailed on evaluation. Strategy review either failed (Germany) or had unintended consequences (EU).

Reviewing findings from the recent institutional turn in peacebuilding research, this article identifies two conflicting arguments with respect to institutional designs that affect the performance of peace operations. One perspective favours functional decentralization and mission latitude, while the other perspective argues that a lack of political guidance strips mission leadership of their authority vis-à-vis local power brokers and reduces the likelihood of a ‘robust’ approach. Comparing two EU crisis management missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan, the article asks which of the two perspectives is supported by the institutional design and performance of EU peace operations. Unlike the UN – the focus of most previous research – the EU’s institutional framework is highly centralized. This provided member states with ample opportunities for political guidance, but such guidance was, in fact, negatively associated with performance. This finding suggests that the political guidance thesis must be treated with caution. Because member states’ interests vis-à-vis a conflict state rarely converge, the conditions for meaningful political guidance are absent. The article, therefore, finds that increasing managerial latitude provides the more promising avenue to enhancing peacebuilding performance. Addressing policy-makers, my findings speak to the urgent need for the EU to review and potentially reform its crisis management system.

This research note synthesizes the main theoretical frameworks in public policy. The concept of policy knots ties policy cycles, multiple streams, punctuated equilibrium, and other frameworks into one useful analytical tool. We introduce two particular policy knots—the granny knot and the clinch knot—to demonstrate the utility of the concept. As an illustration, we examine climate change policy in the United States in order to show the challenges of tying and securing a policy knot.

Recent advances in leadership research suggest that collective-focused leadership climate and differentiated individual-focused leadership might simultaneously, yet oppositely, affect collective outcomes. The present study extends this literature by addressing open questions regarding theory, methods, statistics, and level of analysis. Therefore, a new and more parsimonious theoretical model is developed on the organizational-level of analysis. Drawing on the commitment literature, we argue for opposite relations of the two leadership constructs on the affective organizational commitment climate. We subsequently theorize that contingent-reward leadership climate moderates these opposing relationships, making our study the first in this field to investigate moderators. Last, we reason that organizational effectiveness is enhanced when affective commitment is "put into Action" and raises the organizational citizenship behavior climate. Our three-path moderated-mediation hypotheses are tested, and supported, by structural equation modeling analyses in a multisource data set containing 16,911 respondents from 157 companies. Extensive alternative model testing shows that our theory and findings are robust.

Much literature has analysed parties’ influence on public education spending. We challenge this literature on theoretical, methodological and empirical grounds. It is standard to regress expenditure on cabinet seat-share weighted party family dummies in time-series cross-section regressions using ‘country-year’ data. But using ‘country-year’ data artificially inflates the number of cases and leads to biased estimates, as governments usually do not change annually. Second, using party families as proxies for party preferences assumes that parties within families hold similar positions while they differ across families. But this is empirically often not the case. Finally, a historical institutionalist perspective suggests that we should not expect party effects anymore in the first place. Empirically, we propose a new design, using direct measures of party preferences in analyses on government-term level. We find that the partisan composition of government did not have any significant effects on education spending from 1995 to 2010 in 21 democracies.

Since 1990 mortality and morbidity decline has been more extensive for some conditions prevalent in low- and middle-income countries than for others. One reason may be differences in the effectiveness of global health networks, which have proliferated in recent years. Some may be more capable than others in attracting attention to a condition, in generating funding, in developing interventions and in convincing national governments to adopt policies. This article introduces a supplement on the emergence and effectiveness of global health networks. The supplement examines networks concerned with six global health problems: tuberculosis (TB), pneumonia, tobacco use, alcohol harm, maternal mortality and newborn deaths. This article presents a conceptual framework delineating factors that may shape why networks crystallize more easily surrounding some issues than others, and once formed, why some are better able than others to shape policy and public health outcomes. All supplement papers draw on this framework. The framework consists of 10 factors in three categories: (1) features of the networks and actors that comprise them, including leadership, governance arrangements, network composition and framing strategies; (2) conditions in the global policy environment, including potential allies and opponents, funding availability and global expectations concerning which issues should be prioritized; (3) and characteristics of the issue, including severity, tractability and affected groups. The article also explains the design of the project, which is grounded in comparison of networks surrounding three matched issues: TB and pneumonia, tobacco use and alcohol harm, and maternal and newborn survival. Despite similar burden and issue characteristics, there has been considerably greater policy traction for the first in each pair. The supplement articles aim to explain the role of networks in shaping these differences, and collectively represent the first comparative effort to understand the emergence and effectiveness of global health networks.

Several rebel groups actively recruit children to serve among their ranks. While this constitutes one of the most egregious violations of children’s rights, it remains unclear what impact recruited children have on the fighting capacities of these armed groups. The existing research suggests that, on the one hand, armed groups drafting children might also be militarily effective, since it is cheaper to provide for children, they are more obedient and aggressive than adults, and easily manipulable. On the other hand, children may negatively affect rebel groups’ fighting capacities as they are less proficient combatants than adults and often difficult to control. We add to this debate by systematically analyzing the quantitative evidence on the impact of child soldiers on rebel groups’ fighting capacities. Based on the analysis of newly compiled data on child recruitment by rebel groups between 1989 and 2010, our analyses show that children may actually increase rebel groups’ fighting capacities. That said, rebels’ ability to procure arms and the access to resources seem to be more important determinants of fighting capacity. The authors discuss these findings in light of policy implications and avenues for future research.

This paper challenges the common explanations that failures of external state-building and democracy promotion are the result of a lack of domestic capacity or a lack of domestic willingness against an externally set liberal agenda of state-building and democratisation. Studying political decision-making on a micro-level, we argue that both explanations fail to capture the multi-faceted motivations and interests of domestic actors that go beyond mere ‘resistance’ against externally induced liberal reforms. Rather, criticism of reforms might be rooted in ideas of social justice and claims to socio-economic security. Furthermore, these explanations tend to overlook the need for domestic elites to bargain with various domestic stakeholders. A case study of Croatian public administration reform illustrates that failure of externally promoted reforms remain an option when significant international resources are available for liberal state-building and the target of reform is a relatively mature bureaucracy.

Across policy domains, government agencies evaluate social media content produced by third parties, identify valuable information, and at times reuse information to inform the public. This has the potential to permit a diversity of social media users to be heard in the resulting information networks, but to what extent are agencies relying on private citizens or others outside of the policy domain for message content? In order to examine that question, we analyze the online practices of state-level government agencies. Findings demonstrate that agencies emulate offline content reuse strategies by relying predominately on trusted institutional sources rather than new voices, such as private citizens. Those institutional sources predominantly include other government agencies and nonprofit organizations, and their messages focus mostly on informing and educating the public.

To manage the challenges resulting from the Euro crisis, EU institutions and member state governments established a number of measures aimed at enhancing coordination of budgetary and economic policy. The development of these measures came with considerable political conflicts. This article investigates empirically the extent to which political parties in the German Bundestag contributed to these conflicts by employing their information and control instruments. Differences in level of activity between parliamentary parties in the Bundestag are explained by strategic behaviors. The article contributes to political science debates regarding both the role of national parliaments in EU politics and on political conflicts in Germany resulting from the Euro crisis.