Aktuelle Publikationen

Die Zielsetzung dieses Beitrags besteht darin, anhand dreier politikwissenschaftlicher Theoriestränge das Ausmaß der Hinwendung zum wettbewerbsorientierten Steuerungsparadigma in vier deutschen Bundesländern zu erklären. Inwieweit unterscheiden sich die Hochschulsteuerungsmodelle der deutschen Bundesländer und wodurch lassen sich die unterschiedlichen hochschulpolitischen Entwicklungen erklären? Im Rahmen eines qualitativen Vergleichs befassen sich die Autoren mit den Entwicklungspfaden von vier Bundesländern: Hessen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Sachsen und Thüringen. Dabei wird untersucht, ob und inwieweit parteipolitische Konstellationen, historische Vermächtnisse und fiskalpolitischer Problemdruck das Ausmaß der Einführung wettbewerbsorientierter hochschulpolitischer Steuerungsmechanismen und der Stärkung der universitären Autonomie beeinflussen.

The research note comments on W. Veenendaal's article “A Big Prince in a Tiny Realm: Smallness, Monarchy, and Political Legitimacy in the Principality of Liechtenstein”. It is argued, inter alia, that the phenomenon of “princely self-restraint” should not be underestimated in Liechtenstein's constitutional reality. The character of the microstate's actual political system strongly depends on the individual personality of the Reigning Prince. A strong monarch who acts as a political actor with his own agenda should not be conceptualized as a neutral traditional leader. From the perspective of many citizens of Liechtenstein, the principality's political system is legitimate since it combines traditional authority and legal-rational authority in a unique way. Largely due to the powerful role of the government, the microstate is characterized by consensus-oriented hierarchical governance. Elite surveys can be seen as a useful instrument to overcome some of the methodological pitfalls of the elite interview approach.

When coding events from media sources – as the majority of data projects do – different reports may oftentimes contain contradictory information. What do coders make of this? It is up to them to aggregate different reports into one coded event, and to supplement missing information based on other sources or their own background information. If not addressed properly, this may lead to a lack of replicability and to low reliability of the final data product. In this short article, we present an approach for separating (i) event reports and the information contained in them, and (ii) events, which are based on aggregate information from the reports and constitute the final data product. Our procedure preserves uncertainty arising from multiple reports and gives the user control over how missing and conflicting information should be dealt with. We illustrate our procedure with data from a current coding project, the Mass Mobilization in Autocracies Database (MMAD).

Parliamentarians and their party groups can employ many different instruments to communicate policy statements to their electorate (debates in plenary, presentations of committee reports, oral questions, written questions, and interpellations). Therefore, the design of these instruments should be analysed in one common framework. This paper seeks to provide a first step towards this goal by mapping and explaining the centralisation of parliamentary policy statements in all western European countries with a parliamentary system. It is argued that, on a theoretical level, there are two different causes for a stronger or weaker centralisation of the instruments of parliamentary policy statements: the electoral connection and efficiency. Empirically, it is shown that there are striking differences in centralisation both within and between countries which are worth exploring further. Moreover, the results of the statistical models suggest that the electoral connection is the driving factor behind the centralisation of the instruments of parliamentary policy statements.

Modern communication technology is emerging rapidly, with tremendous social implications. The key innovations introduced by this technology include the increased pervasiveness and the rich nature of digitally transmitted information, and a new type of network structure over which it is disseminated. The articles in this special issue present theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between communication technology and political conflict and violence. There are different pathways through which this can happen: technology can facilitate collective action, but at the same time give governments the opportunity to censor content and gather intelligence about dissidents. Also, audience effects can be introduced by the rich and instant transmission of information from conflict regions. The contributions to this special issue can be divided into three groups. A first group of articles looks at the effects of ‘old’ communication technologies with state-of-the-art methods, which is necessary to see if the effects of modern technology really differ. A second category of articles focuses on ‘new’ communication technologies, and try to assess their effect on conflict both theoretically and empirically. The third and last category reverses this question, and looks at the reflection of war and violence in (traditional and new) media channels.