Aktuelle Publikationen

African cities have to manage rapid urbanization and mobilization to decrease road congestion and air pollution that hinder economic development and social cohesion. This paper presents public policy research that applied the concepts and language of Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis Development (IAD) framework to systematically describe the implementation of sustainable public transport policies in the Greater Johannesburg Area/South Africa. This mixed-method study focuses, in particular, on the process of developing a single trunk route of the Rea Vaya Bus Rapid Transit system (Phase 1A).

Speculations about whether strategic voting made a difference to the outcome of an election regularly whip up the passions of pundits, party strategists, electoral reformers and scholars alike. Yet, research on strategic voting's political effect has been hampered by the scarcity of data on district level party preferences. We propose the use of Bayesian small area estimation to predict district level preferences from just a handful of survey responses per district and comparing these predictions against election results to estimate how many voters switched sides in each district. We apply the approach to estimate how many seats changed hands as a result of strategic voting at the 1997 and 2001 UK general elections. Despite similar rates of strategic voting in both elections, the number of seats that were affected was markedly greater in 1997. Interestingly, the Liberal Democrats turn out to win the most seats because of strategic voting. We also estimate how many votes went in the ‘wrong’ direction—away from otherwise viable candidates. We validate our results by using journalistic sources and compare them with previous published estimates.

Governments often walk a fine line between measures designed to decrease the ‘spontaneous’ influx of asylum seekers and their attempts to avoid credibility losses as human rights advocates. Recent developments in Australia and Canada show that their governments have been relying on the following interrelated strategies that allow them to partially solve the resulting consistency problem: (1) Using refugee resettlement to present themselves as protectors of the right to asylum, while (2) trying to impede ‘spontaneous arrivals’ through strict border regimes and harsh conditions aiming at deterrence, and at the same time (3) distancing themselves from the implementation of related measures. The findings of this article indicate that, by delegating morally questionable tasks and thus outsourcing responsibility for the ‘dirty work’, the governments of both Australia and Canada attempt to avoid loss of image and balance their humanitarian obligations with policies - more or less explicitly - aiming at controlling and decreasing the admission of asylum seekers.

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The argument that environmental change is an important driving force of migration has experienced a strong revival in the climate change context. While various studies predict large environmental migration flows due to climate change and other environmental events, the ex post empirical evidence for this phenomenon is inconclusive. We contribute to the extant literature by focusing on the micro-level. We examine whether and how individual perceptions of different types of environmental stressors induce internal migration. The analysis relies on original survey data from Vietnam including both migrants and non-migrants. The results suggest that individual perceptions of long-term environmental events, such as droughts, significantly reduce migration while perceptions of sudden-onset environmental events, such as floods, significantly increase the likelihood of migration controlling for other determinants of migration. These findings also imply that improving the targeting of aid to environmental disaster-affected areas and the financial and technical support for adaptation to environmental change could be the most productive policy-options. Policymakers, thus, need to implement a wide range of developmental policies in combination with environmental ones in order to improve society’s ability to effectively cope with environmental change and minimize its effect on migration.

During the 2009 election campaign, Twitter not only served as a source of news for the media but also became a public stage for active political users. In particular, hopes were raised about a pluralistic grass-roots sphere of public communication in which political information can be shared in a non-ideological, decentralised and egalitarian manner. To test whether Twitter led to new patterns of political interaction and to determine the beneficiaries, we present findings from a large-scale network analysis investigating about four million tweets by more than 33,000 users including citizens, journalists and politicians in the 2009 National Election. Our analysis identifies the most popular users, contents and topics in this political sphere, revealing the Pirate Party movement as the most influential group during the campaign. A network analysis of the participating actors confirms the strong position of established online activists and bloggers in contrast to traditional mass media, politicians and parties.

The Internet has become an important infrastructure for political campaigns around the world, and various online tools have become pervasive campaigning devices. Still, most research on the role of the Internet and online tools in political campaigns focuses on US presidential campaigns. Due to the specific institutional context in the US, this research might not provide realistic observations about the role of the Internet in future campaigns in other countries. Researchers will have to enrich the debate through systematic studies of the role of the Internet and various online services in campaigns in political, legal and cultural contexts different from those prevailing in the US. This special issue aims to add to the discussion by presenting a number of empirical studies focusing on the role of the Internet and various online services during the campaign for the German federal election of 2009 and its aftermath.

Religion has increasingly become important in conflicts worldwide. Religious leaders may play a key role in mobilizing believers as they can call for peace or instigate violence. But what makes religious leaders support peace or promote violence? Drawing on a survey poll of 102 religious leaders in Juba, South Sudan, this paper represents virtually the first attempt to study the correlates of pro-violence opinions of religious elites in a more quantitative manner in a developing country. The paper analyzes when and why some religious leaders support faith-based violence while others do not. Employing a unique combination of innovative measures, our results have many implications for mobilization processes. We find that leaders’ support for faith-based violence is largely independent of individual demographic or personal determinants but is closely related to religious attitudes. Tolerance toward other faiths and secularism reduce pro-violence attitudes. Muslims seem to be more ready to support faith-based violence, probably given their minority status and other peculiarities of Islam in (South) Sudan. Surprisingly, interreligious activities do not reduce support for violence but increase appreciation for peaceful protest. Generally, determinants of peaceful protest substantially differ, suggesting that any support for violence follows its own distinct logic.

Land is a key element to socio-economic development, peace- and state-building in Africa. It is inherent to local identity and inextricably linked to power. In Namibia, land rights were historically administered and allocated by traditional authorities. However, with the adoption of the 2002 Communal Land Reform Act, these customary land rights were codified. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in Namibia with state officials, traditional authorities of the Nama and Ovambo ethnicity, workers and farmers, we show that although it was presented as a decentralization reform, the Act reintroduced the Namibian state as a central actor in land tenure. This has resulted in power struggles between the state and traditional authorities, albeit to varying intensities as some traditional authorities have historically restricted access to communal land and limited political leverage.

Does economic inequality cause civil war? Deviating from individualist measures of inequality such as the Gini coefficient, recent studies have found a statistical link between group-level inequalities and conflict onset. Yet, this connection remains controversial, not least because of the difficulties associated with conceptualizing and measuring group-level differences in development. In an effort to overcome weaknesses afflicting specific methods of measurement, we introduce a new composite indicator that exploits the strengths of three sources of data. The first step of our method combines geocoded data from the G-Econ project with night lights emissions data from satellites. In a second step, we bring together the combined spatial values with survey estimates in order to arrive at an improved measure of group-level inequality that is both more accurate and more robust than any one of the component measures. We evaluate the effect of the combined indicator and its components on the onset of civil violence. As expected, the combined index yields stronger results as more information becomes available, thus confirming the initial hypothesis that horizontal economic inequality does drive conflict in the case of groups that are relatively poor compared to the country average. Furthermore, these findings appear to be considerably more robust than those relying on a single data source.

The classical outbidding model of ethnic politics argues that democratic competition involving ethnic parties inevitably leads to ethnic outbidding where parties adopt ever more extreme positions. However, recent small-N studies show that ethnic outbidding is only one of a range of strategies available to ethnic parties. This article seeks to explain why some ethnic parties are extremist, whereas others adopt moderate positions. Drawing on the ethnic outbidding and the nested competition model of ethnic party competition, it is hypothesised that the ethnic segmentation of the electoral market, and the relative salience of an ethnically cross-cutting economic dimension of party competition, account for the varying degrees of extremism. Hypotheses are tested drawing on a novel, expert-survey-based dataset that provides indicators for the positions of 83 ethnonational minority parties in 22 European democracies in 2011. Results of ordinary least squares and two-level linear regressions show that as the economic dimension gains importance, parties become more moderate relative to the party system mean. The electorate's ethnic segmentation has a positive effect on extremism, but this effect is not significant in all models. Contrary to expectations, higher ethnic segmentation of the party system is associated with more moderate positions in the majority of the estimated models.

Policy makers and academics often contend that organizational anarchy permits soldiers to perpetrate sexual violence. A recent United Nations report supports this thesis especially with regard to the massive sexual abuse in the Congolese civil war. We challenge the anarchy argument and maintain, based on a principal-agent framework, that opportunistic military commanders can order their soldiers to rape through the use of sanctions and rewards. Our qualitative and quantitative analysis of a survey of 96 Congolese ex-soldiers shows that ordered rape is more likely in organizations where soldiers fear punishment and in which commanders distribute drugs as stimulants.

How do religious civil wars evolve? Many violent conflicts are fought between groups of different faiths. The paper argues, however, that religious differences rarely directly lead to conflict onset. Rather, the apparent religious dimension of many civil wars is a consequence of successful religious framing. Political and military leaders offer religious interpretations designed to legitimize the use of force and to mobilize believers to violent action. Such framing processes can be more or less successful, depending inter alia on the authority of the political and religious leadership, on the coherence and appropriateness of the frames, on the existence of persuasive counter-frames, and on the availability of communication infrastructures that allow for effective dissemination of religious frames. Comparing violent conflicts in the Philippines and Thailand, the paper shows that religious mobilization can fail along the theoretically predicted lines.