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The COVID-19 pandemic not only ravaged human bodies but also had profound and possibly enduring effects on the health of political and legal systems, economies and societies. Almost overnight, governments imposed the severest restrictions in modern times on rights and freedoms, elections, parliaments and courts. Legal and political institutions struggled to adapt, creating a catalyst for democratic decline and catastrophic increases in poverty and inequality.
This handbook analyses the global pandemic response through five themes: governance and democracy; human rights; the rule of law; science, public trust and decision making; and states of emergency and exception. Containing 12 thematic commentaries and 25 chapters on countries of diverse size, wealth and experience of COVID-19, it represents the combined effort of more than 50 contributors, including leading scholars and rising voices in the fields of constitutional, international, public health, human rights and comparative law, as well as political science, and science and technology studies.
Taking stock after the onset of global emergency, this book provides essential analysis for politicians, policy-makers, jurists, civil society organisations, academics, students and practitioners at both national and international level on the best, and most concerning, practices adopted in response to COVID-19 - and key insights into how states and multilateral institutions should reform, adapt and prepare for future emergencies.
This article introduces the Special Issue on ‘The Responses of the Council of Europe to the Decay of the Rule of Law and Human Rights Protections’. The Council of Europe (CoE), a unique international organisation with its commitment to protect and promote human rights, the rule of law, and democracy, has been severely tested by the spread and consolidation of trends posing systemic threats to its foundational goals. The authors of this Special Issue assess how the European Court of Human Rights, the Venice Commission, the Parliamentary Assembly, the Committee of Ministers, and the office of the Secretary General have addressed systemic threats to the foundational principles of the organisation in the last decade. The Special Issue finds that the respective legal-institutional features and capacities of the CoE organs as well as the constraining influence of the broader political context in Europe on them vary significantly, hampering the CoE’s ability to produce timely, consistent, and co-ordinated responses against systemic threats.
This article investigates whether Article 18 judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, indicating that the state authorities pursued ulterior and illegitimate motives when violating the Convention, receive the seriousness and the urgency that they call for at the execution phase. By way of an analysis of the responses of the Committee of Ministers and states on the receiving end of Article 18 judgments between 2004 and June 2021, this article finds that the collective responsiveness of the Committee of Ministers to Article 18 judgments has increased over time, especially with respect to individual measures required to implement Article 18 judgments. So far, the responsiveness of individual states to their Article 18 judgments does, however, vary significantly, ranging from taking concrete steps to implement the judgments to outright resistance and no response, posing a significant risk to the Convention system’s ability to respond to the decay of rule of law.
This article undertakes a survey of the changes in the structure of the interpretive doctrines of the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) over time in an exploration of the aging of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR or the Convention) on its 70th anniversary. It argues that the Court’s interpretive doctrines that seek to give due defer ence to national rights traditions, canons and institutions have become increasingly pervasive in the Court’s procedural and substantive case law in the last two decades. This, in particular, has come at a loss for interpretative doctrines that interpret the Convention as a practical and effective living pan-European instrument. This argument is built in four parts. First it offers a defence of why a study of the interpretive doctrines of the Court over time is a good proxy for studying the ECHR’s ageing process. In the second part, it discusses the rich doctrinal forms of due deference and effective interpretation in the case law of the Court – both young and mature. Part three explains how the judicialisation and expansion of the European human rights system in late 1990 s transitioned to a more height ened and sophisticated focus on due deference doctrines in the Court’s case law. Finally, part four examines whether the recent judicial innovations under the Court’s Article 18 case law and the widely celebrated success of increased ownership of the Convention by domestic courts can act as counter points to the argument that the effective interpretation principle has suffered a loss as the Convention has aged, concluding that none of this may offset the fact that the Convention at 70 is more conservative in spirit than its younger self.
Family lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in European Societies: Introduction to the Special Issue
(2022)
Objective: This chapter introduces the reader to the Special Issue "Family Lives during the COVID-19 Pandemic in European Societies".
Background: This Special Issue analyses how families, parents, and children have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they have been coping with its related challenges in different societal contexts.
Method: The studies collected in this Special Issue are based on qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches and data that have been gathered during 2020 in a range of European countries. It covers the first lockdown period, the reopening phases, and the months thereafter.
Results: The 20 contributions of this Special Issue show that families shouldered large responsibilities during the pandemic. While the pandemic did not lead to radical shifts in gendered care patterns, mothers and fathers experienced the pandemic differently, with mothers reporting higher levels of stress. Moreover, there was great heterogeneity in how different types of families and children were affected by the pandemic. Single parents and parents and children in low-income households were most strongly affected in their social and economic wellbeing. Social and economic distress are strongly interwoven, and the developments during the pandemic aggravated existing social disparities.
Conclusion: This Special Issue underlines the importance of the family for the functioning of societies during times of crisis. It also shows that policy makers often adopted a too narrow view of what constitutes a family and did not adequately address family diversity in their decision making. This Special Issue furthermore emphasized that there is a danger that the pandemic will increase disparities between families. Thus, parents and their children need adequate support measures that are tailored to their needs, and that are designed to alleviate these social, economic and educational disparities.
In a recent contribution to this journal, McAlexander (2020, hereafter McAlexander) seeks to re-analyze Wucherpfennig, Hunziker and Cederman (2016, hereafter WHC) who instrument the effect of ethnic group inclusion on civil conflict by exploiting differences in colonial governance between the French and the British empire. McAlexander proposes a research design that replaces the between-colony dimension of WHC’s comparison with a continuous measure of indirect rule that varies be-tween British colonies. We show that McAlexander’s study hardly poses a viable reanalysis because his approach is compromised by problems of ecological inference and post-treatment confounding, lead-ing to biased inference by design. We propose a more informative reanalysis, indicating that British colonialism built on suitable customary institutions, unlike the French empire. Although tentative, our analytical extension lends support to WHC’s original findings, most importantly that inclusion reduces the risk of post-colonial civil conflict.
Large companies are increasingly on trial. Over the last decade, many of the world’s biggest firms have been embroiled in legal disputes over corruption charges, financial fraud, environmental damage, taxation issues or sanction violations, ending in convictions or settlements of record-breaking fines, well above the billion-dollar mark. For critics of globalization, this turn towards corporate accountability is a welcome sea-change showing that multinational companies are no longer above the law. For legal experts, the trend is noteworthy because of the extraterritorial dimensions of law enforcement, as companies are increasingly held accountable for activities independent of their nationality or the place of the activities. Indeed, the global trend required understanding the evolution of corporate criminal law enforcement in the United States in particular, where authorities have skillfully expanded its effective jurisdiction beyond its territory. This paper traces the evolution of corporate prosecutions in the United States. Analyzing federal prosecution data, it then shows that foreign firms are more likely to pay a fine, which is on average 6,6 times larger.
Gemeinsam getrennt erziehen“ ist das Thema des heute veröffentlichten Gutachtens des Wissenschaftlichen Beirats für Familienfragen beim BMFSFJ. Das Gutachten gibt einen umfassenden Überblick über Trennungsfamilien in Deutschland. Immer mehr Eltern wünschen sich vor, aber auch nach einer Trennung ihre Kinder gemeinsam zu betreuen. Deshalb legt das Gutachten den Fokus auf Familien, die eine geteilte (asymmetrische wie symmetrische) Betreuung leben. Internationale Vergleiche zeigen, wie geteilte Betreuung anderswo gelebt wird und wo es Reformbedarf gibt.
The intensification of parenting in Germany: The role of socioeconomic background and family form
(2022)
Drawing on the international discourse on the intensification of parenting and new data from Germany, this paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the unique challenges that parents face in the 21st century. We used data from the survey “Parenthood Today”, which was conducted in 2019 to examine parents’ views on parenting in Germany. The data comprised standardized interviews with 1652 mothers and fathers. We focused on three dimensions of parental pressures: namely, time pressure, financial pressure, and pressure that emanates from the educational system. Time pressure referred to the pressure currently felt, whereas financial pressure and pressure from the educational system referred to changes across time. In each of these domains, more than 60% of the parents experienced high (time) or increasing (education and financial) pressure. Binary logistic regressions showed that while parental education was a strong predictor of experiencing an increase in financial pressure, parental education did not matter for other realms of parenting. However, employment and family form were strongly related to parental time pressure. Full-time employed lone mothers, but also non-resident fathers, reported experiencing heavy pressure when trying to balance their roles as a worker and as a carer. Our results draw attention to the importance of better integrating the needs of post-separation families, including of non-resident fathers, in the debate on the “intensification of parenting”.
How firms strategically navigate informal and formal copyright practices: insights from Nollywood
(2021)
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to explain how and why firms configure copyright practices when confronted with state-sanctioned laws and informal customs projected by local ethnic or religious communities.
Design/methodology/approach
A multi-case inductive study of four film-producing organizations within the Nigerian film industry (i.e. Nollywood) was conducted. Specifically considered were firms that started their operations around the same time with similar founding conditions, experiences, resources and technical competencies. Field observations and multiple rounds of in-depth interviews were conducted to achieve the research objectives.
Findings
The study found that firms adopted dominant or hybrid configurations when interacting with informality and formality. Dominant configurations represent the exclusive adoption of informal copyright practices while hybrid configurations refer to the blended use of informal and formal copyright practices. The second set of findings revealed that each firm’s strategic intent affected the type of interactional configuration that unfolded in the firm. Specifically, firms with social intents tended to adopt dominant configurations, whereas firms with socio-economic intents tended to adopt hybrid configurations.
Practical implications
The study implies that firms may profit from strategically focusing on when and in what circumstances to adopt informality. Strategic intents that blend social and economic rationales may secure more positive interactive outcomes from internal and external stakeholders promoting formality and informality.
Social implications
This study highlights the fact that firms embedded in local religious and ethnic communities use organizational practices to solve social and institutional problems of their members. The copyright practices of these organizations encourage apprenticeship, youth empowerment and entrepreneurship in Nigeria.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that goes beyond macro-level analysis to investigate the interactional dynamics between formality and informality at the firm, community, and state levels. The study is also first of its kind to use copyright practices as an analytical lens to explore the interaction between informality and formality.
How informality affects habitual improvisation in firms: insights from the Nigerian movie industry
(2021)
Research has often underestimated the pervasive and global occurrence of informality because studies largely define informality as illegal economic practices. This study adopts a multidimensional view of informality to explain how and why firms habitually improvise even when they do not experience unexpected or extreme eventualities. We addressed this concern through a comparative ethnographic study of three film production crews in the Nigerian movie industry. Our findings unravel the multiple dimensions of informality and define habitual improvization. We build a theoretical model that traces the organizing principles of informality and how they affect the modes of implementation and outcomes of habitual improvization. Finally, we offer an agenda for future theoretical and empirical research on informality and organizational improvization.
Die MetallRente Jugendstudie ist die umfassendste repräsentative Untersuchung zum Finanz- und Vorsorgeverhalten junger Menschen in Deutschland. Die fünfte Studie analysiert auch Einflüsse der Corona-Pandemie auf die Bereitschaft junger Menschen zur Zukunftsplanung und ihr Vorsorgeverhalten. Trauen 17- bis 27-Jährige dem Staat eine zukunftsfeste Alterssicherung für ihre Generation zu? Wie stehen sie zu immer neuen politischen Vorschlägen? Wie schauen sie auf Sicherheit und Rendite? Angesichts Niedrigzinsen, Überalterung und mangelnden Reformen orientiert sich eine ganze Generation neu.
This paper studies the enforcement of fines, and, in particular, the effects of simplification and salience nudges on timely payments. In a randomized controlled trial, we add cover letters to 80,000 payment notifications for speeding. The letters increase the salience of the payment deadline, the late penalty, or both. Emphasizing only the deadline is not effective. Stressing the late penalty significantly and persistently increases payment rates. The effect is largest if both parameters are made salient. The most effective treatment yields a net revenue gain that covers approximately 25 percent of the labor costs of the ticket administration personnel. A survey experiment documents how the salience nudges alter prior (mis)perceptions about the communicated parameters. The survey results rationalize the differential effects of the treatments and, together with the evidence from the RCT, offer a broader framework for explaining why certain nudges are effective in some contexts but fail in others.
Regulatory governance of nonprofit organizations: legal frameworks and voluntary self-regulation
(2021)
This multi-perspective Research Handbook provides a clear pathway through the nonprofit governance research field, pushing beyond the borders of current theory to expand and deepen the analytical framework for nonprofit governance. It offers an analysis of the basics including definitions, organizational forms and levels of governance, and takes a critical approach towards the normative and prescriptive tendencies in much of contemporary governance scholarship. Divided into four distinctly thematic parts, contributors provide an in-depth review of the last 20 years, building on the foundations of classical contributions and further exploring new theoretical approaches, while examining the governance challenges of diverse types of organizations, including those from both developed and developing countries. Future challenges including multilevel governance are expertly addressed, and insights leading towards a unified theory are proposed. This thoroughly engaging Research Handbook will be an excellent resource for scholars in business and strategic management, nonprofit management and civil society, interested in topics such as nonprofit governance practice and boards of directors, governance theory, stakeholder management, membership organizations, foundations and hybrid organizations. Teachers of nonprofit management will also find this invaluable as it addresses both the core concepts and the most recent developments.
Tech companies and the public interest: the role of the state in governing social media platforms
(2023)
In the early days of the internet, it was hoped that digital technology would bring about democracy and positive outcomes for society. Recently, the debate has shifted towards tech lash with many critics pointing towards technology companies undermining democracy, stability, and sustainability. As a result, a new consensus seems to be emerging among policymakers, companies, and civil societal actors that self-regulation has to move towards co-regulation. This Special Issue of Information, Communication and Society draws together cutting-edge contributions on three core themes in scholarly and policy discourse on platform regulation: First, the papers in this special issue enhance empirical understandings of the role of the state in governing social media platforms developing in the United States, Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Second, they provide a holistic framework to understand policy problems that need to be addressed, which helps to develop and evaluate new policy initiatives. Finally, papers point towards three approaches in governing social media platforms and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of content moderation, process-based co-regulation, as well as competition regulation and alternative business models.
Background
Although older adults are more vulnerable to the COVID-19 virus, a significant proportion of them do not follow recommended guidelines concerning preventive actions during the ongoing pandemic. This article analyses the role of biased health beliefs for adaptive health behaviour such as reduced mobility, protection in public spaces and hygiene measures, for the population aged 50 and older in 13 European countries.
Methods
Health perception is measured based on the difference between self-reported health and physical performance tests for over 24 000 individuals included in the most recent Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. Logistic regressions are employed to explore how over- and underestimating health are related to preventive behaviours.
Results
Results suggest that older adults who underestimate their health are more likely to show adaptive behaviour related to mobility reductions. In particular, they are more likely to stay at home, shop less and go for walks less often. In contrast, overestimating health is not significantly associated with reduced mobility. Protective behaviour in public spaces and adopting hygiene measures do not vary systematically between health perception groups.
Conclusion
As health beliefs appear relevant for the adoption of preventive health behaviours related to mobility, they have serious consequences for the health and well-being of older Europeans. Although adaptive behaviour helps to contain the virus, exaggerated mobility reduction in those who underestimate their health might be contributing to the already high social isolation and loneliness of older adults during the ongoing pandemic.
Health misperception can have serious consequences on health. Despite their relevance, the role of such biases in determining healthcare utilisation is severely underexplored. Here we study the relationship between health perception and doctor visits for the population 50+ in Europe. We conceptualise health misperception as arising from either overconfidence or underconfidence, where overconfidence is measured as overestimation of health and underconfidence is measured as underestimation of health. Comparing objective performance measures and their self-reported equivalents from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, we find that individuals who overestimate their health visit the doctor 17.0% less often than individuals who correctly assess their health, which is crucial for preventive care such as screenings. In contrast, individuals who underestimate their health visit the doctor more often (21.4% more). Effects are similar for dentist visits, but we find no effects on hospital stays. The results are robust to several sensitivity tests and, more important, to various conceptualisations of the health perception measure.