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To what extent do norms of regional Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs) have an impact on member states’ borders and their permeability? International agreements and regional integration measures quite often highlight how harmonization of mechanisms and procedures related to cross-border interaction within specific communities takes place. As these agreements and measures contain mutual expectations about appropriate behavior, a form of convergence in bordering practices – and therefore effects – is implied. This leads to the assumption that cross-border interaction is gradually increasing and eventually leading to a ‘borderless’ realm that allows for the free movement of goods, services, persons, and capital. However, the nature of borders or a deeper understanding of the bordering process itself is often not central to the studies of international relations. They represent mere fixtures of international interaction and appear in the public discussion only if sudden restrictions are implemented or if large-scale changes in the international environment affect their functioning.
Specific literature on borders is relatively new and located mainly within an interdisciplinary setting that largely lacks coherency in its ontological concepts or deals exclusively with individual cases. The literature on the normative capacity of (regional) IGOs on the other hand is well matured and one of the cornerstones of international studies. However, here a blatant neglect of borders and bordering is apparent. This situation is aggravated by the circumstance that the field of International Relations by definition is dealing with cross-border interaction.
Apart from the general ontological issue of what borders and bordering processes are from a political science perspective, three main gaps in conjunction with the above question could be identified within the literature. The first relates to the general efficacy of the normative influence of regional IGOs on enhancing cross-border interaction through the issuing of specific normative provisions. On this, the relevant literature is divided. Arguments range from an all-permeating relevance of norms as intersubjective understandings that create specific expectations of appropriate behavior to the primacy of rational choices that are targeted to create benefits in most economic and security- related matters. The second gap relates to the relevance of domestic precognition in cross-border interaction. It is not clear to what extent dominant normative conceptions at the national level create obstacles to the efficacy of IGO provisions in shaping cross- border interaction. Finally, the impact of critical junctures – as kind of catalysts – that shift member state preferences in following communal obligations are being analyzed. Here, the assumption is that these junctures may either enhance or negate IGO provisions dependent on the dominant domestic preferences. Essentially, the approach taken here is a layered one, where each identified gap provides the basis for the following ones. The analysis itself is divided into a quantitative and a qualitative part. For the former, a new dataset has been created that specifically lists all normative provisions targeting the free movement of goods, services, persons, and capital of the two IGOs selected for this research project. This is an important departure from the usual dichotomous perception of IGO influence used throughout the literature. In conjunction with specific data related to each of the four freedoms, multiple variations of a gravimetric Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood model are specified. The qualitative approach draws upon descriptive and matching approaches to analyze the impact of dominant domestic norms and critical junctures on the bordering process. For this purpose, a corpus of source material is created that includes government declarations and media articles, as well as the specific IGO provisions on bordering to each of the four freedoms that are central to this research.
The quantitative findings indicate a strong and consistently positive impact of regulative IGO norms while evaluative IGO norms do not provide similar results. The qualitative findings point in a similar direction. As long as IGO norms have a more regulative direction and are obligatory, the effect is less likely to be diminished by contesting dominant domestic norms or critical junctures vis-`a-vis more evaluative IGO norms.
The results and additional findings of this research have implications for further research. Central to this is the capacity of regional IGOs to exert normative influence on the bordering practices of their member states. An additional finding relates to the interrelatedness of normative provisions. The more these provisions are cross-referencing each other – or are interlocked – the more robust they seem to get. This is a trait that is relevant for policy-makers and IGO bureaucracies if they want to enhance the compliance of their agents. On a methodological level, the here introduced data set on normative IGO provisions provides other researchers with a substantially more fine- grained approach to investigating the impact of specific IGO measures on a particular dimension of cross-border interaction.
This article is the first to show that gender shapes the degree to which legislators use formal mechanisms to oversee government activities. Extensive scholarly work has analysed the use of oversight instruments, especially regarding who monitors whom. Whether, how, and why the conformity of men and women with institutional roles differs, has not yet received scholarly attention. We hypothesise that women become more active than men in overseeing the executive when in opposition while reducing their monitoring activities even more strongly than men when in government because of different social roles ascribed to men and women as well as differences in risk aversity between sexes. We analyse panel data for three oversight tools from the German Bundestag between 1949 and 2013 to test this proposition. Our findings imply that characteristics of political actors influence even a strongly institutionalised process as oversight and further clarify the gender bias in political representation.
Can established parties influence the electoral success of new parties? To answer this research question, the author examined the relationships of 168 new parties in 18 highly developed democracies with their established competitors based on their respective election programmes and election results. His analysis of the textual similarity of these election manifestos shows that established parties can influence their competitors' election results by selectively changing the emphasis of their policies. However, competition among the parties must also be taken into account. This study thus contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of party competition and the opportunities offered by computer-assisted textual analysis in the social sciences.
Being a master of metaphors
(2023)
How can powerful states best extract domestic concessions from their junior allies? What are the conditions under which the powerful state is more likely to succeed in inducing such domestic policy change? This article explores the link between US security commitments and Washington’s ability to attain favourable policy outcomes within the allied domestic arena. It provides an illustrative case of how the USA, using security guarantees as leverage, can enter allied domestic space and shape its decision-making process. After it was revealed that Latvia had served as a key node through which North Korea attempted to evade the sanctions regime, the USA, by playing its security guarantor card, pressured Riga to carry out substantial policy reforms in relation to its financial system. This approach yielded considerable results. In order to preserve the existing security arrangements with the dominant alliance member, Latvia offered significant policy concessions. This finding demonstrates that US security alliances come with side benefits that are often underrated or neglected in the scholarly literature.
Participating in an election is by far the most prevalent form of political participation in modern democracies. Turnout rates, however, not only vary considerably between countries but also over time: By trend, in many Western democracies turnout levels have declined over the last decades. Electoral systems depict a prominent factor that has always been discussed with respect to its impact on turnout. In this respect, a high number of empirical studies found aggregate turnout predominantly to be higher in countries using proportional representation compared to countries using a less proportional electoral system. Based on these findings, one should expect turnout to increase when the electoral system changes towards higher proportionality. However, empirical evidence of the actual lasting impact of changes in electoral institutions on voter turnout is all but conclusive. In this dissertation, I aim at answering the following question: What are the consequences of electoral system change for voter turnout? I argue that it is necessary to examine the relationship between electoral systems and turnout more detailed as most studies did to date by taking the level of electoral constituencies and the temporal dimension of electoral system change into account.
To assess the impact of electoral systems and further proposed causal factors associated with electoral systems, party system size for instance, on turnout empirically, I make use of a comparative research design, analyzing longitudinal data with time-series cross-sectional regression models. These data, being the basis for my empirical analyses, represent a unique data set covering 9.639 electoral districts from 146 national legislative elections in eleven European countries. The dissertation generally finds an increasing district magnitude to boost turnout, while a decreasing magnitude has negative consequences for electoral participation. The positive effect of district magnitude on turnout seems to depend on the size of the population in the respective district, however. In addition, the analyses show that a higher number of parties in a district, respectively an increase in the number of parties in a district, has a negative impact on turnout.
Der interdisziplinäre Band postuliert eine Macht des Kontextes und erklärt, was darunter verstanden wird. Die Beiträge beleuchten und hinterfragen die Macht des Kontextes in dessen Relationen zu Sprache(n), Gesellschaft(en) und Medien. Dies geschieht teils aus philologischem, teils aus sozialwissenschaftlich-kommunikationswissenschaftlichem Blickwinkel und schließt jeweils mit Thesen zur Macht des Kontextes. Der Fokus in den Beiträgen lässt sich entlang der sozialwissenschaftlichen Ebenen (Mikroebene, Mesoebene, Makroebene) differenzieren. Mit Blick auf die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse eröffnet sich die Perspektive einer breit verstandenen Kontextlinguistik, und es werden Impulse und Anknüpfungspunkte für weitere Forschung in den Einzeldisziplinen sowie für disziplinenverbindende Forschung geboten.
The extent to which the left–right dimension still structures party systems in highly developed, industrialized democracies is a contested field in comparative politics. Most studies in this area take the position that a stable and universal left–right dimension is either still the most important game in town or has become obsolete and replaced by other policy dimensions. Although country-specific studies focusing on voters’ left–right self-placement discover different meanings of left and right that vary between countries and change over time, few macro-comparative studies focusing on parties or governments take this aspect into account. Using a left–right concept for party politics from the PIP project on Parties, Institutions and Preferences that distinguishes an ideological core derived from political theory, as well as country- and time-specific issues uncovered through empirical analysis, the article demonstrates fundamental differences in the relevance and meaning of left and right by analyzing 34 party systems from 1945 to 2020. The article shows that the thesis of the decline of the left and right is premature. An important aspect for the continued high relevance of the left–right dimension is the fact that left and right changes their meaning by including controversial issues such as European integration, migration and environmental degradation.
Many democracies are witnessing the rise and continuing success of parties and politicians who oppose fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Recent research finds that voters support illiberal politicians, because they trade off policy congruence against attitudes toward liberal democracy. Other studies, however, suggest that authoritarian and populist voters might actually have a preference to vote for illiberal candidates. We argue that both factors interact: Authoritarian and populist voters are more willing to trade off policy representation against support for liberal democracy. To test this mechanism, we rely on a survey experiment conducted in Germany. The results clearly demonstrate that voters indeed trade off policy congruence against liberal democracy. Moreover, this effect is particularly strong for populist and authoritarian voters. Overall, the results have important implications for understanding when and which voters support or oppose liberal democracy.
The political science literature often points to populism as the cause of democratic backsliding. The literature purports that populism undermines democracy's liberal component, meaning the horizontal checks and balances on executive power by legislatures and courts and the vertical checks and balances by civil society, such as a free press and social movements. Populists promote political polarization to build sustainable ruling coalitions during and between elections that legitimize and support the illiberal policies above. However, this debate often ignores the economic tools that populists in power possess, such as capturing direct and indirect international rents to finance clientelist mechanisms to co-opt political support. This paper contributes to the rich literature on how economic rent conditions the negative relationship between populism and liberalism by disaggregating the moderating effects of direct and indirect international rents through panel regression models in 18 Latin American countries from 1991 to 2019. I find that direct international rents, such as natural resource rents, moderated a deepening in processes of democratic backsliding. Contrastingly, indirect international rents, such as remittances, moderately mitigated democratic backsliding.