Aktuelle Publikationen

Recent studies have indicated that asymmetrical task dependence among organizational members can affect dyadic work relationships, individual job satisfaction, and team learning and team performance. This study aims to go to the next level and investigates if – and how – asymmetries affect organizational performance. However, the key underlying theories (i.e. interdependence and power-dependence theory) are conflicted if this relationship would be positive or negative. Therefore new insights are necessary and to do so we draw from the literature on organizational trust climate to hypothesize it is a key mediator. To test the boundaries of our model, we then connect to the strategic Human Resource Management (HRM) literature and hypothesize that commitment-based HR practices act as a first- stage moderator. This study advances knowledge by a) showing that asymmetrical task dependence does matter at the organizational level and affects organizational performance, b) revealing that trust climate is a key underlying mechanism, and c) connecting recent discoveries within organizational behavior to the strategic HRM literature. Practically, this study is the first to provide clear organizational-level interventions. Our moderated- mediation model was tested, and fully supported, in a multi-source dataset of 67 small- and medium-sized organizations containing responses of 8390 organizational members.

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Policy forums are issue-based intermediary organizations where diverse types of political and societal actors repeatedly interact. Policy forums are important elements of modern governance systems as they allow actors to learn, negotiate, or build trust. They can vary in composition, size, membership logic, and other distinct features. This article lays the foundation of a theory of policy forums based on three interrelated elements: First, it discusses conditions for the formation of a forum and describes the logic of these organizations as one of an asymmetric multipartite exchange. Second, it enumerates the potential set of goals and motivations of participating actors that are fed into this exchange. Third, it proposes eight different dimensions on which policy forums differ and which affect the exchange mechanisms among actors. We claim that empirical work on policy forums should systematically take these elements into account and propose elements of a research agenda.

Political theory and research approaches are in most cases not explicit in all respects, but are usually shaped by implicit background theories and scientific worldviews, e.g. presuppositions and paradigms. Examples are idealism, materialism or institutionalism. A fairly new perspective in this regard is relationalism. This way of thinking, in its ontological orientation, conceives the world only in terms of relations. Research programmes with a relationalist orientation put this idea into practice with methods of social network analysis which are more and more used also in political science. Several variants of this new -ism and type of network thinking are presented in this paper in a critical perspective. Relationalism is ultimately seen as fruitful perspective, but is seen as limited in its explanatory power, though. It should therefore always be combined with other approaches and perspectives.

Chief executives in many parliamentary democracies have the power to dissolve the legislature. Despite a well-developed literature on the endogenous timing of parliamentary elections, political scientists know remarkably little about the strategic use of dissolution power to influence policymaking. To address this gap, we propose and empirically evaluate a theoretical model of legislative bargaining in the shadow of executive dissolution power. The model implies that the chief executive's public support and legislative strength, as well as the time until the next constitutionally mandated election, are important determinants of the use and effectiveness of dissolution threats in policymaking. Analyzing an original times-series data set from a multiparty parliamentary democracy, we find evidence in line with key empirical implications of the model.

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This article presents new theoretical and empirical insights into democratization in Africa, using the typology developed by John Higley and Michael Burton to understand elite interaction in Ghana. Social network analysis (SNA) is used to test the main proposition of the Higley/Burton theory, namely that a ‘liberal democracy is impossible without a consensually united elite’. Empirical evidence is provided from a unique data set that maps the interaction patterns between Members of Parliament elected to the Ghanaian legislature in 2012. The article shows that MPs in Ghana form a dense and strongly interconnected network bridging ethnic and party cleavages, and that MPs from different parties have developed a measure of trust in one another. These findings not only support Higley and Burton's claim that elite integration is conducive to stable democracy, but also point to new directions in African Studies by demonstrating the capacity of actor-centric approaches to explain processes of democratization in countries that lack the classic structural preconditions for consolidation.

Das kommunale Haushaltsrecht spricht im Grundsatz eine klare Sprache: Permanente Haushaltsdefizite sind nicht zulässig. Es ist Aufgabe der Kommunalaufsicht, diese Regel durchzusetzen. Offensichtlich stößt sie dabei an Grenzen. Warum die Aufsicht welche Entscheidungen trifft, wie sie denkt und funktioniert, darüber ist kaum etwas bekannt.

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Datasets in the field of ethnic politics still tend to treat ethnonational groups as unitary actors and do not differentiate between the positions of the organizations representing these groups. Datasets in the field of party politics differentiate between the positions of political parties, yet fail convincingly to conceptualize an ethnonational dimension of competition. This Research Note presents EPAC, a new dataset on Ethnonationalism in Party Competition that seeks to fill this gap. Based on an expert survey, EPAC provides cross-sectional data on the ethnonational positions of 210 political parties in 22 multinational European democracies. The conceptualization of an ethnonational dimension of competition underlying the dataset is introduced and a series of validity and reliability tests performed. Test results show that EPAC provides valid and reliable measures of party positions on an ethnonational dimension that can serve as an empirical base for study of the causes and effects of the mobilization of ethnicity in party competition.

The reported role of social media in recent popular uprisings against Arab autocrats has fueled the notion of ‘liberation technology’, namely that information and communication technology (ICT) facilitates organization of antigovernment movements in autocracies. Less optimistic observers, on the other hand, contend that ICT is a tool of repression in the hands of autocrats, imposing further restrictions on political and social liberties. We investigate whether the liberation- or the repression-technology perspective can better explain empirically observed patterns. To this end, we analyze two outcomes. First, we look at which autocracies are more likely to adopt and expand the Internet. In line with the repression technology expectation, we find that regimes aiming to prevent any independent public sphere are more likely to introduce the Internet. Second, we study the effects of the Internet on changes towards democracy. This analysis reveals no effect of the Internet on political institutions. These findings provide moderate support for the ‘repression technology’ perspective, and suggest that the Internet has not – at least in its first two decades of existence – contributed to a global shift towards democracy.

The notion of a “welfare mix” has two different points of reference. One is the variety of institutional arrangements of modern welfare states in, basically, capitalist democracies. This is primarily connected to a cross-country comparative perspective, very much influenced by classic pieces of research on the varieties of welfare states in general and related typologies (above all Esping-Andersen, The three worlds of welfare capitalism, 1990; see also Arts and Gelissen J Eur Soc Policy 12:137–158, 2002; Castles et al., The Oxford handbook of the welfare state, 2011). We believe to know, for instance, that Scandinavian welfare states are much more state-centered and, accordingly, third sector organizations much less important than in, say, conservative or corporatist welfare states such as Germany or Austria or in liberal welfare states such as the United States (cf. Salamon and Anheier, Defining the nonprofit sector: a cross-national analysis, 1997). A second point of reference of the “mix” of welfare state arrangements is the combination of sector-specific institutions in the provision of welfare-related services in a given country. It is here where the notion of hybridity is particularly relevant since it is typically the arrangement of overlapping sectoral segments that characterize the “mix” in question (cf. Evers Int J Public Adm 28:736–748, 2005 for an overview). Examples are tax exempted foundations in the field of education or science, private voluntary associations providing public goods such as social services of various kinds or private goods such as housing provided by public enterprises or cooperatives.