Aktuelle Publikationen

The article combines research on postconflict management with public administration research by presenting a single case study on the United Nations interim administration in Kosovo. To investigate the reasons for the UN mission’s failure to implement its policies on minority relations, the study turns toward local municipal bureaucracies and offers a two-part causal argument that derives from principal–agent theory and bureaucratic representation theory. First, due to a lack of political and administrative oversight by Kosovar institutions and the UN peacebuilding mission, local municipal authorities experienced a high degree of autonomy. Second, those units within municipal administrations that were responsible for minority policy implementation did not include minority bureaucrats who could have acted as their communities’ advocates. In the absence of such active representation and a lack of top-down supervision, the municipal civil service departed from its mandate to implement affirmative policies serving the Serb and Roma community in Kosovo. The article finds that this ethnic bureaucratic drift constitutes a central explanation for the lack of minority policy implementation in Kosovo between 2001 and 2008.

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dc.contributor.author: Meyer, Angela

Network-focused research in public administration has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. This rapid growth has created come confusion about terminology and approaches to research in the field. We organize the network literature in public administration using compact citation networks to identify coherent subdomains focused on (1) policy formation, (2) governance and (3) policy implementation. We trace how these domains differ in their approach to defining the role of networks, relationships and actors and to what extent the articles apply formal network analysis techniques. Based on a subsequent content analysis of the sample articles, we identify promising research avenues focused on the wider adoption of methods derived from social network analysis and the conditions under which networks actually deliver improved results.

What is the influence of presidentialism on legislative turnout? Does it matter for electoral participation if the presidential and legislative elections are held on the same day or not? If any, what is the confounding impact of the electoral system type? This article uses a sample of more than 450 democratic legislative elections between 1990 and 2010 to evaluate these three research questions. Distinguishing three types of regimes: (1) parliamentary systems, (2) presidential systems with concurrent presidential and legislative elections and (3) presidential systems with non-concurrent presidential and legislative elections, we first evaluate the impact of each of these three system types on legislative turnout in a multivariate framework. We find that the first two regime types have higher turnout figures than the third regime type. In a second step, we examine whether citizens' participation in any of the three system types interacts with the electoral formula in their country. Our results indicate that proportional representation has a moderate positive impact on turnout in presidential systems with non-concurrent presidential and legislative elections, a negative impact in presidential systems with concurrent legislative elections to the state's two highest offices and no impact in parliamentary systems.

This article traces political and institutional developments in the Republic of Georgia after the Rose Revolution. Particular focus is placed on efforts by Georgian policy-makers to align Georgian political institutions with Western models. Drawing on the concept of policy transfer, the author demonstrates various pitfalls in this process. Based on the gathered evidence, it appears that Georgian policy-makers engaged in various processes of ‘incomplete transfer’, compounded by a lack of understanding or deliberately false conceptions of Western institutions. Despite democratic rhetoric and interlinkages with the West, Georgia moved to a novel form of ‘hyper-presidentialism’ and dismantled institutional checks and balances. Hence, the Rose Revolution initially served to reinforce the already existing institutions of ‘patronal presidentialism’ through a series of misguided institutional modifications. The author also discusses the outcome of the recent parliamentary and presidential elections, which may have ironically and accidentally further democratised the country.

Why do western welfare states differ so starkly when it comes to educational governance and, in particular, the degree of (de-)centralization? This article focuses on two such western European countries which demonstrate highly similar educational traditions, institutions and guiding principles – France and Sweden. The Swedish education system has evolved into one of the most decentralized in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), while France has preserved the main components of its centralized education system amid a broader international trend towards decentralization. Looking at secondary education governance in both countries, the author theorizes different forms of ‘educational corporatism’ and the resulting patterns of interactions of teacher unions as key educational actors. Characterized by ‘competitive corporatism’ within the centralized bureaucracy, the French education policy framework has enabled teachers unions to capture the policy-making apparatus and exploit their internal differences to stymie education reform and decentralization. Swedish teachers unions, by contrast, compensated for the decline of centralized corporatism by creating new institutions of ‘local teacher-dominated corporatism’, which altered the incentive structure for decentralization. The research question bears significance for contemporary education policy-making, as France's weak performance in international comparisons has been traced to excessive educational centralization, while critics of Swedish education link the weak performance of Swedish pupils to the perceived excessive decentralization of the education system.

Social media services have become areas of political communication. Politicians integrate them in their campaigns, journalists use them as sources and topics, and the public uses them for the discussion of politics. In this, political activities on social media are clearly interconnected with the coverage of politics by traditional media. This article analyzes Twitter messages commenting on politics during the campaign for the 2009 federal election in Germany. It will be shown that the temporal dynamics and content of Twitter messages follow a hybrid logic of political coverage, sometimes following the same logic as the coverage of political actors in traditional news media, whereas in other cases following a logic specific to political expression on the Internet.

Political actors increasingly use the microblogging service, Twitter, for the organization, coordination, and documentation of collective action. These interactions with Twitter leave digital artifacts that can be analyzed. In this article, we look at Twitter messages commenting on one of the most contentious protests in Germany’s recent history, the protests against the infrastructure project Stuttgart 21. We analyze all messages containing the hashtag #s21 that were posted between May 25, 2010, and November 14, 2010, by the 80,000 most followed Twitter users in Germany. We do this to answer three questions: First, what distinguishes events that resulted in high activity on Twitter from events that did not? Second, during times of high activity, does the behavior of Twitter users vary from their usual behavior patterns? Third, were the artifacts (retweets, links) that dominated conversations during times of high activity indicative of tactical support of the protests or of symbolic association with it?

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The international community uses a number of interventions to make and build peace. How effective are these interventions? What works and what does not? Some of the commonly advocated interventions have been assessed in large-n studies.This article provides an overview of the current knowledge and highlights the uncertainties. Although there is no evidence that development aid helps to prevent wars in general, aid stabilizes post-war situations. There are also a considerable number of studies suggesting that UN Peacekeeping Operations do indeed keep the peace. Although there are fewer studies, there is some emerging evidence that arms embargoes do restrict arms transfers to conflict zones and thus help to make conflicts less deadly. This suggests that internationally binding rules on arms transfers and the use of private military and security services are effective means of conflict management. On the other hand, the evidence arising from the analysis of mediation and sanctions is mixed. They are frequently used third-party interventions, often in conjuncture with other interventions. However, our knowledge about the optimal policy mix of economic, diplomatic and military interventions is still limited.

The advancing internationalisation of environmental politics has triggered increasing interest in factors that lead countries to participate in international environmental agreements. But do partisan differences matter for such ratification decisions? An analysis of the ratification responses of 21 OECD countries toward 64 treaties shows that partisan environmentalism matters for ratification behaviour whereas left–right differences do not play a significant role. More precisely, while the likelihood of ratification increases when overall government positions are more pro-environment, pro-environment veto players and environmental ministers are not found to play a role. These results hold against a number of controls and correcting for potential error in the measurement of party positions.

In light of the recent interest in using longitudinal panel data to study personality development, it is important to know if personality traits are related to panel attrition. We analyse the effects of personality on panel drop-out separately for an ‘older’ subsample (started in 1984), a relatively ‘young’ subsample (started in 2000), and a ‘new’ subsample (started in 2009) of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study. We found that openness slightly decreases the probability of panel drop-out in all three samples. For the ‘older’ subsample only, we found a small negative effect of agreeableness on panel drop-out. We control for age, sex, education, migration background, and the number of inhabitants in the region of the respondents.

Why do some former child soldiers reintegrate more successfully into civil society than others? We attempt to understand this variation by looking at their personal experiences within the armed groups instead of focusing on the reintegration programme design. We hypothesise that, besides other factors, successful reintegration depends on the level of attachment felt towards the armed group. In other words, if a former child soldier feels a high level of attachment to the armed group, the reintegration process back into society might be more difficult. To examine this possible linkage, we examine a unique data set based on 66 interviews with Ugandan former child soldiers. Our analysis shows that those former child soldiers who still feel a higher level of trust towards the armed group are less likely to trust the members of their home community and feel accepted by them.

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Lawyers of global law firms have begun to take on complex pro bono representations for clients in peace and constitution-building settings. These lawyers, who often cooperate across different offices of a global law firm, are not acting based on an external mandate but pursuant to an attorney-client relationship. The client is the source of authority and the owner of the process; yet, global law firms that serve pro bono clients are also a form of profit-making transnational corporation. In their day-today business they represent the interests of paying clients. This article will discuss whether and how such constellations can lead to power, infrastructure, and knowledge asymmetries between law firms and their often weak pro bono clients in post-conflict settings. Accordingly, it raises and discusses the following questions: Are the legal profession’s domestic codes of conduct strong enough to guarantee good professional conduct by global law firms when providing pro bono services in post-conflict settings with weak or temporarily absent local legal profession institutions? Is it desirable to create a transnational code of conduct for lawyers, law firms, and other institutions for providing pro bono legal services in such fragile peace and constitution building settings? By addressing these questions, this article also approaches pro bono services of global law firms as an example of how interests of the private sphere of lawyer-client relations and the public sphere of peace and constitution building merge, and how the legal profession’s codes of conduct regulate global law firms and their legal professionals’ conduct as global agents of “privatized” peace and constitution building efforts.