Aktuelle Publikationen

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Recent data collections about political violence are frequently based on media reports, which can lead to reporting bias. This is an issue in particular for the emergent literature on communication technology and conflict, since this technology may not only affect violence, but also the reporting about it. Using the effect of cellphones on violence as an example, this article presents a quantitative assessment of reporting bias in a micro-level analysis. Comparing media-based event reports and those from military sources, the results show that the purported violence-increasing effect of cellphone coverage is partly due to higher reporting rates of violence in cellphone-covered areas. A simple diagnostic procedure for this problem is implemented. Applied to the analysis of cellphones and violence in Africa, it produces a pattern that is consistent with reporting bias driving much of the effect found in the Pierskalla and Hollenbach (2013) study about this topic.

A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda-setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single-country studies has suggested a number of general agenda-setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including comparable media and politics evidence for seven European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), this study highlights a number of generic patterns. Additionally, it shows how the political system matters. Overall, the media are a stronger inspirer of political action in countries with single-party governments compared to those with multiple-party governments for opposition parties. But, government parties are more reactive to media under multiparty governments.

Coal production in India has not been commensurate with the growing energy demand. As a result, import dependence has increased, which has exposed the economy to higher prices and geopolitical risks. Coal India Limited, the monopoly public sector producer, is saddled with the problems of low productivity. Private sector participation in the sector is limited and restricted to captive mining. The aim of this article is to use a tool called “Discourse Network Analysis” and structurally analyse the configuration of debate on privatisation versus nationalisation from 1997 to 2013.

Qualitative small-N comparisons face the challenge to detect context-bound causality under conditions of limited empirical diversity. Rather than treating context as a causal factor, we test the usefulness of the novel method of comparative multilevel analysis (CMA) to identify and understand the role of context as a contingent necessary condition that enables a causal relationship to unfold. Combining CMA with pairwise comparisons, we assess how organ donation policies in Switzerland and Spain affect relatives’ refusal rates in a small-N setting exhibiting multiple contextual levels. To tackle limited diversity systematically, we suggest to refine the CMA methodology by accounting for several contexts and referring to higher-order constructs. Applying CMA with these refinements, we find voluntary information measures only affect refusal rates in contexts of a credible state explicitly supporting organ donation. The fact that CMA can easily be combined with other analytical and conceptual approaches makes it an effective technique to identify contextual effects in small-N research.

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This Article takes a preliminary look at some distinct, unintended effects of anti-bribery law. In an exemplary and exploratory way, it intends to examine structural socio-legal problems and dilemmas of designing and implementing legislation against corruption. Firstly, it outlines four ideal types of legal norms that are meant to combat corruption but display significant negative features. Secondly, the typology is briefly applied to selected recent developments in German federal anti-bribery legislation. The Article concludes, inter alia, that the design, implementation, and interpretation of anti-corruption law is full of functional, legal, political, and moral pitfalls.

The central assumption in the literature on collaborative networks and policy networks is that political outcomes are affected by a variety of state and nonstate actors. Some of these actors are more powerful than others and can therefore have a considerable effect on decision making. In this article, we seek to provide a structural and institutional explanation for these power differentials in policy networks and support the explanation with empirical evidence. We use a dyadic measure of influence reputation as a proxy for power, and posit that influence reputation over the political outcome is related to vertical integration into the political system by means of formal decision-making authority, and to horizontal integration by means of being well embedded into the policy network. Hence, we argue that actors are perceived as influential because of two complementary factors: (a) their institutional roles and (b) their structural positions in the policy network. Based on temporal and cross-sectional exponential random graph models, we compare five cases about climate, telecommunications, flood prevention, and toxic chemicals politics in Switzerland and Germany. The five networks cover national and local networks at different stages of the policy cycle. The results confirm that institutional and structural drivers seem to have a crucial impact on how an actor is perceived in decision making and implementation and, therefore, their ability to significantly shape outputs and service delivery.

In this article we summarize the precepts of Peripheral Realism, its place in the intellectual history of International Relations Theory, its contributions to interpreting Latin American international politics and its insights for the future. After revising the intellectual merits and tenets of the theory in the four initial sections, we show how it predicted the behavior of Latin American states under unipolarity. Finally, we review its implications for a world where China may hold economic primacy.