Aktuelle Publikationen

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It is often assumed that political parties in Africa have only weak formal structures and are instead dominated by informal, personalised networks. This paper seeks to challenge this view by presenting a much more nuanced picture of intra-party dynamics. Based on unique survey data from Ghana, it is shown how formal and informal party structures co-exist and interact at the national and constituency level. Because informal relationships are not directly observable and difficult to study, the paper employs a social network approach to map the personal interactions between the Members of the 6th Parliament of Ghana and their respective parties. It is found that the local party organisation plays a strong role in both of the major parties NDC (National Democratic Congress) and NPP (New Patriotic Party). There are, however, also differences between the parties. At the national level, the NDC is strongly centralised and dominated by its national executives. The NPP, in contrast, has an informal power center located in the Ashanti Region. Ethno-regional factions play only a minor role in both parties. By demonstrating that the relative importance of informal relations varies even between parties in the same country, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the variation in party organisation across Africa.

We outline a comprehensive research program on institutional reforms in European parliaments. Original data show that parliamentary rules in Western European parliaments have been changed frequently and massively during the period from 1945 to 2010 suggesting that actors use institutional reforms as a distinct strategy to pursue their substantive goals. We discuss how institutional instability affects existing theoretical and empirical arguments about institutional effects. Furthermore, we present four ideal-typical approaches to analyzing rule changes, present new software tools for identifying and coding changes in large text corpora, and demonstrate their usefulness for valid measurement of the overall change between subsequent text versions.

Studies have found that politically deprived groups are more likely to rebel. However, does rebellion increase the likelihood of achieving political rights? This article proposes that rebellion helps ethnic groups to overcome deprivation. I illustrate this by using a ‘‘typical’’ case (the Ijaw’s struggle against the Nigerian government) to demonstrate how ethnic rebellion increases the costs for the government to a point where granting political rights becomes preferable to war. Further, I exploit time-series-cross-sectional data on deprived ethnic groups to show that rebellion is significantly associated with overcoming deprivation. The statistical analysis shows that democratic change is an alternative mechanism.

Twitter has become a pervasive tool in election campaigns. Candidates, parties, journalists, and a steadily increasing share of the public are using Twitter to comment on, interact around, and research public reactions to politics. These uses have met with growing scholarly attention. As of now, this research is fragmented, lacks a common body of evidence, and shared approaches to data collection and selection. This article presents the results of a systematic literature review of 127 studies addressing the use of Twitter in election campaigns. In this systematic review, I will discuss the available research with regard to findings on the use of Twitter by parties, candidates, and publics during election campaigns and during mediated campaign events. Also, I will address prominent research designs and approaches to data collection and selection.

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In Reaktion auf die Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise wurden durch die EU-Institutionen seit 2011 bestehende Mechanismen der EU-weiten Koordinierung und Kontrolle nationaler Politiken – insbesondere mit Blick auf die Wirtschafts- und Finanzpolitik – in erheblichem Umfang ausgebaut. Mit dem Anspruch einer engeren Koordinierung nationaler Wirtschafts- und Finanzpolitiken durch die Kommission haben sich sowohl vertikal als auch horizontal die Machtverhältnisse im gewaltenteiligen EU-Mehrebenensystem verändert. Auf nationaler Ebene ist eine Verschiebung der Macht von der Legislative zur Exekutive und innerhalb der Exekutive eine Zentralisierung der Macht in der Kernexekutive zu beobachten. Damit reiht sich Deutschland in den europaweiten Trend der Machtzentralisierung in Folge von Europäisierung ein. Ausgehend von der Annahme, dass die neuen europäischen Governance-Mechanismen für die nationalen Ministerialverwaltungen einen erhöhten Koordinationsbedarf schaffen, wird in dem Beitrag herausgearbeitet, wie sich dieser erhöhte Koordinationsbedarf auf die Machtstrukturen und Koordinationsprozesse in der bundesdeutschen Ministerialverwaltung auswirkt. Zum einen werden innerhalb der Exekutive zwischen den einzelnen Ressorts Entscheidungskompetenzen zentralisiert mit dem Effekt einer Hierarchisierung im Kabinett; zum anderen kommt es innerhalb der einzelnen Ressorts im Verhältnis zwischen politischer Führung und administrativer Elite zu einer verstärkten funktionalen Politisierung.

In many applications of the Cox model, the proportional-hazards assumption is implausible. In these cases, the solution to nonproportional hazards usually consists of modeling the effect of the variable of interest and its interaction effect with some function of time. Although Stata provides a command to implement this interaction in stcox, it does not allow the typical visualizations using stcurve if stcox was estimated with the tvc() option. In this article, I provide a short workaround that estimates the survival function after stcox with timedependent coefficients. I introduce and describe the scurve_tvc command, which automates this procedure and allows users to easily visualize survival functions for models with time-varying effects.

An important literature examines the attempts by the international community in inducing or coercing conflict parties in civil wars to refrain from committing atrocities against the civilian population. We examine in this article whether a non-governmental actor, the distinctively neutral and independent International Committee of the Red Cross, whose mission includes the promotion of humanitarian law and the protection of the civilian population, has such a restraining effect on the conflict parties. Our results suggest that the more time has passed since the ratification of the relevant Geneva Conventions and Protocols, the larger is the risk of civilian victimization. We cannot find evidence that the ICRC’s presence in conflict zones and the seminars it conducts to spread humanitarian law make a crucial difference. Case studies of Bosnia and Darfur indicate that shaming strategies and thus a relatively unusual instrument for the traditionally neutral actor did not abate the killings; the statistical evidence in the form of Granger causality tests rather show that the killing and harming precedes the naming and shaming.

Das doppelt-blinde Peer-Review-Verfahren steht trotz seiner langen Tradition zunehmend in der Kritik und befeuert damit die Diskussion um alternative Publikationsformen. Kriegeskortes Vision eines offenen, nachgelagerten Peer-Review-Systems steht derzeit als Alternative im Fokus dieser Diskussion. Wir nehmen die Kritik sowie die normativ geführte Diskussion um alternative Formen der Peer-Steuerung zum Anlass, um das Nutzungspotential von Open Post-Publication-Peer-Review (OPR) zu eruieren. Unsere Studie untersucht dabei, wie verbreitet OPR ist, welche Gründe für dessen Nutzung sprechen und welche Probleme Wissenschaftler damit assoziieren. Die Ergebnisse einer internationalen Umfrage mit 2.800 Wissenschaftlern zeigen, dass OPR nur von einem Drittel der Befragten als brauchbares Verfahren eingeschätzt wird, um die operative Reliabilität des Begutachtungsprozesses zu verbessern. Antizipierte Vorteile aus der Literatur sind zwar für die grundsätzliche Nutzungsbereitschaft relevant, spielen bei der tatsächlichen Publikationsentscheidung jedoch eine nachgelagerte Rolle. Eine Ausnahme bildet die Erwartung an höhere Publikationschancen für heterodoxe Forschungsbeiträge. Ziel unserer Untersuchung ist es, einen wissenschaftlich fundierten Beitrag zur Debatte über innovative Formen der Wissenschaftskommunikation zu leisten.

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We present a field experiment that uses geo-referenced smartphone advertisements to measure ethnic preferences at a highly disaggregated level. Different types of banners advertising a vote matching tool are randomly displayed to mobile Internet users in Bosnia and Herzegovina, while recording their spatial coordinates. Differences in the response (click) rate to different ethnic cues on these banners are used to measure temporal and spatial variation in ethnic preferences among the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Our study lays out the theoretical and practical underpinnings of this technology and discusses its potential for future applications, but also highlights limitations of this approach.