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This article investigates the reasons behind varying institutional positions in the European Union’s (EU) area of justice and home affairs (JHA). It argues that such instances of institutional behaviour cannot be fully understood without examining how each institution seeks to legitimize its role in the EU political system. A novel theoretical framework on institutional behaviour is advanced, connecting individual policy positions and governance choices to (1) institutional roles developed within different types of organizational structure, and (2) the representative claims made by officials involved in decision-making. The framework draws on insights from organizational theory regarding institutional role expectations and a constructivist approach to representation borrowed from the work of Michael Saward. Using three cases of JHA legislation from the post-Lisbon period, it is shown that the framework can explain varying patterns of institutional behaviour by exploring lines of justification present in the institutional discourse.
This contribution investigates the asymmetrical relationship between economic and social aspects under the European Semester by looking at the roles of the European Council and the Council between 2010 and 2016. Drawing on the theories of deliberative and new intergovernmentalism, this asymmetry is associated with an uneven evolution of the co-ordination infrastructure, notably the varying degree to which key policy issues are subject to informal policy dialogue. Not only are finance ministers better placed to conduct policy dialogue, they also control the European Semester policy priorities more effectively than their colleagues in the Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council (EPSCO). Finance ministers also are more closely linked to discussions at the highest political level, the European Council. Social affairs committees and the Commission managed to gain a greater role at the expert level and to integrate more social issues into policy recommendations. Yet, these successes are not matched by higher level political endorsement.
A Dynamic Analysis of Judicial Behaviour: The Auto-Correct Function of Constitutional Pluralism
(2018)
This book examines contemporary educational research and its governance, addressing key questions via a multidisciplinary theoretical framework of comparative institutional analysis with original data and applying multiple methods. The authors explore and explain important changes in the governance of educational research and the contents of scholarship in education and related disciplines across Europe since the 1990s. This volume synthesizes findings from a multi-year comparative research project, including in-depth empirical case studies of three distinct educational research cultures evolving in Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom. The authors reconstruct and compare changing conceptualizations of educational research, embedded in increasingly internationalized contexts of research, and examine shifts in its governance, including patterns of funding, publication, and evaluation. They examine the producers of European educational research and the distinct role of the European Union in constructing a European Educational Research Area, in establishing cross-border networks, and in (re)shaping educational research agendas. Through innovative empirical analysis of programs of research on various levels and education researchers' collaborations in scientific networks, they provide insights into (supra)national dynamics in education-related scholarship. Theory-guided content analysis of research projects funded by leading national funding agencies and by the most highly developed supranational research funding instrument - the EU Framework Programme - enables the authors to embed findings on Germany, the United Kingdom, and Norway in a broader European perspective.
Road freight transportation accounts for around 7% of total world energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. With the appropriate incentives, energy savings and emissions reductions can be achieved by shifting freight to rail or water modes, both of which are far more efficient than road. We briefly introduce five general strategies for decarbonizing freight transportation, and then focus on the literature and data relevant to estimating the global decarbonization potential through modal shift. We compare freight activity (in tonne-km) by mode for every country where data are available. We also describe major intraregional freight corridors, their modal structure, and their infrastructure needs. We find that the current world road and rail modal split is around 60:40. Most countries are experiencing strong growth in road freight and a shift from rail to road. Rail intermodal transportation holds great potential for replacing carbon-intense and fast-growing road freight, but it is essential to have a targeted design of freight systems, particularly in developing countries. Modal shift can be promoted by policies targeting infrastructure investments and internalizing external costs of road freight, but we find that not many countries have such policies in place. We identify research needs for decarbonizing the freight transportation sector both through improvements in the efficiency of individual modes and through new physical and institutional infrastructure that can support modal shift.
Observing and Measuring Government Openness. A conceptual discussion and application to Mexico
(2018)
Open government has become a goal for countries all over the world, but it remains an elusive concept. Despite innovative methodologies to assess open government policies, action plans, and interventions in different countries, scholarly research and practical decisions are hindered by the lack of a precise concept and an operationalization. In this paper, we make two contributions to this discussion. First, we argue that the discussions about open government would benefit from taking the grammatical structure of the concept seriously (open is an adjective, government a noun). Second, we propose that, in order to be conceptually and practically useful, open government should be observable. We present the methodology, application and results of an effort to observe and measure open government in Mexico, based on a study of 908 government offices in terms of transparency and participation.
Developing countries account for a large majority of global refugee reception. 3.5 million out of Syria's 4 million refugees have sought refuge in three countries - Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. Is it possible to achieve a fair distribution of protection seekers? This Delmi report examines the division of responsibilities for those in need of protection from a global perspective. It analyses past and present models and discusses its feasibility in practice.
An issue that the European Union continues to face is how to coordinate the economic and fiscal policies of its member states. Recent reforms that created the European Semester require additional information concerning member states’ fiscal plans for the Commission and Council to review more rigorously. Spain has developed similar provisions for its regions. In this paper, Mark Hallerberg and Diego Salazar-Morales consider the possible lessons arising from the emerging federation in Spain for the European framework. They analyse the performance of Spain’s fiscal federalist framework with a special emphasis on its coordination and political relationship with the autonomous regions. Their findings suggest that coordination agreements are negatively correlated with balances, indicating that such agreements are indicators of fiscal problems and also that they did not contribute to lower deficits. Moreover, they find that politics, rather than fiscal rules and frameworks, led to differing fiscal performance. The paper concludes with lessons from Spain’s experience for the European Union.
Conclusion:
Hannah Arendt’s 1943 essay, ‘We Refugees’, begins: ‘In the first place, we don’t like to be called “refugees”. We ourselves call each other “newcomers” or “immigrants”’. The essay demonstrates that for the refugees, of whom she was one, the label ‘immigrant’ was preferable. It reflected a desire to get on and integrate, rather than neediness. That impulse to avoid the ‘refugee’ label may still be common today, particularly from those keen to avoid rights restriction or stigmatization. However, the ‘refugee’ label today is also instrumentalized to downplay the protection needs of others – those who may not be recognized as refugees (even though they ought to be), and those who are not refugees in any sense, but nonetheless require international protection. The New York Declaration and the bifurcated Global Compacts risk endorsing an unduly narrow conception of refugeehood, and failing to root out the refugee containment that taints the global refugee regime. However, I also offer a more constructive reading, emphasizing the overarching concept of international protection, and obligations to avoid harm in migration governance.
Germany has been accused of transforming the EU into a “bad International Monetary Fund” by promoting conditionality and competitiveness. In a response to Hans Kundnani, Jörg Haas argues that insisting on rules and reforms is actually a constructive contribution to the debate about the EU’s future. The real issue with Germany is that it seems unwilling to comply with the laws it has shaped. This is part of a broader problem: the ever-growing influence of national governments in the EU makes it easy for powerful states to circumvent rules. We need an EU that ensures fair treatment for strong and weak members alike.
Immunotherapy is currently revolutionizing the treatment of cancer. Detailed analyses of tumor immune cell interaction in the tumor microenvironment will facilitate an accurate prediction of a patient’s clinical response. The automatic and reliable pre-screening of histological tissue sections for tumor infiltrating immune cells (TILs) will support the development of TIL-based predictive biomarkers for checkpoint immunotherapy. In this paper, a learning approach for image classification is presented, which allows various pattern inquires for different types of tissue section images. The underlying trainable reaction diffusion model combines classification and denoising. The model is trained using a stochastic generation of training data. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated for immunofluorescent and for Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained melanoma section images. A particular focus is on the classification of TILs in the proximity to melanoma cells in an experimental melanoma mouse model and in human melanoma. This new learning approach for images of melanoma tissue sections will refine the strategy for the practical clinical application of biomarker research.
Nationale Parlamente
(2018)
Setting a country’s structural growth rate on a higher path, i.e. sparking and sustaining a growth acceleration can have quantitatively huge implications for national income and, more broadly, for people’s wellbeing. We develop a novel statistical framework to identify systematically the set of binding constraints that were unlocked before the 135 growth acceleration episodes that took place between 1962 and 2002 worldwide. We employ this information to characterise the acceleration process, which tends to be preceded by a deep recession and major economic policy changes. Once we combined this information with a set of counterfactual analyses, we find however that successful acceleration strategies should not contain off-the-shelf approaches or necessarily all-encompassing “shock therapy” solutions. On the other hand, they call for a careful tailoring to local conditions. Richer countries tend to experience fewer accelerations, but once these have been ignited, they are better positioned to make the most out of them. Despite standard growth determinants doing a fairly good job at characterising successful accelerations, we note how take-offs remain extremely hard to engineer with a high degree of certainty.
Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda founded a Customs Union in 2004 and apply a Common External Tariff (CET) on imports to the region. However, the CET has been increasingly destabilized by countries using unilateral exemptions on a wide range of strongly traded goods. This instability undermines progress in regional integration and creates an uneven playing field for business. The article discusses evidence for the influence of interest groups on the observed instability. This study takes a political economy perspective and tracks lobbying behavior from the domestic to the regional level. It looks at the influence of business membership organizations and other interest groups on CET negotiations. The article applies an exploratory, qualitative approach predominantly drawing on data gathered by the author in 25 interviews with experts in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda in January 2016.
Macroeconomic adjustment in the euro area periphery was more recessionary than pre-crisis imbalances would have warranted. To make this claim, this paper uses a Propensity Score Matching Model to produce counterfactuals for the Eurozone crisis countries (Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus, Spain) based on over 200 past macroeconomic adjustment episodes between 1960-2010 worldwide. At its trough, between 2010 and 2015 per capita GDP had contracted on average 11 percentage points more in the Eurozone periphery than in the standard counterfactual scenario. These results are not dictated by any specific country experience, are robust to a battery of alternative counterfactual definitions, and stand confirmed when using a parametric dynamic panel regression model to account more thoroughly for the business cycle. Zooming in on the potential causes, the lack of an independent monetary policy, while having contributed to a deeper recession, does not fully explain the Eurozone’s specificity, which is instead to be identified in a sharper-than-expected contraction in investment and fiscal austerity due to high funding costs. Reading through the overall findings, there are reasons to believe that an incomplete Eurozone institutional setup contributed to aggravate the crisis through higher uncertainty.
This article studies the perception of the EU Commission's Secretariat General in policy‐making. Recently, research on EU institutions devotes increasing attention to analyzing structures and procedures of decision‐making in EU institutions, most notably the EU Commission. Conventionally, the EU Commission is portrayed as a fragmented organization, divided along the lines of staff nationality, sectoral responsibilities and cabinets and General Directorates (DGs). The Secretariat General has long been viewed a weak actor that is hardly able or motivated to steer internal decision‐making. However, recent research indicates a changing role of the Secretariat General as a pro‐active broker and last arbiter. This article studies how the Secretariat General is perceived by the DGs in policy coordination and argues that this perception depends on the pattern of political authority, bureaucratic roles and the relevance and the alternatives prevailing in the policy field. The article is based on data from a survey among Commission officials.
Voter turnout in second-order elections is on a dramatic decline in many modern democracies. This article investigates how electoral participation can be substantially increased by holding multiple of these less important elections simultaneously. Leading to a relative decrease in voting costs, concurrent elections theoretically have economies of scale to the individual voter and thus should see turnout levels larger than those obtained in any stand-alone election. Leveraging as-if-random variation of local election timing in Germany, we estimate the causal effect of concurrent mayoral elections on European election turnout at around 10 percentage points. Exploiting variation in treatment intensity, we show that the magnitude of the concurrency effect is contingent upon district size and the competitiveness of the local race.
Seit die Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) erstmals zur Bundestagswahl 2013 antrat, nahm sie an allen darauffolgenden Landtagswahlen sowie der Europawahl 2014 teil und erzielte dabei teils beachtliche Erfolge. Gleichzeitig stieg die Wahlbeteiligung bei einigen dieser Wahlen deutlich an. Vor diesem Hintergrund stellt sich die Frage, ob die AfD von der gestiegenen Wahlbeteiligung profitiert hat und sogar dazu beitrug, die Wahlbeteiligung zu steigern? Ganz allgemein gefragt, welche Konsequenzen hat das Aufkommen populistischer Parteien für das politische System? Die Analyse der Wahlergebnisse in Bundestags-, Landtags- und Europawahlen auf Landkreisebene zeigt keinen eindeutigen Zusammenhang zwischen dem Erstarken der AfD und der Wahlbeteiligung. Nur in Einzelfällen wie der Bundestagswahl 2017 und bei Landtagswahlen 2016 lässt sich eine moderate mobilisierende Wirkung der AfD feststellen. Vielmehr deuten die Ergebnisse auf eine verstärkte Polarisierung der politischen Beteiligung hin.
These days leadership staff units in German federal ministries perform a distinct advisory role. Over time the former small assistance units have developed into fully fledged staff units, the heads of which, in particular, serve as close and confidant advisers to ministers. That is, although not appointed under special conditions or introduced by a formal reform process, they serve as the functional equivalents to the special or ministerial advisers found elsewhere. This chapter explores the emergence, contribution and role of the staff units and argues that the institutionalization of the relationship between politics and administration accounts for the smooth and silent emergence of the advisory role.
The United Nations and organized civil society in the form of international NGOs have yet to find an optimal mode of engagement that works for both sides. This has many reasons, but foremost it is caused by a formalized and politicized administrative process with, in the end, rather limited participation opportunities for NGOs. The current regime fails to live up to its potential – a deficit that is becoming more acute as both the UN and NGOs face legitimacy pressures and have to brave geopolitical and resource uncertainties. In response, the article proposes a more differentiated cooperation model based on functional roles and new organizational formats. Such an approach could enable a mutually beneficial relationship to emerge between the United Nations system and international civil society.
How exactly are national parliaments involved in the European Semester? The stronger coordination of fiscal and economic policies in the European Union (EU) in reaction to the sovereign debt crisis has forced national parliaments to adapt their procedures. This article examines how the European Semester is scrutinised and what factors have driven parliamentary activities in the French National Assembly, the German Bundestag, the Irish Dáil and the Portuguese Assembleia between 2012 and 2017. Particularly noteworthy is that legal provisions for a parliamentary debate on the Stability Programme can be ignored in France, that the German Bundestag is much less active in the European Semester than in EU affairs or in the budget process and that the weakness of Ireland’s parliament in the annual budget procedure affects its role in the European Semester. This article therefore suggests defining minimum standards for parliamentary involvement and strengthening interparliamentary cooperation.
This article contributes to the debate on environmental determinants of public service performance by analyzing the effect of country size (population size) on public service effectiveness. It theoretically describes and empirically tests a size-induced trade-off between economies and diseconomies of scale in national bureaucracies. The main argument is that public service performance increases with size due to economies of scale, but it decreases after the optimal country size when bureaucracies become too large and cumbersome to manage. The hypothesized curvilinear effect is tested for the first time empirically in cross-sectional regression models and multilevel within-between RE models that isolate the theoretically relevant between-country effect. The results support the expected inverse U-shaped relation on a global scale and in the subsample of democracies. The findings and their implication for research and practice are discussed: Public management must adapt theoretically and practically to country size as it is a contextual factor beyond the control of managers.
The provision of Article 13 TSCG to create an Interparliamentary Conference was the starting point for long discussions after which national parliaments and the European Parliament eventually reached a compromise. This article pursues a two-fold objective: It first examines the different phases of interparliamentary negotiations from 2012 to 2015. On the basis of a distinction between three competing models for interparliamentary cooperation, the article shows that the two models of EP-led scrutiny and creating a collective parliamentary counterweight did not prevail: Parliaments agreed that the new Interparliamentary Conference on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance (SECG) would follow the ‘standard’ interparliamentary conference (COSAC model). In terms of national parliaments’ actual participation, the lowest common denominator compromise has not changed the numbers of participating MPs: Attendance records are stable over time, the size of national delegations continues to vary and participating MPs are still twice as likely to be members of Budget or Finance committees than to be members of European affairs committees.
John Rawls featured prominently in the philosophical debate on social justice, bringing issues of individual freedom, civil rights and equal opportunity to the forefront. When considering the conceptualisation of social justice in South Africa, one is struck with the wealth of very ‘Rawlsian’ liberal democratic ideals suffused into the country’s constitution, alongside its dream of constitutional transformation. This is juxtaposed to the ideology and policies of the African National Congress, with its proclivities that are an antithesis to a veritable liberal constitutional democracy. Herein is found a dialectic in which the topic of justice is situated and analysed using the philosophy of Rawls as a benchmark. One is then faced with the confusion surrounding social justice in South Africa, what it means and how it is to be achieved. Concomitantly, the role and place of the individual is brought to the fore, begging the question of what citizens owe each other.
Gleicher Lohn für gleiche Arbeit am gleichen Ort: Künftig sollen Arbeitnehmer aus dem EU-Ausland nicht nur den gültigen Mindestlohn, sondern auch die gültigen Tariflöhne erhalten, wenn sie in einem anderen EU-Land arbeiten. Zudem werden die Einsätze erstmals befristet und dürfen in der Regeln nicht länger als ein Jahr dauern, mit Sonderantrag ist eine Verlängerung auf 18 Monate möglich. Werden mit dieser Regelung Beschäftigte besser vor Lohn- und Sozialdumping geschützt? Oder wird durch eine Abschottung der Arbeitsmärkte das freie Angebot von Dienstleistungen in der EU behindert? Nach Ansicht von Matthias Dauner, cep – Centrum für Europäische Politik, Freiburg, bedeutet der Reformvorschlag eine »Kriegserklärung an die liberalen Verfechter des Binnenmarktes und ein Angriff auf das Geschäftsmodell vieler Unternehmen aus den Mitgliedstaaten Mittel- und Osteuropas, deren Wettbewerbsvorteil insbesondere in vergleichsweise niedrigen Lohn- und Lohnnebenkosten besteht«. Zwar würden auf den ersten Blick die Rechte von entsandten Arbeitnehmern gestärkt. Faktisch sei aber davon auszugehen, dass die Zahl der Entsendungen abnehmen dürfte. Leidtragende dürften die entsendenden Unternehmen und deren Mitarbeiter aus den neuen Mitgliedstaaten sein. Auch Ingo Kramer, Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände, sieht einen »unnötigen Angriff auf den Binnenmarkt«. Eine verschärfte Entsenderichtlinie wäre nicht die Verwirklichung eines funktionierenden Binnenmarkts, sondern Protektionismus und für die deutschen Unternehmen ein massiver Kostentreiber. Für Anke Hassel, WSI, und Bettina Wagner, Hertie School of Governance, ist die Reform der Entsenderichtlinie dagegen eine notwendige Voraussetzung für einen besseren Binnenmarkt. Denn nur wenn Rechtssicherheit bestehe und Regulierungsarbitrage eingedämmt werde, könne ein produktiver Wettbewerb entstehen.
Communication
(2018)
From a traditional engineering perspective, communication is about effecting control over a distance, and its primary concern is the reliability of transmission. This chapter reviews communication in nature, describing its evolution from the perspective of the selfish gene. Communication in nature is ubiquitous and generally honest, and arises as much from collaboration as manipulation. We show that context and relevance allow effective communication with little information transfer, particularly between organisms with similar capacities and goals. Human language differs fundamentally from the non-verbal communication we share with other animals; robots may need to accommodate both. We document progress in AI capacities to generate synthetic emotion and to sense and classify human emotion. Communication in contemporary biomimetic systems is between robots in swarm robotics, but also between robot and human for both autonomous and collaborative systems. We suggest increased future emphasis on capacities to receive and comprehend signs, and on the pragmatic utility of communication and cooperation.
When playing one-shot economic games, individuals often blindly trust others, accepting partnerships without any information regarding the trustworthiness of their partner. Consequently, they risk deleterious pacts. Oddly, when individuals do have information about another, they reject partnerships that are not fair, despite the fact that such offers are profitable—individuals costly punish. Why would one reject profitable partnerships on the one hand, but risk unknown offers on the other? Significant research has gone into explaining the contexts where blind trust or costly punishment provides an evolutionary advantage; however, both behaviours are rarely considered in tandem. Here we demonstrate that both behaviours can simultaneously be revenue maximizing. Further, given the plausible condition of partially obscured information and partner choice, trust mediates the generation of costly punishment. This result is important because it demonstrates that the evolutionary viability of trust, fairness, and costly punishment may be linked. The adaptive nature of fairness expectations can best be explained in concert with trust.
The question of whether AI systems such as robots can or should be afforded moral agency or patiency is not one amenable either to discovery or simple reasoning, because we as societies constantly reconstruct our artefacts, including our ethical systems. Consequently, the place of AI systems in society is a matter of normative, not descriptive ethics. Here I start from a functionalist assumption, that ethics is the set of behaviour that maintains a society. This assumption allows me to exploit the theoretical biology of sociality and autonomy to explain our moral intuitions. From this grounding I extend to consider possible ethics for maintaining either human- or of artefact-centred societies. I conclude that while constructing AI systems as either moral agents or patients is possible, neither is desirable. In particular, I argue that we are unlikely to construct a coherent ethics in which it it is ethical to afford AI moral subjectivity. We are therefore obliged not to build AI we are obliged to.
The prevalence of artificial intelligent agents carrying out morally salient decisions is growing. The decisions made by such agents as autonomous cars or weapon systems, may have life and death consequences. We argue that the decision-making algorithms of all agents whose decisions have high societal impact should be transparent [6]; to ensure human-agent interaction is fully informed, consensual, and of maximum benefit to the society. Importantly, the literature also indicates we
may perceive and respond to morally salient decisions made by a machine differently to the same decision made by a human [5, 4, 3].
We present here a virtual reality simulation of a self-driving car we developed, in which users experience moral dilemmas. In our two studies, we investigate the perceptions of a morally salient decision; first as moderated by the type of the agent, artificial or natural (human), and then with the implementation of transparency. Specifically, inspired by the Moral Machine research programme [2, 1], we used social value as a moral framework. The agent chooses to hit a pedestrian on either the left or right side of a zebra crossing dependent on dimensions of occupation, body-size and
gender. Participants gave feedback after each scenario.
Contrary to past findings, participants in this current study were distressed at the principle of decision-making based on attributes such as social value. In questionnaire responses and postexperiment conversation the majority reported preferring such decisions to be made at random.
This raises important insights into how we implement moral frameworks. We suggest that the disparity between preferences from the current study and past work is due to the virtual reality methodology we used. Specifically, we note a distinction between emotional vs. rational decisionmaking, which was supported by an extension survey we conducted. Consistent with expectations,
the self-driving car was perceived as significantly less morally culpable and human-like than the
human-driver. The transparency implementation led to a further significant reduction in perceived
human-likeness, and also to reduced perceptions of intentionality. The reduction in moral culpability has disturbing possible connotations, though it may also be helpful for correct attribution of accountability. Promisingly, our transparency implementation significantly improved participants’
understanding of the self-driving cars decision.
We suggest companies implementing moral frameworks do not take crowd-sourced preferences at face value, but explore the methodology used. Additionally, our work supports transparency as a mechanism to calibrate our mental models of autonomous agents.
In this article, we present an idea for a more intuitive, low-cost, adjustable mechanism for behaviour control and management. One focus of current development in virtual agents, robotics and digital games is on increasingly complex and realistic systems that more accurately simulate intelligence found in nature. This development introduces a multitude of control parameters creating high computational costs. The resulting complexity limits the applicability of AI systems. One solution to this problem it to focus on smaller, more manageable, and flexible systems which can be simultaneously created, instantiated, and controlled. Here we introduce a biologically inspired systems-engineering approach for enriching behaviour arbitration with a low computational overhead. We focus on an easy way to control the maintenance, inhibition and alternation of high-level behaviours (goals) in cases where static priorities are undesirable. The models we consider here are biomimetic, based on neuro-cognitive research findings from dopaminic cells responsible for controlling goal switching and maintenance in the mammalian brain. The most promising model we find is applicable to selection problems with multiple conflicting goals. It utilizes a ramp function to control the execution and inhibition of behaviours more accurately than previous mechanisms, allowing an additional layer of control on existing behaviour prioritization systems.
Die Literatur zur Entwicklung privater Renten konzentriert sich traditionsgemäß auf die sozialpolitischen Effekte im Hinblick auf die Verteilung von Risiken und Kosten auf Anspruchsberechtigte und Arbeitgeber. Es gibt jedoch noch eine weitere Dimension der Privatisierung der Altersvorsorge, die diese im Kontext der Finanzmärkte und – im weiteren Sinn – des Wirtschaftssystems betrachtet. Hier spielen insbesondere Mindestverzinsungen eine große Rolle, weil sie für Fondsmanager einen Anreiz dafür setzen, größere Tranchen der Portfolios in festverzinsliche Wertpapiere statt in Aktien zu investieren. Während in den verschiedenen Segmenten der Finanzindustrie unterschiedliche Präferenzen im Hinblick auf garantierte Mindestverzinsungen vorherrschen, befindet sich die Politik in einem Dilemma: Sollte man kalkulierbaren Renditen oder aber der Entwicklung der Aktienmärkte Priorität einräumen? Das Beispiel der Riester-Rente in Deutschland zeigt, dass die Verknüpfung der Einführung privater Rentenpläne mit Einschnitten bei der staatlichen Rente durch die Politik dazu führte, dass Versicherungsunternehmen im Verbund mit Gewerkschaften auf Mindestleistungen bestanden und dadurch die Expansion der Aktienmärkte in Deutschland eingeschränkt wurde.
The scientific final report describes the topics that have been worked on by the Böckler expert group on Workers Voice: Good scientific arguments for anchoring it more strongly and legally binding to the benefit of "good corporate governance". In the supervisory and executive bodies of cross-border operating companies in Europe.
Hoch die Eurosolidarität
(2018)
The spread of false information and hate speech has increased with the rise of social media. This paper critically examines this phenomenon and the reactions of governments and major corporations in Europe. Policymakers have turned towards national regulation as a means to manage false information and hate speech. This article looks into the legislative frameworks on the issue in Germany, France, the UK, the Czech Republic, and Italy and compares them. In response to such regulatory pressure, tech companies have been changing aspects of their platforms to deal with this trend, for example through content moderation. We propose tentative alternatives to this current approach towards reinforcing boundaries for freedom of expression.
Hitler’s rise to power amidst an unprecedented propaganda campaign initiated scholarly interest in campaign effects. To the surprise of many, empirical studies often found minimal effects. The predominant focus of early work was on U.S. elections, though. Nazi propaganda as the archetypal and, in many ways, most likely case for strong effects has rarely been studied. We collect extensive data about Hitler’s speeches and gauge their impact on voter support at five national elections preceding the dictatorship. We use a semi-parametric difference-in-differences approach to estimate effects in the face of potential confounding due to the deliberate scheduling of events. Our findings suggest that Hitler’s speeches, while rationally targeted, had a negligible impact on the Nazis’ electoral fortunes. Only the 1932 presidential runoff, an election preceded by an extraordinarily short, intense, and one-sided campaign, yielded positive effects. This study questions the importance of charismatic leaders for the success of populist movements.
We point to a popular yet underresearched platform of political information, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Considering the supply side of the marketplace, we argue that personal biographies on the platform are an attractive medium for politicians to enhance their appearance. We trace changes to biographies coming from the parliament using data that cover the entire edit histories for biographies on all German members of parliament for the three last legislative periods. Our findings show editing of personal biographies to be a persistent phenomenon. Moreover, type, timing, and driving factors of editing behavior highlight the importance politicians’ attribute to Wikipedia for pursuing reelection. Our results speak to the domains of political professionalization, voting behavior, and the general measurement of communicative patterns.
The role that state capacity plays in development has been the subject of growing cross-disciplinary research. The state capacity concept has faced criticism on numerous fronts, with scholars recently devoting serious efforts to overcome it. This article offers a rich overview of the concepts’ journey in terms of its theoretical roots, its uses by different disciplines, its definitions and measurements, and the empirical evidence around the impact of state capacity on development outcomes. It argues in favor of an optimistic view of the field’s advances by showing: (a) convergence in conceptualizations and (b) high-quality innovations in measurements. The article also contributes to the field by offering a definition of state capacity that consolidates all elements of the dominant strand and further tackles a number of issues that remain weak and should take priority in a future agenda.