Aktuelle Publikationen

Open collaboration has evolved as a new form of innovation creation in the public sector. Government organizations are using online platforms to collaborative create or contribute to public sector innovations with the help of external and internal problem solvers. Most recently the U.S. federal government has encouraged agencies to collaboratively create and share open source code on the social coding platform GitHub and allow third parties to share their changes to the code. A community of government employees is using the social coding site GitHub to share open source code for software and website development, distribution of data sets and research results, or to seek input to draft policy documents. Quantitative data extracted from GitHub's application programming interface is used to analyze the collaboration ties between contributors to government repositories and their reuse of digital products developed on GitHub by other government entities in the U.S. federal government. In addition, qualitative interviews with government contributors in this social coding environment provide insights into new forms of co-development of open source digital products in the public sector.

Open government initiatives in the U.S. government focus on three main aspects: transparency, participation, and collaboration. Especially the collaboration mandate is relatively unexplored in the literature. In practice, government organizations recognize the need to include external problem solvers into their internal innovation creation processes. This is partly derived from a sense of urgency to improve the efficiency and quality of government service delivery. Another formal driver is the America Competes Act that instructs agencies to search for opportunities to meaningfully promote excellence in technology, education, and science. Government agencies are responding to these requirements by using open innovation (OI) approaches to invite citizens to crowdsource and peer produce solutions to public management problems. These distributed innovation processes occur at all levels of the U.S. government and it is important to understand what design elements are used to create innovative public management ideas. This article systematically reviews existing government crowdsourcing and peer production initiatives and shows that after agencies have defined their public management problem, they go through four different phases of the OI process: (1) idea generation through crowdsourcing, (2) incubation of submitted ideas with peer voting and collaborative improvements of favorite solutions, (3) validation with a proof of concept of implementation possibilities, and (4) reveal of the selected solution and the (internal) implementation of the winning idea. Participation and engagement are incentivized both with monetary and nonmonetary rewards, which lead to tangible solutions as well as intangible innovation outcomes, such as increased public awareness.

This article extends the conceptual knowledge of average relative subjective age in organizations by exploring organizational-level antecedents and consequences of employees, on average, feeling younger than their chronological age. We draw from the theories of selection-optimization-compensation and socioemotional selectivity to build a theoretical framework for relative subjective age in organizations. We hypothesize that companies in which employees, on average, perceive themselves to be younger than they actually are have a higher average individual goal accomplishment and, in turn, experience higher company performance. We further hypothesize that employees' average experience of high work-related meaning relates to a lower subjective age in organizations. In addition, we assess the role of environmental dynamism and age-inclusive human resource management as moderators in this theoretical model. Through empirically testing this model in a multisource dataset, including 107 companies with 15,164 participating employees, we received support for the hypothesized relationships. Our results contribute to current debates in the scientific literature on age and have important practical implications in light of the demographic changes faced by many companies. This research indicates to both researchers and practitioners that it is not employees' chronological age but their subjective age, a factor that can be influenced, which drives organizational performance outcomes.

Many civil wars are fought between members of different religious communities. It seems plausible to focus on these communities’ interrelations to identify the causal factors responsible for the escalating effects that religion can have in such conflicts.A closer look, however, reveals that processes within religious communities can be crucial in influencing the role religions play in intrastate wars. Within single communities, factions of religious elites compete for material and dogmatic supremacy. Such intra-religious conflicts can motivate religious elites to search for support from political allies to prevail over their religious rivals. In return, they legitimize their political patrons’ claims for political power and their violent campaigns against members of other religious communities. Thus, intra-religious conflicts can effectively contribute to the religious escalation of intrastate wars between different religious communities. This argument is exemplified with reference to conflicts in Thailand, The Philippines, and Iraq.

Democracy promotion is an integral component of European foreign policy. However, the 1990s’ rosy proliberalization rhetoric faded with the failed interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bumpy integration of the Western Balkans into the EU and the persistence of authoritarianism in the Arab world despite the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring. This article suggests four explanations for the observed lack of effectiveness of European democracy promotion: (1) the absence of a consensus among democracy promoters about policy objectives, and the interference of hidden agendas; (2) the neglect of rational interests of domestic actors and the dynamics of the external–domestic interplay in democracy promotion; (3) the adaption of authoritarian incumbents to the domestic and international threats to democratize, and (4) the existence of negative external actors interested in promoting autocracy and undermining democratic transition.

German foreign policy did adapt its principled beliefs as far as German-Russian relationship is concerned and was successful in integrating EU and NATO over the crisis, but did not manage to adapt decisively causal beliefs at the tactical level.

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dc.contributor.author: Garas, Antonios; Schweitzer, Frank

The European sovereign debt crisis continues to hold Europe and the world captive. Will the euro and the fiscal mechanism of the eurozone survive? And how effective is the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP)? Do the euro countries generally fail to comply with the rules of fiscal governance, or does the eurozone need a more member-specific fiscal mechanism? This article examines whether and how the SGP influenced the development of government debt making in the euro countries after the introduction of the common currency. While the SGP could not prevent euro countries from exceeding their deficits, this study’s synthetic control analysis reveals that the mechanism has effectively reduced the overall government debt of euro countries since 1999. In particular, donor countries were able to control governmental spending, while many recipient countries—including Greece, Portugal and Italy—have increased government debt ever since, resulting in the European sovereign debt crisis. This suggests that while the SGP effectively constrained overall government debt making, a more sophisticated mechanism is required for safeguarding compliance in large recipient countries.

The authors examine higher education developments in two peripheral post-communist countries—Georgia and Armenia, whose education systems have previously received little attention in the literature. They focus on how both countries’ models of higher education governance have evolved through the phase of political transformation and recent period of geopolitical tensions and more intense Europeanization and internationalization. Based on a series of empirical indicators for three ideal-types of higher governance derived from the previous literature, the authors assess the transformed relationship between the state and higher education institutions. Specifically, they focus on the extent to which both systems have converged on a market-oriented model of Anglo-American inspiration. The empirical analysis shows that following western practices has become a common leitmotiv of policy-makers in both countries and that new forms of “co-governance” between the state and university management have emerged. However, the authors argue that policy learning from the West has taken place in a very selective and tactical manner, as market-oriented steering instruments are only being adopted to the extent that they do not undermine the state’s means for political control over higher education.

In mature democracies, elections discipline leaders to deliver good economic performance.Since the fall of the Soviet Union, most developing countries also hold elections, but theseare often marred by illicit tactics. Using a new global data set, this article investigateswhether these illicit tactics are merely blemishes or substantially undermine the economicefficacy of elections. We show that illicit tactics are widespread, and that they reducethe incentive for governments to deliver good economic performance. Our analysis alsosuggests that in societies with regular free and fair elections, leaders do not matter foreconomic growth.

This article places developments in Polish public higher education (HE) in the broader context of the literature on HE governance and, in particular, marketization. The Polish case stands out due to the parallel existence of prestigious large universities with long histories of scientific advancement and the largest number of private HE institutions in Europe. Since 1989 Poland has undergone a process of extreme massification, with student numbers having exponentially multiplied. The analysis aims to offer theoretical explanations based on historical institutionalism and organizational isomorphism for the differential development of Polish public and private HE. The author argues that Polish public HE has been characterized by fragmentary state-driven attempts to inject more competition into the system and altogether relative policy inertia – despite an internal and external environment which is highly conducive to policy change and in particular marketization. The author presents a series of empirical indicators to assess the degree of marketization and/or attachment to the historical governance model, which was reinstated in 1990.

In this article, we offer an explanation for varying patterns of territorial reforms aimed at accommodating claims for more substate autonomy in multinational states. We argue that the interaction between preferences of state-wide and non-statewide parties, their negotiation power and the negotiation mode accounts for specific patterns of territorial change. Analytically, we advance existing research in two ways: First, by analyzing territorial change in a two-dimensional space (vertical and horizontal), we pay explicit attention to jurisdictional heterogeneity between substates. Second, by applying an actor-centered institutionalist approach, we highlight the strategic potential of actors within the institutional setting. The comparative analysis of thirteen processes of territorial change in four multinational Western democracies—Canada, Belgium, Spain, and the UK—reveals, first, certain conditional effects of the independent variables on specific patterns of territorial change and, second, how the negotiation mode impacts on a party’s negotiation power.