Aktuelle Publikationen

Many studies have emphasized the role of natural resources in the onset and duration of armed conflict. Due to its characteristics, narcotics are considered to be one of the most influential resources. However, the dynamics of how this particular commodity is linked to conflict is still not well understood. Most scholars have focused on the revenue aspects of narcotics and only a few have mentioned the micro-level aspect, i.e., the effect of drug intake and alcohol consumption on combatants' behavior during conflict. With the help of a dataset based on 224 interviews held with former combatants in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we examined this latter dynamic. Our analyses show, after controlling for armed group-level and individual-level variables, that drug intake and alcohol consumption boost the number of violent actions perpetrated by combatants.

This special issue explores norm diffusion, contestation and localisation in the contexts of political transition in general and post-war peacebuilding specifically. It engages with critical moments in which international diffusion endeavours meet local politics of norm contestation in societies undergoing post-war and/or post-authoritarian transitions. The ‘third wave’ of norm research offers an agency-based approach to the negotiation and contestation of the meaning of norms that is consistent with work in peacebuilding studies on the meeting between international norms and local realities in post-war contexts. By honing in on the ‘normative powers’ of local agents, their perspectives and capacities, and how these contribute to norm construction, the special issue provides theoretical and conceptual advances to capture these transition processes in the context of the Western Balkans.

In their seminal paper, Carey and Shugart (1995) argue that electoral rules predetermine whether election campaigns are predominantly characterized by competition between parties, or among candidates within parties. In particular, electoral systems that provide weak party control over ballot access, that allow voters to express a preference vote for individual candidates, and that select candidates on the basis of the votes they earn individually are supposed to offer strong incentives for candidates to cultivate a personal vote. In this paper, we investigate Carey and Shugart's original claims about the instrumental motivations of candidates in open-ballot proportional representation (PR) elections using survey data and election statistics from the 2007 Swiss National Council elections. As opposed to previous work, we develop and employ more direct and valid measures of intra- and interparty incentives to wage personal campaigns. Our empirical results suggest that the candidates' campaign focus and expenditures are closely linked to intraparty competition, but not interparty competition. Previously used proxies of intraparty competition, such as district magnitude or the number of candidates on a party list (or ratios thereof), turn out to be but remotely related to the candidates' campaign behavior.

Although Sweden and Denmark are regarded as typical social democratic welfare states, there are significant differences in the institutional set-up of their skill formation systems. In Sweden, vocational education is fully integrated into secondary education, while Denmark is characterized by strong involvement of employers via workplace-based apprenticeships. This article aims to explain these different paths of development and their political sustainability, while providing general insights on the dynamics of institutional change in advanced political economies. We demonstrate how firm size had crucial implications for skill formation policies during the phase of industrialization, while the partisan balance of power became highly influential in the post-war decades. An additional key observation is that once a critical juncture is passed, actors adopt their strategies and preferences to reflect the new institutional context. As a consequence, the skill formation regimes of both countries remained relatively stable after the 1980s.

In peacebuilding, international norms travel frequently from the global sphere of international organisations to local contexts - but what happens when international norms touch the ground? This article deals with norm diffusion in post-war Kosovo from the vantage point of the local, making localisation strategies, contestation patterns and translation practices the subject of analysis. It shows that the ‘local meaning’ of norms can be ambiguous, but nevertheless supportive of the liberal norms promoted by peacebuilding and that norm diffusion is shaped by conditions that are specific to post-war societies. First, norm contestation is influenced by wartime polarisations leading to segregated discursive arenas and by conflict goals that shape local interpretations of international norms. Through strategic emphasis and selection, local agents then aim to build congruence with the conflict goal. The rejection, localisation or acceptance of international norms depends on whether the established local meaning allows congruence building with the conflict goal or not. These claims are based on an empirical analysis of local interpretations (or ‘local meaning’) of the internationally promoted norms of democracy and minority rights at the municipal level in Kosovo.

Um flexibler und schneller auf Veränderungen reagieren zu können, entwickeln Firmen verstärkt netzwerkartige Formen der Zusammenarbeit. Um ihre eigene Leistungsfähigkeit zu stärken, müssen Teams die dadurch verschwimmenden Teamgrenzen selbst aktiv aufbauen und managen. Eine empirische Studie des Instituts für Führung und Personalmanagement der Universität St. Gallen bei einem international tätigen Automobilunternehmen zeigt, wie Teams so die Beschleunigungsfalle vermeiden können.

In the 1990s, Tanzania, like many other countries in the Sub-Sahara region, embarked on a number of reforms to improve public service delivery. Among others, the reform proponents championed outsourcing by the public institutions as an approach that facilitates cost cutting and yet improves service delivery. The public institutions adopted this new approach for the same rationale. Currently, almost all the public institutions in Tanzania, even the most sensitive ones, have to some degree done outsourcing. What remains to be empirically seen, is the degree, to which the main objective of outsourcing has been achieved. This article addresses the question. It adopts a comparative approach by analyzing two categories of services outsourced by the University of Dar es Salaam. The services under comparison are cleaning and health. Specifically, the aim is to establish whether the University following the outsourcing measures attains the objective of cost cutting.

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This article seeks to clarify the relationship between reserved seats filled through competitive elections, political parties, and substantive minority representation. It argues that the party affiliation of the minority representative moderates the impact of reserved seats on substantive representation since minority and party constituencies can cross-pressure a representative or, in the case of overlap, can allow her to cater to party and minority interests simultaneously. Drawing on empirical examples, the article first classifies party affiliations along the criterion of overlap between minority interests and party appeal into five categories: ‘coinciding ethnic’ parties, ‘multi-ethnic’ parties, ‘partial ethnic’ parties, ‘other ethnic’ parties, and ‘non-ethnic’ parties. Hypotheses about how these affiliations affect a reserved-seat representative's willingness to act for the minority are later developed, expecting a strong positive effect of the coinciding ethnic party, a weak positive effect for multi- and partial ethnic parties, a negative effect for other ethnic parties, and no effect for non-ethnic party affiliation.

Die Wechsel ehemaliger Spitzenpolitiker in die Privatwirtschaft sind häufig Gegenstand kontroverser Debatten und medialer Diskurse. Während sich die wissenschaftliche und die mediale Diskussion primär auf die Ministerebene fokussieren, finden entsprechende „Seitenwechsel“ nachgeordneter Leitungspersonen wie Staatssekretäre geringere öffentliche Aufmerksamkeit. Außerdem suggeriert die mediale Berichterstattung über berufliche Aktivitäten ehemaliger Politiker und Spitzenbeamte eine Dominanz privatwirtschaftlicher Nachpositionen, da sie sich einseitig auf entsprechende Tätigkeiten im privaten Sektor fokussiert und Nachtätigkeiten im politischadministrativen System ausblendet. An dieser Stelle setzt der Beitrag an. Im Rahmen des Beitrages werden die Karrierewege beamteter und parlamentarischer Staatssekretäre nach dem Ausscheiden aus ihrem Amt analysiert. Dabei werden neben Nachpositionen im privaten Sektor auch solche im politischadministrativen System berücksichtigt. Der Beitrag zeigt auf, dass keine einseitige Dominanz privatwirtschaftlicher Nachpositionen existiert. Vielmehr übernehmen ehemalige Amtsträger auch nach ihrem Ausscheiden häufig Führungspositionen in Politik und Verwaltung. Allerdings verlieren diese seit Ende der 1970er an Bedeutung, wohingegen die Bedeutung privatwirtschaftlicher Nachpositionen seitdem stark zunimmt. Außerdem werden Unterschiede zwischen der politischen und der administrativen Teilelite in Bezug auf ihre Nachpositionen und potentielle Hybridisierungstendenzen herausgearbeitet.

Network science has spurred a reexamination of relational phenomena in political science, including the study of international conflict. We introduce a new direction to the study of conflict by showing that the multiplex fractionalization of the international system along three key dimensions is a powerful predictor of the propensity for violent interstate conflict. Even after controlling for well-established conflict indicators, our new measure contributes more to model fit for interstate conflict than all of the previously established measures combined. Moreover, joint democracy plays little, if any, role in predicting system stability, thus challenging perhaps the major empirical finding of the international relations literature. Lastly, the temporal variability of our measure with conflict is consistent with a causal relationship. Our results have real-world policy implications as changes in our fractionalization measure substantially aid the prediction of conflict up to 10 years into the future, allowing it to serve as an early warning sign of international instability.

Political polarization is traditionally analyzed through the ideological stances of groups and parties, but it also has a behavioral component that manifests in the interactions between individuals. We present an empirical analysis of the digital traces of politicians in politnetz.ch, a Swiss online platform focused on political activity, in which politicians interact by creating support links, comments, and likes. We analyze network polarization as the level of intra-party cohesion with respect to inter-party connectivity, finding that supports show a very strongly polarized structure with respect to party alignment. The analysis of this multiplex network shows that each layer of interaction contains relevant information, where comment groups follow topics related to Swiss politics. Our analysis reveals that polarization in the layer of likes evolves in time, increasing close to the federal elections of 2011. Furthermore, we analyze the internal social network of each party through metrics related to hierarchical structures, information efficiency, and social resilience. Our results suggest that the online social structure of a party is related to its ideology, and reveal that the degree of connectivity across two parties increases when they are close in the ideological space of a multi-party system.