Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School
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04/2014
The decision to establish an Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) marked a momentous change in the history of the European Union: By introducing a common currency and a single monetary policy at the European level, the institutions and practices of economic governance in the EU were transformed. At the same time, EMU created new economic structures and actors at the heart of the international macroeconomic system – with novel and potentially far-reaching implications for policy-making in international financial institutions (IFIs).
How does the EU govern its external relations in international financial institutions? And what explains the patterns of EU unity in IFIs? The dissertation pursues both a descriptive and an explanatory goal, as reflected in the two guiding research questions. I take an encompassing view to studying the EU’s external relations. Representation of the EU in international organizations and fora is an important element, yet it is only part of a longer and more complex story: Before any common position can be communicated or represented at the international level, European actors need to decide on it in the first place. The internal aggregation and authorization of external policies and positions in a poly-centric political system is thus a vital ingredient to the governance of the EU’s external relations in IFIs.(...)
03/2014
German policy makers and scholars have repeatedly referred to the United States’ higher education system as a model for improving the quality of universities in Germany.
Starting at this debate about a potential "Americanization” of German higher education policy this dissertation focuses on the introduction of new bachelor’s programs at German universities and analyzes whether these new degrees resemble their American counterparts.
The theoretical basis for this study is the “Varieties of Capitalism” (VoC) approach by Hall and Soskice, which argues that firms in coordinated market economies (CMEs) such as Germany need employees with specific skills, while employees in liberal market economies (LMEs) like the United States have to acquire general skills for the job market. Assuming that new German bachelor’s degrees are aimed at providing graduates with more general skills, the question of whether the introduction of these new degrees represents a convergence with American higher education policy and whether this indicates a shift towards a more liberal American-style market economy constitutes the main part of this study.
02/2014
Sovereign rating downgrades have led to strong criticism of the criteria used by the three major rating agencies, Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch. But which criteria do rating agencies actually use for evaluating the creditworthiness of sovereign states? The existing literature points to a few basic macroeconomic factors. This book shows that, in addition, rating agencies take political factors into account, in particular a country’s economic liberalization policies, international economic agreements, and political institutions. The book demonstrates the importance of political factors for sovereign ratings based on a new data set for 145 rated countries, which is the largest sample analyzed in the literature thus far. Methodologically, the study combines panel econometric evidence with a text analysis of a unique database of more than 1,200 rating announcements. In 72 per cent of these rating announcements, rating agencies refer to political factors as a key rating determinant.
This book argues that rating agencies have good reason for taking political indicators into account as well. (...)
01/2014
Questions of migration control have long been of central concern to wealthy Western states that attract large numbers of new immigrants. While border control measures aimed at deciding who is allowed to enter state territory and who is prevented from doing so are generally accepted as a legitimate sovereign prerogative, the removal of resident non-citizens tends to be far more controversial. Deportation, i.e., the enforcement of legal obligations to leave the country, is often considered a “cruel power” (Gibney 2008: 147) on the part of the state because it bears the potential of tearing vulnerable individuals from their families and breaking other social ties. In liberal democracies, return enforcement has therefore traditionally been considered a measure of last resort, rather than a normal policy option. This normative assessment is closely interlinked with liberal-democratic states’ emphasis on individual rights (Hampshire 2013: 44-47). This rights-based identity leads to instances in which not only non-citizens’ right to physical integrity, but also their right to family life and their claims to social belonging in their country of residence may trump the state’s prerogative to control access to its territory, and delegitimize forced return. In line with these considerations, the enforcement of former colonial citizens’ legal obligation to leave the United Kingdom (UK) was denounced as “un-British” during the late 1970s.2 In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, so-called guest worker programmes became discredited as domestic authorities proved unwilling or unable to enforce the idea of strictly temporary stay (Pagenstecher 1995). In addition, both the UK and Germany have over the course of the past four decades enacted a number of one-off regularizations of asylum seekers whose applications had been rejected, but who were granted legal residence on the basis of their extended stay in the respective country (cf. Baldwin-Edwards/Kraler 2009).