Aktuelle Publikationen

If one interprets China's sizable rise in Latin America as an unprecedented phenomenon, it follows that the concurrent story of declining U.S. influence in the region is an event hastily acknowledged at best and ignored at worst. In this article, we ask whether Chinese economic statecraft in Latin America is related to the declining U.S. hegemonic influence in the region and explore how. To do so we analyze foreign direct investments, bank loans, and international trade from 2003 to 2014, when China became a major player in the region. We use data from 21 Latin American countries, and find that an inversely proportional relationship exists between the investments made by Chinese state‐owned enterprises (SOEs), bank loans, manufacturing exports, and the U.S. hegemonic influence exerted in the region. In other words, Beijing has filled the void left by a diminished U.S. presence in the latter's own backyard.

What is the main motivation for replication in international relations? How can we implement it, and who is in charge? With a variety of proposals put forward by the contributors to this special issue, it seems useful to provide a synopsis. This article does so by asking a set of key questions related to replication, and by summarizing the stance each proposal takes with respect to these questions. This comparison reveals that there are fewer disagreements than we would think: there is broad consensus when it comes to the motivation and the need for replication in our field. However, proposals diverge as to how replication should be best implemented and, to a lesser extent, who should be the driving force behind this. This article concludes with a recommendation for a dual strategy. First, simple replication on the journal side should be implemented as a routine quality check to weed out work that does not even satisfy basic replication standards. Second, journals should be encouraged to allow publication of more comprehensive, in-depth replication studies with an independent contribution.

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Patterns found in digital trace data are increasingly used as evidence of social phenomena. Still, the role of digital services not as mirrors but instead as mediators of social reality has been neglected. We identify characteristics of this mediation process by analyzing Twitter messages referring to politics during the campaign for the German federal election 2013 and comparing the thus emerging image of political reality with established measurements of political reality. We focus on the relationship between temporal dynamics in politically relevant Twitter messages and crucial campaign events, comparing dominant topics in politically relevant tweets with topics prominent in surveys and in television news, and by comparing mention shares of political actors with their election results.

The contribution advances a theoretical conceptualization of the bureaucratic autonomy of international secretariats and suggests an empirical yardstick for its measurement. The proposed concept of bureaucratic autonomy focuses on administrative structures and provides an indicator-based approximation for the bureaucratic capacities of international organizations in order to systematically reveal variation in intra-organizational potential for autonomous bureaucratic behaviour. The usefulness and limitations of the concept are discussed in light of an empirical examination of 15 international secretariats.

Policy coordination in federal states is inherently complex because it includes a multitude of actors at the federal and the sub-state level. If the sub-states want their interests to be included in the final decision, they need to coordinate with the federal level but also amongst themselves. Several individual interests are overlooked easier than coordinated interests of a group of sub-states. This paper puts forward the argument that during the coordination process, the actors from both levels meet in different constellations where they focus on different aspects of coordination, especially on different actors’ interests separately. This is a strategy which enables them to procedurally reduce the complexity of the decision-making process. In order to empirically investigate this argument, first a thorough definition of coordination as process is provided and operationalized for empirical investigation. It is accentuated that coordination as a process has different dimensions which are relevant for the understanding of the coordination process. This argument is analyzed with the example case of German EU policy. The empirical data used are original expert interviews with German civil servants responsible for EU policy coordination at the sub-state level. It will be demonstrated that the actors strategically form voluntary coordination constellations which enables them to reduce complexity during the process.

Social media adoption changes the existing organizational technology paradigm of public sector organizations. This paper explains the internal decisions that are necessary before new technologies can be used to support the strategic mission of a government organization and which behavioral and technological changes are integrated into the organization's standard operating procedures. This is an important theoretical contribution, because social media technologies are developed and hosted by third parties outside of government, with government's role limited to reactively evaluating their internal needs, strategic alignment, and existing routines. Evidence from qualitative interviews with social media directors in the U.S. federal government and a digital ethnography of their online practices expand the existing theory of social media adoption by adding two distinct activities: strategic alignment and routinization which lead to the institutionalization of new technologies.

From 1991 until 2012, the European Union (EU) applied sanctions on Myanmar with the purpose of promoting democracy and human rights. In addition, the EU called on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to exert pressure on Myanmar. This paper analyses, in the context of Myanmar’s 1997 accession to ASEAN, how the EU’s sanctions approach towards Myanmar was perceived within ASEAN and related repercussions of this approach on ASEAN–EU interregional relations. With the accession of Myanmar as the base story, it is argued that a regional organizations membership concept implies specific dealings with normative ideas such as democracy and human rights as well as strategies of punishment such as sanctions. The differing membership concepts of ASEAN and the EU explain ASEAN’s critical perception of the EU’s sanctions on Myanmar. Further, the conceptual difference in membership also explains that the EU’s pressure on ASEAN has severely impaired the interregional relations.

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Voters are reluctant to sanction representatives for individual misconduct if they have to balance candidate-level and party-level factors in their choice, but this trade-off is affected by the electoral system. Our general theoretical model explains why individual accountability can empirically occur in single-member district (SMD) systems but is expected under less restrictive conditions using open-list proportional representation (OLPR). The latter not only decouples party and candidate choice but also makes seat allocation more vote elastic. For a thorough empirical test of our argument, we draw on real-world evidence from state-level elections in Bavaria, Germany, which are held under an unusual mixed-member system. Exploiting a recent public scandal involving one-third of representatives, we examine how electoral punishment of the same candidates by the same voters differs across electoral rules. Drawing on difference-in-differences as well as matching/regression estimators, we show that electoral punishment is substantially larger under OLPR than under SMD systems.

The literature increasingly acknowledges that international institutions do not exist in isolation, but regularly interact with each other. This interplay might induce influence, affecting institutions’ development and performance. The following research adds to this debate by systematically analyzing the quantitative evidence on how institutional interaction drives institutional design from a network perspective. Using dyadic cross-sectional data on international environmental agreements in 1952–2000, the authors find support for their theoretical argument that regimes’ similarity in design as captured by their degree of legalization strongly depends on institutions’ interaction. However, while “soft law” disseminates between regimes that are well connected through direct or indirect links, this does not apply to “hard law.” The authors explain this divergence with states’ concerns about binding-law commitments and sovereignty costs associated with the latter. This research may have important implications for studies of international institutions and of network analysis in general.

This article reports on an attempt to forecast the outcome of the 2013 election to the German Bundestag. In contrast to the predominant academic approach to forecast incumbent vote shares from measures of government popularity, economic conditions and other fundamental variables, we entirely relied on data from published trial heat polls. Opposite to common practice in the news media, we did not take isolated polls as election forecasts in their own right. Instead, we used historical data to assess empirically the relationship between polls and election outcomes, and combined extrapolations from current polls in a Bayesian manner. The forecast was published one month ahead of the election. The retrospective evaluation of our method was added after the election. While our method is parsimonious and provides a large lead time, the performance at the 2013 election was underwhelming. We offer additional suggestions how the approach can be improved in future scenarios.

The aim of this paper is to analyze and describe how the acknowledgement of the climate change problem and the subsequent policy proposals are spread globally and differentiated nationally, focusing on policy networks between national and global organizations based on the survey on Japanese organizations which are active in the domain of climate change policy. Global organizations, especially those that are known for providing scientific information and policy advice, influence the climate change policies being made by the national organizations. The effects of this relationship between the global and national organizations are two-fold: firstly, the information presented by global organizations partially forms the policy preferences of national organizations. Secondly, the national organizations can gain more reputation among policy domain actors by having ties with global organizations, especially with those that do not have ties with other national organizations. This distribution process of scientific information and policy advice from global organizations to domestic policy domain can be seen as the mechanism which brings global convergence on climate change policy ideas. On the contrary, domestic organizations form ties with global organizations based on their own policy preference. As a result, the information from the global organizations is filtered by the national organizations, which brings the national differentiations with respect to climate change policies among the countries.