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Este artigo apresenta uma análise crítica da criação e implementação da mais emblemática medida política para o campo de jovens e adultos pouco escolarizados em Portugal: o Programa Novas Oportunidades. Recorrendo à proposta de Roger Dale sobre a agenda globalmente estruturada para a educação, discutiu-se a fabricação desta medida a partir de um cenário de regulação transnacional. Através da análise documental de um conjunto de documentos europeus e nacionais entre o período de 2000 e 2010 para o campo da educação de jovens e adultos, verificou-se que Programa Novas Oportunidades é consequência de um fortalecimento do processo de regulação das políticas educativas, levado a cabo pela União Europeia. Este fortalecimento resultou na construção de um programa político para o campo da educação de jovens e adultos em Portugal que comunga não só das mesmas ideologias instrumentais para a educação da União Europeia, como de uma gestão tecnocrática das políticas educativas, assente na procura de resultados.
Karl Marx observed long ago that all economic struggles invite moral struggles, or masquerade as such. The reverse may be true as well: deep moral-political conflicts may be waged through the manipulation of economic resources. Using the recent financial and Eurozone crises as empirical backgrounds, the four papers gathered here propose four different perspectives on the play of moral judgments in the economy, and call for broader and more systematic scholarly engagement with this issue. Focusing on executive compensation, bank bailouts, and the sovereign debt crisis, the symposium builds on a roundtable discussion held at the opening of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo) in Paris on November 29, 2012.
This chapter examines business lobbying at the WTO. It argues that the role of companies in multilateral trade is tightly linked to the evolution of the trading system, with the most decisive influence during the creation of the WTO institutions. In an initial phase, business lobbying concentrated on tariff barriers. As the GATT expanded its scope during the Uruguay Round, large US companies became very active participants and crucially shaped the agenda, in particular with respect to service trade and intellectual property rights. In other areas, however, active lobbying was less effective, most notably investment protection and textiles. With the establishment of the WTO, lobbying has begun to partially shift to the supranational level. Some relationships exist between the WTO secretariat and companies, but the most important new pillar of political activity relates to dispute settlement. At the same time, the WTO secretariat tries to reach out to a more diverse set of stakeholders. In many ways, the influence of global companies on WTO affairs is much more indirect today than it was during its creation.
Neo-liberalism has had one central message for the state: scale back, cut back, cut out, transform. This brings to mind Winston Churchill's reply to an opponent who asked, ‘How much is enough?’ to Churchill's repeated push to spend increasingly more on defence in the 1930s. Churchill's rejoinder came in the form of a story about a Brazilian banker with whom he had just had lunch. The banker had received a cable informing him of the death of his mother-in-law and asking for instructions. He cabled back: ‘embalm, cremate, bury at sea; leave nothing to chance’.
This take on neo-liberalism – as burying the state – is certainly exaggerated because neo-liberalism comes in many different forms with many different policy applications. Only the recommendations of the most radical strands come close to the Brazilian banker's response to his mother-in-law's death. Yet the story as a metaphor for neo-liberal views of the state nonetheless somehow rings true. This is largely because neo-liberals have been more anti-state in their rhetoric than in their actions.
The state has been neo-liberalism’s bête noire, as its main focus of attack, because neo-liberals – whatever their differences – have viewed the state as consistently doing too much in the wrong ways with the worst consequences not only for the markets but also for democracy, by endangering individual freedom through its interventions. As a provider of public goods, the state had to be scaled back to leave room for the market, which would assure more efficiency. However, the state has also been neo-liberalism’s greatest conquest, as its main locus of action, because it has been primarily through the state that neo-liberals have been able to realize their vision(s).
Karl Marx observed long ago that all economic struggles invite moral struggles, or masquerade as such. The reverse may be true, too: deep moral–political conflicts may be waged through the manipulation of economic resources and the design of policy devices. Using the recent financial and Eurozone crises as empirical backgrounds, the short papers presented here by Philippe Steiner, Cornelia Woll, Wolfgang Streeck and Marion Fourcade propose four different perspectives on the play of moral judgments in the economy and call for a broader and more systematic scholarly engagement with this issue. Focusing on executive compensation, bank bailouts and the sovereign debt crisis, the discussion forum builds on a roundtable discussion held at the opening of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo) in Paris on November 29, 2012.
The future of international political economy: Introduction to the 20th anniversary issue of RIPE
(2013)
How much leeway did governments have in designing bank bailouts and deciding on the height of intervention during the 2007-2009 financial crisis? By analyzing the variety of bailouts in Europe and North America, we will show that the strategies governments use to cope with the instability of financial markets does not depend on economic conditions alone. Rather, they take root in the institutional and political setting of each country and vary in particular according to the different types of business–government relations banks were able to entertain with public decision makers. Still, “crony capitalism” accounts overstate the role of bank lobbying. With four case studies of the Irish, Danish, British, and French bank bailout, we show that countries with close one-on-one relationships between policy makers and bank management tended to develop unbalanced bailout packages, while countries where banks negotiated collectively developed solutions with a greater burden-sharing from private institutions.
A major question confronting sustainability research today is to what extent our planet, with a finite environmental resource base, can accommodate the faster than exponentially growing human population. Although these concerns are generally attributed to Malthus (1766–1834), early attempts to estimate the maximum sustainable population (ergo, the carrying capacity K) were reported by van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) to be at 13 billion people (1). Since then, the concept of carrying capacity has evolved to accommodate many resource limitations originating from available water, energy, and other ecosystem goods and services (1, 2). In PNAS, Suweis et al.(3) apply the concept of carrying capacity using fresh water availability on a national scale as the limiting resource to infer the global K. They estimate a decline in global human population by the middle of this century. We ask to what extent models that are …
Las políticas de seguridad desarrolladas por el Estado peruano durante los años 80 han sido causantes de innumerables muertes, desapariciones y violaciones de derechos humanos. En la actualidad, con remanentes subversivos y una zona infestada por el narcotráfico (el VRAEM), la atención a las políticas y estrategias desarrolladas por el Estado para afrontar esta problemática es crucial. En tal sentido, este artículo reseña las principales decisiones del gobierno peruano desde el año 2000 hasta la actualidad, en materia de políticas de seguridad para la zona en conflicto denominada VRAEM desentrañado las estrategias utilizadas para afrontar a Sendero Luminoso y cómo estas han violado, reiteradamente, los derechos fundamentales de las poblaciones aledañas a la zona en conflicto.
El Cuerpo de Gerentes Públicos de SERVIR nace de un proceso de aprendizaje enriquecedor que supone un reto para la reconversión de la burocracia nacional tradicional hacia una moderna y más eficiente a partir de experiencias latinoamericanas similares. SERVIR, mediante esta experiencia, nos demuestra que la política pública no es un proceso de una sola dirección, que las fases pueden variar y que la creatividad es un aspecto fundamental para imaginar opciones y alternativas frente a un número de retos que la gestión pública nos presenta. Pero no solo es creatividad, también se trata de instinto al identificar los precisos momentos en los que apostar por un proyecto y cuándo salir.
Crónica de un Conflicto anunciado. El caso del conflicto social en Bagua (5 y 6 de junio de 2009)
(2013)
Los acontecimientos que se suscitaron el 5 de junio de 2009 en el poblado amazónico de Bagua presentan una serie de antecedentes, decisiones y estrategias adoptadas por parte del Estado y a una serie de actores políticos que hacen que su estudio sea particularmente interesante. Nos encontramos frente a un suceso que cambia la manera de entender y manejar los conflictos sociales en la política nacional.
Recent research in Toronto and Geneva indicates that asylum seekers and refugees are predisposed to be cooperative with the refugee status determination (RSD) system and other immigration procedures, and that the design of alternatives to detention can create, foster and support this cooperative predisposition – or can undermine or even demolish it.
The diffusion of contested practices across environments: Social movements’ boundary-bridging role
(2013)
We examine the diffusion across country institutional environments of a corporate practice that is contested by potential adopters. We show that the diffusion process is in crucial ways driven by the mobilization of social movement activists in favour of the corporate practice in the target institutional environment. We further show that social movement activism is particularly relevant for the pioneering introduction of a foreign practice into a new institutional environment in the early stages of the diffusion process, while more conventional institutional pressures become relevant at later stages of the process. Results from the study of the adoption of the corporate governance practice ‘say on pay’ by Swiss companies between 2007 and 2012 largely support our hypotheses and underline the boundary-bridging role of transnationally connected social movement activists.
Anknüpfend an neuere Forschungsergebnisse zum Verhältnis von Politik und Ministerialverwaltung wird untersucht, wie und warum sich Struktur und Rolle der Leitungsbereiche deutscher und dänischer Ministerien seit 1980 gewandelt haben. Die Studie zeigt, dass die Ministerialverwaltungen beider Länder unter einem diffusen Anpassungsdruck stehen, der selektiv auf einen Bedeutungszuwachs der Leitungsbereiche hinwirkt, aber unterschiedlich verarbeitet wird. Der länderspezifische Bedeutungszuwachs der Leitungsbereiche wird anhand unterschiedlich wirkender institutioneller Filter erklärt, die auf die jeweilige Institutionalisierung des Verhältnisses von Politik und Verwaltung zurückzuführen sind.
Die Untersuchung bietet einen fundierten empirischen Einblick in den Wandel von Organisation und Rollenwahrnehmung der Leitungsbereiche und stößt damit in eine Lücke der vergleichenden Verwaltungsforschung.
Research in public administration and public policy is remarkably split between institutional approaches and policy analytical approaches. Whereas institutional approaches, most often in (comparative) public administration, identify features of politico-administrative systems to account for policy-making such as politicization or the role of the centre, policy perspectives explain policy-making by factors related to the respective policy domain, e.g. frames or agenda-setting. This divide becomes crucial in the analysis of policy advice. On the one hand, advisory systems are affected by features of politico-administrative systems because bureaucrats represent important sources of advice to ministers. On theother hand, advisory systems also vary across policy domains. The paper aims to reconcile the two approaches by analyzing the constitution of policy advisory systems as affected by both institutional and policy factors. The article argues that the composition and role of advisory systems and their components basically depend upon how the problem structure of a given policy domain prompts the involved actors to use the institutional context to impose their specific problem perception, and hence to determine the relevant knowledge in policy advice. Hence, the paper focuses on the question which institutional and policy-level factors affect the constitution of the policy advisory system in climate policy-making in German federal government.
Little is known about political polarization in German public opinion. This article offers an issue-based perspective and explores trends of opinion polarization in Germany. Public opinion polarization is conceptualized and measured as alignment of attitudes. Data from the German General Social Survey (1980 to 2010) comprise attitudes towards manifold issues, which are classified into several dimensions. This study estimates multilevel models that reveal general and issue- as well as dimension-specific levels and trends in attitude alignment for both the whole German population and sub-groups. It finds that public opinion polarization has decreased over the last three decades in Germany. In particular, highly educated and more politically interested people have become less polarized over time. However, polarization seems to have increased in attitudes regarding gender issues. These findings provide interesting contrasts to existing research on the American public.
Figures from postelection surveys often grossly overestimate election turnout. Two distinct phenomena are responsible for this gap: overrepresentation of actual voters and vote misreporting by actual nonvoters among survey respondents. Previous accounts of turnout bias are inconclusive in that they either focus on a single component, or fail to separate between the two. In this paper, we formally decompose turnout bias in election surveys into its constituent parts, assess their empirical prevalence and heterogeneity using an extensive collection of 49 vote validation studies from six countries, and employ Bayesian meta regression techniques to account for cross-study differences. Our results indicate that both election and survey characteristics such as actual voter turnout and survey response rates differentially affect the components of turnout bias. We conclude with a discussion of the threats and potentials of our findings for survey-based comparative electoral research.
We draw attention to a simple yet underappreciated way of forecasting the outcomes of elections involving two rounds of voting: surveying the voters’ candidate evaluations in first round exit polls, poststratifying the sample proportions of reported votes to official first round election returns, and redistributing the votes for eliminated competitors according to their supporters’ lower-order preferences among the viable alternatives in round two. We argue that the approach is likely to outperform standard pre-election surveys, due to its better coverage and reduced measurement error, and the possibility of correcting for sample selection. We set out the practical details of the method and demonstrate its usefulness by employing a recent German mayoral election as an empirical case. Thirteen candidates were competing in the first round, while there were six candidates in the decisive second round. The runoff result was forecast two weeks in advance with an average absolute error of less than one percentage point.
The Friedman rule states that steady-state welfare is maximized when there is deflation at the real rate of interest. Recent work by Khan, King, and Wolman [Review of Economic Studies 10 (4), 825–860] uses a richer model but still finds deflation optimal. In an otherwise standard New Keynesian model we show that, if households have hyperbolic discounting, small positive rates of inflation can be optimal. In our baseline calibration, the optimal rate of inflation is 2.1% and remains positive across a wide range of calibrations.
Using a new dataset with transaction-level export data from four African countries (Malawi, Mali, Senegal and Tanzania), this paper explores the determinants of success upon entry into export markets, defined as survival beyond the first year at the firm-product-destination level. We find that the probability of success rises with the number of same-country firms exporting the same product to the same destination, suggesting the existence of cross-firm externalities. We explore several conjectures on the determinants of these externalities and provide evidence suggestive of information spillovers, possibly mediated through the banking system.
Did the North American Free Trade Agreement make Mexican firms more productive? If so, through which channels? This paper addresses these questions by deploying an innovative microeconometric approach that disentangles the various channels through which integration with the global markets (via international trade) can affect firm-level productivity. The results show that the North American Free Trade Agreement stimulated the productivity of Mexican plants via: (1) an increase in import competition and (2) a positive effect on access to imported intermediate inputs. However, the impact of trade reforms was not identical for all integrated firms, with fully integrated firms (i.e. firms simultaneously exporting and importing) benefiting more than other integrated firms. Contrary to previous results, once self-selection problems are solved, the analysis finds a rather weak relationship between exports and productivity growth.
We show the existence of an unconditional gender gap in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, when key observable characteristics of the enterprises or individuals are taken into account the gender gap disappears. In the case of enterprises, we explain our finding with differences in key characteristics and a potential selection bias. In the case of individuals, the lower use of formal financial services by women can be explained by gender gaps in other dimensions related to the use of financial services, such as their lower level of income and education, and by their household and employment status.
The need for economic diversification receives a great deal of attention in Russia. This paper looks at a way to improve it that is essential but largely ignored: how to help diversifying firms better survive economic cycles. By definition, economic diversification means doing new things in new sectors and/or in new markets. The fate of emerging firms, therefore, should be of great concern to policy makers. This paper indicates that the ups and downs -- the volatility -- of Russian economic growth are key to that fate. Volatility of growth is higher in Russia than in comparable economies because its slumps are both longer and deeper. They go beyond the cleansing effects of eliminating the least efficient firms; relatively efficient ones get swept away as well. In fact, an incumbency advantage improves a firm's chances of weathering the ups and downs of the economy, regardless of a firm's relative efficiency. Finally, firms in sectors where competition is less intense are less likely to exit the market, regardless of their relative efficiency. Two policy conclusions emerge from these findings -- one macroeconomic and one microeconomic. First, the importance of countercyclical policies is heightened to include efficiency elements. Second, strengthening competition and other factors that support the survival of new, emerging and efficient firms will promote economic diversification. Efforts to help small and medium enterprises may be better spent on removing the obstacles that young, infant firms face as they attempt to enter, survive and grow.
Many countries in Africa suffer high rates of underemployment or low rates of productive employment; many also anticipate large numbers of people to enter the workforce in the near future. This paper asks the question: Are African firms creating fewer jobs than those located elsewhere? And, if so, why? One reason may be that weak business environments slow the growth of firms and distort the allocation of resources away from better-performing firms, hence reducing their potential for job creation. The paper uses data from 41,000 firms across 119 countries to examine the drivers of firm growth, with a special focus on African firms. African firms, at any age, tend to be 20–24 percent smaller than firms in other regions of the world. The poor business environment, driven by limited access to finance, and the lack of availability of electricity, land, and unskilled labor have some value in explaining this difference. Foreign ownership, the export status of the firm, and the size of the market are also significant determinants of firm size. However, even after controlling for the business environment and for characteristics of firms and markets, about 60 percent of the size gap between African and non-African firms remains unexplained.
Studies on innovation and international trade have traditionally focused on manufacturing because neither was seen as important for services. Moreover, the few existing studies on services focus only on industrial countries, although in many developing countries services are already the largest sector in the economy and an important determinant of overall productivity growth. Using a recent firm-level innovation survey for Chile to compare the manufacturing and "tradable" services sector, this paper reveals some novel patterns. First, although services firms have on average a much lower propensity to export than manufacturing firms, services exports are less dominated by large firms and tend to be more skill intensive than manufacturing exports. Second, services firms appear to be as innovative as -- and in some cases more innovative than -- manufacturing firms, in terms of both inputs and outputs of "technological" innovative activity, although services innovations more often take a "non-technological" form. Third, services exporters (like manufacturing exporters) tend to be significantly more innovative than non-exporters, with a wider gap for innovations close to the global technological frontier. These findings suggest that the growing faith in services as a source of both trade and innovative dynamism may not be misplaced.
This paper exploits the surge in Chinese exports from 1994 to 2004 to evaluate the effects of a competition shock from a low wage competitor for producers in an important middle-income country, Mexico. We find that this shock causes selection and reallocation at both firm and product levels and that its impact is highly heterogeneous at the intensive and extensive margins. Sales of smaller plants and more marginal products are compressed and are more likely to cease, whereas those of larger plants and core products seem relatively impervious to the shock. This implies a reallocation in terms of market shares within firms and between firms. We also show that the impact of expanded access to cheaper Chinese intermediate inputs has a similar effect, with larger plants benefiting more from the availability of cheaper imported inputs.
This working paper is part of the research programme on Institutions, Governance and Longterm Economic Growth, a partnership between the French Development Agency AFD and the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance Maastricht University UNUMerit. The research builds on the Institutional Profiles Database IPD, jointly developed by AFD and the French Ministry of the Economy since 2001.What is state capacity and how does it affect development The concept of state capacity acquired centrality during the late seventies and eighties, sponsored by a rather compact set of scholarly works. It later permeated through several disciplines and has now earned a place within the many governance dimensions affecting economic performance. The present article aims to provide a historical account of the evolution and usage of the state capacity concept, along with its various operationalizations. It examines in particular a the growing distance in the usage of the concept by different disciplinary and thematic fields; b the process of branching out of the concept from restricted to more multidimensional definitions; c the problems with construct validity and concept stretching, and d the generalized lack of clarity that exists regarding the institutional sources of state capacity.
Recent literature models leadership as a process of communication in which leaders’ rhetorical signals facilitate followers’ co-ordination. While some studies have explored the effects of leadership in experimental settings, there remains a lack of empirical research on the effectiveness of informational tools in real political environments. Using quantitative text analysis of federal and sub-national legislative addresses in Russia, this article empirically demonstrates that followers react to informational signals from leaders. It further theorizes that leaders use a combination of informational and non-informational tools to solve the co-ordination problem. The findings show that a mixture of informational and non- informational tools shapes followers’ strategic calculi. Ignoring non-informational tools — and particularly the interrelationship between informational and non-informational tools - can threaten the internal validity of causal inference in the analysis of leadership effects on co-ordination.
We address leadership emergence and the possibility that there is a partially innate predisposition to occupy a leadership role. Employing twin design methods on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we estimate the heritability of leadership role occupancy at 24%. Twin studies do not point to specific genes or neurological processes that might be involved. We therefore also conduct association analysis on the available genetic markers. The results show that leadership role occupancy is associated with rs4950, a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) residing on a neuronal acetylcholine receptor gene (CHRNB3). We replicate this family-based genetic association result on an independent sample in the Framingham Heart Study. This is the first study to identify a specific genotype associated with the tendency to occupy a leadership position. The results suggest that what determines whether an individual occupies a leadership position is the complex product of genetic and environmental influences, with a particular role for rs4950.
One of the most important changes in the history of codecision has been the steep increase in early agreements since 1999. Early agreements have enhanced the efficiency of European Union legislation, but they have been criticized for giving a subset of actors disproportionate control over the legislative agenda and negotiation process. Yet, no study has systematically shown whether and how early agreements have indeed redistributed influence between actors within the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers. Our contribution fills this gap by comparing actors’ bargaining success across readings under codecision in a dataset of salient files. Contrary to our theoretical predictions, we do not find evidence of distributional consequences when controlling for inter-institutional conflict and file characteristics. Where codecision is concluded early, the final legislative outcomes are not located closer to the policy positions held by the party group of the Parliament's rapporteur or by the Council Presidency.
The European Union (EU) has experienced a remarkable degree of change during its history: it legislates in an ever wider range of policy areas, and its institutions and decision-making processes have been reformed repeatedly. One of the most important institutional changes was the introduction of the codecision procedure in 1993, which empowered the European Parliament (EP) and transformed the EU system of governance. Following the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon the majority of legislation is now subject to codecision under the ordinary legislative procedure. Consequently, the operation of codecision has major implications for our understanding and analysis of the EU's legislative outputs and for studies of supranational policy-making and systemic evolution more generally. This collection takes stock of 20 years of practising and studying codecision and examines the procedure's long-term implications for the EU's institutions, politics and policies.
This article investigates a widespread yet understudied trend in EU politics: the shift of legislative decision making from public inclusive to informal secluded arenas and the subsequent adoption of legislation as “early agreements.” Since its introduction in 1999, “fast-track legislation” has increased dramatically, accounting for 72% of codecision files in the Sixth European Parliament. Drawing from functionalist institutionalism, distributive bargaining theory, and sociological institutionalism, this article explains under what conditions informal decision making is likely to occur. The authors test their hypotheses on an original data set of all 797 codecision files negotiated between mid-1999 and mid-2009. Their analysis suggests that fast-track legislation is systematically related to the number of participants, legislative workload, and complexity. These findings back a functionalist argument, emphasizing the transaction costs of intraorganizational coordination and information gathering. However, redistributive and salient acts are regularly decided informally, and the Council presidency’s priorities have no significant effect on fast-track legislation. Hence, the authors cannot confirm explanations based on issue properties or actors’ privileged institutional positions. Finally, they find a strong effect for the time fast-track legislation has been used, suggesting socialization into interorganizational norms of cooperation.
[en] Die europäischen Bildungsminister beschlossen 1999 einen einheitlichen europäischen Hochschulraum zu schaffen; der so genannte Bologna Prozess wurde in Gang gesetzt. Mit der Unterzeichnung der Kopenhagener Erklärung nur drei Jahre später entschlossen sich die Nationalstaaten, auch im Bereich der beruflichen Bildung stärker zusammenzuarbeiten. Vor allem soll die nationale wie internationale Vergleichbarkeit von Bildungsabschlüssen verbessert werden. Beide Prozesse zielen darauf ab, Durchlässigkeit zwischen den organisatorischen Feldern berufliche Bildung und Hochschulbildung zu erhöhen, und zwar mit Hilfe von gemeinsam entwi- ckelten Standards wie dem Europäischen und Nationalen Qualifikationsrahmen, einem System zur Validierung und Anerkennung unterschiedlicher Lernformen, der Ermöglichung flexibler Bildungswege und der Einführung von Kreditpunkte- systemen (Powell/Solga 2008, 2010, 2011).
Heute, nach einem Jahrzehnt seit Beginn dieser Prozesse stellt sich die Frage, wie diese in den europäischen Nationalstaaten bisher schon gewirkt und wie sie das Verhältnis von Hochschul- und Berufsbildung verändert haben – Veränderungen, die mit vielfältigen Implikationen für die Bildungs- und soziale Mobilität einherge- hen können (Bernhard/Powell/Graf 2010): Die Frage nach Durchlässigkeit zwi- schen beruflicher und Hochschulbildung ist dabei insbesondere deswegen wichtig, da stratifizierte (Aus-)Bildungssysteme ohne Brücken zwischen einzelnen Bildungs- sektoren den möglichst gleichen Zugang zu Bildungs- und Beschäftigungsopportu- nitäten behindern.
Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have traditionally provided a large proportion of their workforces with qualifications obtained in the dual vocational training system. However, due to the growing demand for abstract and codified knowledge, all three countries aim at increasing the permeability and individual mobility between the dual training sector and the higher education system. In this chapter we analyse the ways in which Germany, Austria and Switzerland have tried to establish institutional linkages between dual vocational training and higher education. We begin by discussing options for creating such linkages: (1.) upgrading of vocational education and training courses, (2.) introducing dual courses of study, (3.) facilitating attendance of general upper secondary schools for people with vocational qualifications, (4.) enabling the parallel acquisition of a dual vocational training qualification and a higher education entrance qualification, (5.) allowing admission to higher education on the basis of prior dual vocational training qualifications and a certain amount of work experience, and (6.) recognising prior learning as an element in higher education programmes. Our analysis shows that, recently, Germany has relied strongly on the admission to higher education based on vocational training certificates in combination with work experience. Switzerland and Austria are rather pushing the comprehensive introduction of programmes that enable the parallel acquisition of a dual vocational training qualification and a higher education entrance qualification. Finally, we raise questions about the risk of institutional ambiguity and institutional task overload
A series of studies has shown that civil wars are caused not only by factors inside countries, but also by effects operating across state borders. Whereas a first wave of quantitative studies demonstrated that such effects make the “closed-polity” assumption untenable, more recently researchers have identified particular causal mechanisms driving conflict. Despite these recent advances, a central puzzle remains unresolved, namely why ethnic groups that at least in theory could count on support from large transborder ethnic kin (TEK) groups often have remained surprisingly peaceful, such as the stranded Russian populations in the “near abroad.” We propose a theoretical framework that extends the analysis from the primary dyad between the incumbent and the challenger group by adding a secondary dyad that pits the incumbent against the TEK group. We postulate a curvilinear effect of the TEK group's relative size on conflict onset. Using a new data set on transnational ethnic links, we find that that the risk of conflict increases within the middle range of the size spectrum, consistent with our main hypothesis. This means that large TEK groups have a conflict-dampening effect, provided that they control their own state. Excluded TEK groups, however, are not associated with lower conflict probabilities.
The Hybridization of Vocational Training and Higher Education in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland
(2013)
Austria, Germany, and Switzerland are increasingly relying on hybridization at the nexus of vocational training and higher education to increase permeability and reform their highly praised systems of collective skill formation. This historical and organizational institutionalist study compares these countries to trace the evolution of their skill regimes from the 1960s to today‘s era of Europeanization, focusing especially on the impact of the Bologna and Copenhagen processes.
Wie Städte sich neu finden
(2013)
In Städten verdichten sich wie nirgendwo sonst ökonomische, soziale und kulturelle Facetten menschlichen Zusammenlebens. Hier entstehen wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Impulse. 84 Prozent der deutschen Bevölkerung lebt in Städten. Doch sind nicht alle Städte gleichermaßen Orte von Wachstum und Innovation. Mit dem Ende der Industrialisierung und dem Übergang in die Dienstleistungsgesellschaft (vgl. Bell 1999) sind einige Städte aus dem größeren Arbeits-kreislauf der Gesellschaft herausgefallen. Sie haben aufgehört, zentrale Orte des Wirtschaftens zu sein. Ihre Bevölkerungen schrumpfen, Gebäude bleiben ungenutzt und die öffentliche Hand verfügt nur über unzureichende und schwindende Mittel, dem entgegenzuwirken. Es sind strukturschwache Städte.
Kommunale Schrumpfungsprozesse sind aus dem 20. Jahrhundert kaum bekannt, obwohl zwei Kriege in Deutschland tobten und unvorstellbare Verwüstungen hinterlassen haben. (...)
On croyait les démons assagis : à la faveur de la crise financière de 2008, les Etats avaient repris le dessus sur les marchés financiers et les politiques économiques savaient répondre et conjurer la dépression. Mais la tempête qui a ébranlé la zone euro entre 2009 et 2012, au départ crise banale dans une petite économie périphérique, la Grèce, a gagné un pays après l’autre et a menacé d’emporter tout l’édifice monétaire européen. Dans ce brillant essai, Jean Pisani-Ferry retrace les étapes de la crise et analyse les solutions adoptées. Si l’Europe a fait preuve d’un remarquable sens de la survie, elle souffre aujourd’hui d’une dangereuse absence de communauté de projets.
This article offers an empirically grounded interpretivist theory of the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights based on domestic judicial and political elite accounts of the legitimacy of the Court in Turkey, Bulgaria, United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. The central argument of the article is that the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights is based on a constant comparison between the values and goals of domestic institutions and the values and goals of the European Court of Human Rights. More specifically, the social legitimacy of the European Court of Human Rights is grounded in the logic of a fair compromise: What actors think they lose by according legitimacy to the European Court of Human Rights must be balanced by what they perceive to gain in return. Three factors organise how actors in different domestic settings struck a fair compromise in their domestic contexts: a) perception of domestic human rights conditions, b) commitment to cosmopolitan ideals of human rights and international law and c) commitment to domestic institutions.
This paper provides a comprehensive discussion of the market value of variable renewable energy (VRE). The inherent variability of wind speeds and solar radiation affects the price that VRE generators receive on the market (market value). During windy and sunny times the additional electricity supply reduces the prices. Because the drop is larger with more installed capacity, the market value of VRE falls with higher penetration rate. This study aims to develop a better understanding on how the market value with penetration, and how policies and prices affect the market value. Quantitative evidence is derived from a review of published studies, regression analysis of market data, and the calibrated model of the European electricity market EMMA. We find the value of wind power to fall from 110% of the average power price to 50–80% as wind penetration increases from zero to 30% of total electricity consumption. For solar power, similarly low value levels are reached already at 15% penetration. Hence, competitive large-scale renewable deployment will be more difficult to accomplish than as many anticipate.
Energy and climate policies are usually seen as measures to internalize externalities. However, as a side effect, the introduction of these policies redistributes wealth between consumers and producers, and within these groups. While redistribution is seldom the focus of the academic literature in energy economics, it plays a central role in public debates and policy decisions. This paper compares the distributional effects of two major electricity policies: support schemes for renewable energy sources, and CO2 pricing. We find that the redistribution effects of both policies are large, and they work in opposed directions. While renewables support transfers wealth from producers to consumers, carbon pricing does the opposite. More specifically, we show that moderate amounts of wind subsidies can increase consumer surplus, even if consumers bear the subsidy costs. CO2 pricing, in contrast, increases aggregated producer surplus, even without free allocation of emission allowances; however, not all types of producers benefit. These findings are derived from an analytical model of electricity markets, and a calibrated numerical model of Northwestern Europe. Our findings imply that if policy makers want to avoid large redistribution they might prefer a mix of policies, even if CO2 pricing alone is the first-best climate policy in terms of allocative efficiency.
Levelized costs of electricity (LCOE) are a common metric for comparing power generating technologies. However, there is criticism particularly towards evaluating variable renewables like wind and solar PV power based on LCOE because it ignores variability and integration costs. We propose a new metric System LCOE that accounts for integration and generation costs. For this purpose we develop a new mathematical definition of integration costs that directly relates to economic theory. As a result System LCOE allow the economic comparison of generating technologies and deriving optimal quantities in particular for VRE. To demonstrate the new concept we quantify System LCOE from a simple power system model and literature values. We find that at high wind shares integration costs can be in the same range as generation costs of wind power and conventional plants in particular due to a cost component “profile costs” captured by the new definition. Integration costs increase with growing wind shares and might become an economic barrier to deploying VRE at high shares. System LCOE help understanding and resolving the challenge of integrating VRE and can guide research and policy makers in realizing a cost-efficient transformation towards an energy system with potentially high shares of variable renewables.
With the global expansion of renewable energy (RE) technologies, the provision of optimal RE policy packages becomes an important task. We review pivotal aspects regarding the economics of renewables that are relevant to the design of an optimal RE policy, many of which are to date unresolved. We do so from three interrelated perspectives that a meaningful public policy framework for inquiry must take into account. First, we explore different social objectives justifying the deployment of RE technologies, including potential co-benefits of RE deployment, and review modelbased estimates of the economic potential of RE technologies, i.e. their socially optimal deployment level. Second, we address pivotal market failures that arise in the course of implementing the economic potential of RE sources in decentralized markets. Third, we discuss multiple policy instruments curing these market failures. Our framework reveals the requirements for an assessment of the relevant options for real-world decision makers in the field of RE policies. This review makes it clear that there are remaining white areas on the knowledge map concerning consistent and socially optimal RE policies.
Should there be free trade? This question finds different, and often contradicting answers in philosophy and economics. Among economists, there is a remarkable consensus that free markets are desirable. It is this curious consensus that motivates this study.
This dissertations aims to explain, reconstruct and contest the neoclassical vision in mainstream trade theory. It is argued that economic justifications for free trade policies rely on an array of implicit and explicit normative premises,and that economists take positions on topics that are usually dealt with by political philosophers. Taken together, these premises and positions amount to what will be called the neoclassical vision. It is argued that throughout the history of economics, economic doctrines were inescapably normative. Tracing the intellectual and historical origins of this neoclassical vision, it is shown how a specific view of what justice demands in the economy came to be constitutive of today’s economic arguments. I hence attempt to treat economics today as it has historically been: as a branch of political philosophy, and as inextricably normative.
Normative trade theory and the theoretical arguments put forward by international economists will serve as the case study on which basis the neoclassical vision is reconstructed. In turn, the vision will be critically assessed from a liberal egalitarian perspective. Particular attention will be paid to the question of the role of politics in how losers from economic activity are treated.
Following this critical analysis, I argue for the need of a normative ‘countervision’that is most convincingly provided by John Rawls’s early work. It will then be outlined how Rawls could respond and overcome the pitfalls of the neoclassical vision – even though Rawls is deeply influenced by conventional economic thought himself. (...)
This study was conceived in the context of a project course on CSR instruments and modelled on a real case. The German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (BMAS) had tendered a report that would provide an overview of the existing classification tools used to evaluate CSR performance. The report is part of the National Strategy on Corporate Social Responsibility, the CSR action plan of the German government.
The Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs is the lead ministry responsible for implementing the National Strategy for Corporate Social Responsibility. The Action Plan for CSR was decided by the federal cabinet on October 6th, 2010. According to the Action Plan, CSR measures include a company’s contributions to voluntarily participate and include social responsibility into their business plan. The inclusion of a company’s key stakeholders is an integral part of CSR.
The goal was not only to provide an overview of the principle and international agreements but also to classify existing instruments from different stakeholders’ perspectives. For this, students analysed 58 CSR instruments for which they developed a diverse set of evaluation criteria. Moreover, they tested their assumptions about key stakeholders’ interests in a small workshop interviewing representatives of trade unions, chambers of commerce, consumer groups as well NGOs.
The result is a very impressive piece of work as it presents new insight in a largely under-researched field. The report was presented to the working group on evaluation of the federal CSR forum in Berlin on June 6th, 2012 where it received a lot of praise by the participants. I hope it will be used in the professional world.
This paper introduces an indicator framework, which allows for a valid and reliable assessment of the service quality of customer-focused government services. While defining service quality is a difficult task, also operationalising and measuring such an elusive concept can never be done perfectly due to a number of problems. Given the ‘soft’ nature of service quality, most prior research has focused on survey-based methods, which while being essential have serious flaws owed to this method’s inherent lack of reliability. Following suggestions by prior research in the field, this paper develops an assessment framework combining a ‘soft’ indicator based on a SERVQUAL survey with a set of ‘hard’ variables adding the reliability, which previous approaches lack.
The indicator was initially developed, tested and re-adjusted for measuring service quality in Berlin’s 40 Bürgerämter. However, it can be adapted in a way that it is applicable to most customer-based government services. The ‘soft’ part of this indicator was developed on the lines of five dimensions, scoring services according to their tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy.
On the ‘hard’ dimension, we have picked a set of eleven variables, which unequivocally add/subtract from service quality, while having the advantage of being measured in a straightforward manner. While the operationalisation and weighting of these variables is open to academic and professional debate, we are confident to have followed a transparent and clearly comprehensible process. We acknowledge, however, that these variables will have to be adjusted when other services are being measured.
All in all, the developed Service Quality Indicator for Customer-Based Public Services (SQI) should be regarded as a starting point for a comprehensive and easily constructible framework to assess service quality in the good governance arena. We hope that this indicator framework will be perfected to the point that it can contribute to a better overall measurement and therefore improvement of government services.
My EMPM Master thesis focuses on changing governance structures in European research policy and the role the European Commission is playing in this context. In particular, it aims at investigating whether we currently witness the transition of the European Commission’s Directorate ‐ General for Research (and Innovation) into a European research ministry. In order to lay the ground for finding answers to this question, I first introduce the history of Community activities in the area of research and discuss the development of power relations between the different European players in the area. The concept of ”agencification” and its consequences for the work, status and self ‐ perception of the European Commission is looked at in particular depth. In the following analytical chapter I argue that this paradigm shift is indeed taking place and that, among others elements, the new position of research as ”shared competence” after the Lisbon Treaty, the relatively recent creation of two executive research agencies and strong leadership embodied in the person of the Commissioner for Research and Innovation have contributed decisively to the development. The thesis is based on the analysis of both relevant literature and theory as well as on semi ‐ structured interviews that I carried out with relevant stakeholders in Brussels, both from the European institutions and from concerned institutions, organizations, and associations, hence providing a sound mix of theoretical approaches and practical reflections.
Education is widely believed to be a key to the development of individuals and society. However, it is also clear that core global political commitments aiming at universality as included in the Millenium Development Goals and the right to education can only be achieved if policy efforts start addressing systematically disadvantaged parts of society. This is the topic of the present paper on sociodemographic barriers to equity in education in Nepal. So far, many policy efforts to enhance educational opportunities are based on a one dimensional assessments of the most disadvantage population groups. They assume, for instance, that girls are generally more disadvantaged than boys or that people living in rural areas are more disadvantaged than those living in urban areas. In her paper, Ann-Kathrin Scheuermann goes further and explore s which combinations of sociodemographic attributes impede equity in education in Nepal in terms of access to education and attainment. She is able to use unique data, the Nepal Living Standards Survey 2010/11 compiled by the World Bank and the Nepalese Central Bureau of Statistics as well as qualitative participatory assessments in the field. She finds that the most influential attributes established in the literature – wealth, geography and gender – do matter, but that culture specific group characteristics are at least as relevant. Poverty remains a major barrier to equity in education. The effect of geography is two dimensional, impeding equity in both rural and urban areas, but for different reasons. In rural areas disadvantages are related to infrastructural aspects, e.g. distance to the nearest school, whereas in urban areas income generation alternatives impede educational opportunities. Gender differences have decreased with regard to access over time, but girls remain disadvantaged when it comes to higher attainment. When looking at inequity regarding geography, gender and wealth jointly, poor boys (not girls!) in urban are among the most disadvantaged. These finding s have great policy -¬‐ relevance. In order to reach the most marginalized population groups policy analysis must go beyond a one dimensional analysis of attributes but look at them in combination. Moreover, socio -¬‐ cultural barriers related to caste, religion and disability can be highly impeding factors which need to be addressed explicitly when designing policies in Nepal. More generally, policies can be tailored more effectively by identifying the most marginalized population groups in order to improve their educational opportunities and achieve universal political commitments and true equity in education.
With the establishment of the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) in 1999, the EU aimed to tackle challenges in the field of security by deploying various military, police, justice and rule of law missions in troubled crisis areas. The Lisbon Treaty put the instrument of CSDP Missions on a new height, putting it under the umbrella of the European External Action Service with the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs & Security Policy / Vice -President of the European Commission as their highest representative. CSDP Missions - while dealing with civilian crisis management in conflict and post- conflict countries - are operating in a highly political environment with demands and direction coming from the EU Member States, the EU institution s, the Host Nations and other international actors. Common values and norms applying to CSDP Missions are underdeveloped and not well communicated. Mandates are often not clearly defined. The work force is mainly seconded by the Member States and highly di verse in respect to culture, professional background and experience and language. Women are strongly underrepresented. Even though leadership is crucial in such a challenging environment, it has never been addressed within the CSDP structures until very recently. This thesis analysis the complexities of CSDP Missions and demands put on leadership in such an environment. Furthermore, it defines best practices and closes with recommendations on how the leadership culture in CSDP Missions can be improved. Results are generated by using literature analysis, interviews with key stakeholders, online questionnaires and the authors own work experience in a CSDP Mission. For CSDP Missions to become even more successful a stronger emphasis on the development of leadership culture seems appropriate. Starting from creating a leadership development strategy, defining standard guidelines and principals for recruitment and promotion of personnel, addressing the problem of gender imbalance, importance should be also put on defining a favored leadership style and common values. Future leaders should be skilled and experienced in working in a highly politicised environment leading and empowering a multi-cultural, diverse work force. With an effective leadership culture CSDP Missions will succeed in being a strong EU actor in civilian crisis management and helping to foster security and maintain peace in the world.
Critics argue that inflation targeting (IT) has met its demise in face of the current financial crisis. As such , p rice - level targeting and nominal gross domestic product (GDP) targeting have been proposed as alternatives, but to date no country has made the switch – why is this so? Existing literature tends to treat the choice of targeting regime as a function of economic theory, empirical precedents, and policy execution constraints. I find this analytical framework insufficient; otherwise, we should observe at least some countries exiting IT regimes in light of the arguments made thus far. In order to explain why governments have yet to make the switch away from IT, I propose that a fourth determinant needs to be added to the framework – politics. Based on this framework, I conclude that IT has yet to meet its demise.
Development aid is underperforming in terms of effectiveness due to donor diversification, proliferation and fragmentation. The re quest for more harmonized and collectively effective actions formulated in the High-Leve l Fora on aid effectiveness have gained sup- port across donor and recipient countries. However, commitment has not been successfully translated into significant changes on the ground. This gap between policy and country level practices needs to be addressed to make development assistance more effective. A first formal partnership of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Agence Française de Développement (AFD) and Lux-Development (LuxDev) has been established in the sector of technical vocational education and training. To assess this partnership and to identify areas for improvement, the study addresses the following research question: Under which conditions do implementing agencies in international development cooperation enter into, develop and sustain inter-organizational collaboration? The dimensions of the collaboration process are at the center of the analysis. The study develops a theoretical framework that consists of criteria to assess collaboration efforts of the agencies in four selected countries nd identifies weaknesses in the structural, the agency, and the social capital dimension. Structural aspects include common visions, shares power arrangements and commitment of the recipient country. Shared personal opinions, alignment of procedures and information exchange helps reconciling individual and collective interests. The analysis of the social capital dimension shows that mutual interaction, reciprocity and trust-building are crucial to successfully build social relationships which form the basis of any collaboration process. A set of nine recommendations are proposed to address the shortcomings in each of the three dimensions of the collaboration process to improve the partnership of the three agencies. To address the structural blocking factors, the agencies should evaluate their collaboration efforts, create a coordinating body and speak to the recipient country’s government with one voice. To manage the tension between individual and collective interests, regular discussions with everyone involved and knowledge about the tools, procedures and implementing mechanisms of the collaboration partners are crucial. To better meet the criteria of the social capital dimension, the agencies should appoint boundary-spanners and create opportunities to learn about their collaboration partners’ culture.
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) is often portrayed as a policy that will mitigate climate change whilst fostering social and environmental improvements in the most isolated and under-developed regions of the world. Our work sets out to assess this cl aim by evaluating whether REDD is effectively designed as an instrument that is suitable for generating local development in forest regions. After revealing the underlying governance rationale through which REDD is expected to generate positive outcomes on the global and local levels, we develop a framework to assess whether the REDD strategies developed through the FCPF and the UN-REDD Readiness initiatives are putting in place the policy environment that is necessary for REDD to function as a development mechanism. Through the comparative analysis of six national Readiness strategies from the Latin American region, we reveal that policies designed under Readiness systematically pay more attention to the development of baseline emissions scenarios and MRV systems than to the establishment of the policy conditions that must be in place for REDD to generate local development. Our analysis suggests that a number of policy design elements might be resulting in the failure of national REDD strategies to address underlying governance problems. The phased approach to Readiness creates incentives for governments to rush through the institutional reform stages, and REDD’s current design only rewards quantifiable GHG emissions reductions, providing few incentives for countries to invest in social and environmental improvements. Furthermore, the reliance on carbon market finance and the operational structure of the FCPF may also result in overinvestments in MRV systems to the detriment of more complex institutional reforms. We conclude by presenting a set of recommendations for reforming the underlying governance logic of REDD in order to enhance its potential as a local development mechanism.
Corruption has an impact. It is about time that anticorruption starts having an impact, too.
This is the first annual policy report of the European Seventh Framework Research Project ANTICORRP, which has started in 2012 and will continue until 2018. Based on the work of 21 different research centers and universities gathering original data, ANTICORRP offers yearly updates on the latest from corruption research, analyzing both the consequences of corruption and the impact of policies attempting to curb it.
This first report offers a methodology to evaluate corruption risk and quality of government at country, region and sector level by means of corruption indicators that are sensitive to change and policy intervention. The aim of the project is to offer testable, easy to handle policies which reduce corruption risk.
Corruption distorts market competition, bolsters deficits on behalf of discretionary spending, hurts real investment in public health and education, reduces tax collection, detriments the absorption rate of EU funds, and generates vulnerable employment and brain drain. This study estimates that if EU member states would all manage to control corruption at the Danish level, tax collection in Europe would increase by 323 billion Euro per year – double of the EU budget for 2013.
In a comprehensive empirical investigation (N = 71,405) we analyzed the development of legal expertise in a critical 1-year period of academic legal training in which advanced law students start practicing to solve complex cases. We were particularly interested in the functional form of the learning curve and inter-individual differences in learning. Performance increases monotonically with the number of practice exams following a slightly concave learning curve without any considerable kinks. Considering the performance development over time, however, the curve is not monotonic and shows intermediate drops in performance. We provide evidence which suggests that these drops are due to cyclic drops in motivation. There are about equally sized marginal effects of practicing law exams in general and practicing exams in the specific area of law. However, students with high (vs. low) initial performance profit more from practicing exams within a specific area of law whereas students with low initial performance profit more from practicing exams in general. The concave increase in performance with the number of practicing exams is mainly driven by individuals with low initial performance. Those with high initial performance mainly display a linear learning trend. We discuss the practical implications of these findings for academic legal training.
We run a large-scale natural field experiment to evaluate alternative strategies to enforce compliance with the law. The experiment varies the text of mailings sent to potential evaders of TV license fees. We find a strong effect of mailings, leading to a substantial increase in compliance. Among different mailings, a threat treatment which makes a high detection risk salient has a significant deterrent effect. Neither appealing to morals nor imparting information about others’ behavior enhances compliance on aggregate. However, the information condition has a weak positive effect in municipalities where evasion is believed to be common.
This study illustrates how entrepreneurship may catalyze prosperity as well as peace in entrenched poverty–conflict zones. We bring to life a conceptualization of transformative entrepreneuring by assessing interrelationships between poverty and conflict indicators from the perspective of rural dwellers in Rwanda's entrepreneurial coffee sector. Our findings suggest that individuals' perceptions of poverty alleviation and conflict reduction are sequentially linked, notably via increased quality of life. This enables us to advance theory on entrepreneuring by unpacking the mechanisms through which entrepreneurial processes may transform the lives of such ‘ordinary’ entrepreneurs in settings where economic and social value creation are desperately needed.
Auf mehreren Ebenen Agieren
(2013)
Global Public Goods. A concept for framing the Post - 2015 Agenda? DIE Discussion Paper 2/2013
(2013)
Control of corruption in a society is an equilibrium between resources and costs which either empowers or constraints elites predatory behavior. While most research and practice focuses on legal constraints, this paper investigates normative constraints, deemed to be more important, especially civil society and the press. Fresh evidence—both historical and statistical—is found to support Tocqueville’s assertions regarding the importance of collective action and the joint action of media and associations in not only creating a democratic society, but controlling corruption as well. However, little is known on how to build normative constraints.
This paper conceptualizes public corruption as part of a broader social order context. It argues that corruption should not be conceived of as a social ‘malady’ to be eradicated, but rather as a default governance regime. People naturally favor their own, be it family, clan, race or ethnic group: treating the rest of the world fairly seems to be a matter of extensive social evolution and sufficient resources. Very few societies have evolved from this natural state of affairs to produce a state which can be expected to treat everyone equally and fairly, and to put public above private interest, when entrusted with the management of common affairs and resources. The paper surveys the approaches to anticorruption of three distinct political regimes, monarchy, medieval republic and modern democracy to conclude that current anticorruption should be conceptualized as solving collective action problems rather than as repression of deviance.
The report, drafted for the European Network of Legal Experts in the non-discrimination field (on the grounds of race or ethnic origin, age, disability, religion or belief and sexual orientation), is part of a study into measures to combat discrimination in the EU Member States and candidate countries, funded by the European Community Programme for Employment and Social Solidarity – PROGRESS. The report provides an overview of Turkey's implementation of the EU anti-discrimination Directives up to 1 January 2013 and precedes and follows earlier reports drafted by the author for the same project.
The cutaneous carotenoid concentration correlates with the overall antioxidant status of a person and can be seen as biomarker for nutrition and lifestyle. 50 high school students were spectroscopically measured for their cutaneous carotenoid concentrations initially in a static phase, followed by an intervention phase with biofeedback of their measured values, living a healthy lifestyle and on healthy food this time. The volunteers showed higher carotenoid concentrations than found in previous studies. A significant correlation of healthy lifestyle habits and a high antioxidant status could be determined. Subjects improved their nutritional habits and significantly increased their carotenoid concentration during intervention. Follow-up five months later showed a consolidation of the increase. The investigations show that a healthy diet and a well-balanced lifestyle correlate with a high cutaneous antioxidant concentration and that spectroscopic biofeedback measurement of cutaneous carotenoids as part of an integrated prevention program is a feasible and effective means to raise the health awareness in adolescents.
This paper examines the reliability of biographical information gathered retrospectively. It draws on data from the German Family Panel (pairfam), which collected information on the partnership status at first birth using two different methods. The first method is based on data on partnership and fertility histories collected retrospectively. The second method uses data gathered through the use of a “landmark question” on the respondents’ partnership status when their first children were born. We find that in almost 20 percent of the cases, the information collected using the first method did not correspond with the information collected using the second method. Partnership dissolution and “turbulence” in the partnership biography are strong predictors for discrepancies in the information gathered through the two different survey methods. We conclude by drawing attention to the limitations of the retrospective collection of partnership histories at a time when divorce and separation rates are increasing.
Political Expertise in Poland in the Field of Foreign Policy and the Emergence of Think Tanks
(2013)
Wunsch und Wirklichkeit
(2013)
Von Wachstum und Wohlstand
(2013)
Experiences from all around the world show that citizens increasingly articulate their discontent with large-scale projects. Still, public debates often leave politics, administrations, corporations and citizens unsatisfied. How can we improve mutual understanding, provide political legitimacy and facilitate economic efficiency? This book pinpoints the opportunities and challenges of participatory modes of governance by offering theoretical accounts and analyses of large-scale projects focusing on infrastructure, communication and public administration.
With contributions by:
Marko Bachl, Henning Banthien, Sarah Bastgen, Daniela Ciaffi, Christopher Gohl, Andreas Hoffelder, Kjetil Holgeid, Mathias König, Wolfgang König, Thamy Pogrebinschi, Martina Richwien, Claudia Ritzi, Andrea Römmele, Fabiano Santos, Emanuela Saporito, Stefan Schaible, Henrik Schober, Gunnar Folke Schuppert, Carmen Sirianni, Arne Spieker, Johannes Staemmler, Mark Thompson, Andrea Versteyl, Paul Webb, Katrin Winkler
Governments are increasingly challenged by citizens who demand for more than just classical representation through elections. Citizen movements call for modes of continuous and issue-oriented participation. This volume addresses the question to what extent new forms of citizen participation enhance democratic legitimacy and where the limits are.
Politische Botschaften werden seit jeher mit einem "Gesicht" verknüpft. Bei anstehenden Wahlen rücken die Kandidaten deshalb vermehrt ins Rampenlicht. [Die Autorin] erörtert am aktuellen Beispiel des Bundestagswahlkampfes mit Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel und dem Spitzenkandidaten der SPD, Peer Steinbrück, das Phänomen der Personalisierung von Wahlkämpfen. In einem ersten Schritt wird der Begriff der Personalisierung mittels dreier Dimensionen definiert. Daran anschließend werden die beiden Spitzenkandidaten der Bundestagswahl 2013 analysiert: Wo liegen ihre Stärken und Schwächen? Welche Themen favorisieren und präsentieren sie? In einem weiteren Schritt werden Angela Merkel und Peer Steinbrück aus der Sicht der Wählerschaft diskutiert. Und schließlich geht es um die Fragen, welche Rolle Kandidaten in den unterschiedlichen Modellen der Wahlentscheidung spielen und wie es um die Gewichtung von Parteiidentifikation, Themen und Personen beim Wahlentscheid bestellt ist.
Europe has been a primary actor in Turkey’s democratization process and for the Kurdish political struggle carried out simultaneously by the PKK and civilian actors since the late 1980s. The European Union and the European Court of Human Rights have had an indispensable role in raising awareness and documenting the plight of the Kurds on the one hand and inducing Turkey to embark on political reform on the other. Since the mid-2000s, however, the dynamics between Europe, the Turkish government and the Kurdish political movement have
drastically changed, diminishing the role, legitimacy and significance of European institutions in Turkey and forcing the Turkish state and the Kurds to develop a “home grown” solution to the conflict. While the “peace process” launched by the government in late 2012 raises
hopes for a peaceful settlement, the mismatch between the parties’
expectations render it extremely fragile.
Despite Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s emphasis to the contrary, the “democratisation package” announced on September 30 was expected to be more than just another bundle of EU-induced reforms. The much-awaited package came nearly a year after the initiation of informal peace talks between the government and Abdullah Öcalan – the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), listed as a terrorist organisation by the EU and the US – and six months after Öcalan made a historic call to his fighters to end the armed struggle. The package was anticipated as the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government’s response to Öcalan’s three-stage road map for peace. Yet, rather than legislative changes for a political settlement on the Kurdish question, Erdoğan announced a generic harmonisation package, a move which has put into question his government’s commitment to the peace process. The fragility of the cease fire between the PKK and the Turkish military and the urgency of radical reforms to prevent a deadlock in the peace process render the AKP’s piecemeal approach to democratisation too costly at this point in time. With the EU’s opening of negotiations on Chapter 22 on regional policy, which pertains to decentralisation in governance and is thus relevant for a political solution to the Kurdish question, there is a real and urgent need for European policy makers to be involved in the peace process in Turkey.