Refine
Document Type
- Article (14)
- Doctoral Thesis (7)
- Book (1)
- Part of a Book (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (23)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (23)
Keywords
- - (6)
- Parties (3)
- Bürgerkrieg (2)
- Ideologie (2)
- Partei (2)
- partisan theory (2)
- populism (2)
- women (2)
- ASEAN (1)
- Alliances (1)
- BAYES (1)
- Baltic (1)
- Baltic Sea (1)
- Bayes (1)
- Bordering (1)
- Borders (1)
- COVID-19 pandemic (1)
- Ceremony (1)
- Civil conflicts (1)
- Communications (1)
- Corporate Communications (1)
- Corporate Protocol (1)
- Cristina Lafont (1)
- Democracy (1)
- Demokratie (1)
- Diffusion (1)
- Diplomacy (1)
- Diplomatic Protocol (1)
- Diplomatie (1)
- Diplomatisches Protokoll (1)
- Diskurs (1)
- District magnitude (1)
- EU (1)
- Electoral systems (1)
- Entwicklungszusammenarbeit (1)
- Established Parties (1)
- Foreign aid (1)
- Friedensvertrag (1)
- Global Governance (1)
- Gravity (1)
- Ideologische Veränderung (1)
- Ideology (1)
- Institution (1)
- Institutionen (1)
- Institutionentheorie (1)
- Interaktion (1)
- Interdisziplinarität (1)
- Interviews (1)
- Intrastate conflicts (1)
- Kommunikation (1)
- Konfliktregelung (1)
- Kontextfaktoren (1)
- Kontextlinguistik (1)
- Kontextualisierung (1)
- Latin America (1)
- Latvia (1)
- Learning (1)
- Left–right dimension (1)
- Lernen (1)
- Linguistik (1)
- Lord's Resistance Army (1)
- Machtteilungsregierungen (1)
- Machtverhältnisse (1)
- Majoritarian electoral systems (1)
- Manifestos (1)
- Mediation (1)
- Mehrheitswahl (1)
- Mikro-, Meso-, Makroebene (1)
- Mixed electoral systems (1)
- Mixed methods (1)
- Money laundering (1)
- New Parties (1)
- Norms (1)
- Offizielle Repräsentation (1)
- Parteien (1)
- Party Competition (1)
- Party systems (1)
- Policy Moves (1)
- Political Economy (1)
- Political ideology (1)
- Politische Ökonomie (1)
- Position (1)
- Power-Sharing (1)
- Proportional representation (1)
- Protokoll (1)
- Rezeption (1)
- Salience (1)
- South China Sea (1)
- Staatsprotokoll (1)
- Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) (1)
- Text Analysis (1)
- Textsorte (1)
- Textsorten (1)
- Third-party intervention (1)
- US security guarantees (1)
- Uganda (1)
- Unternehmenskommunikation (1)
- Unternehmensprotokoll (1)
- Unternehmensrepräsentation (1)
- Verbreitung (1)
- Verhältniswahl (1)
- Voter turnout (1)
- Wahlbeteiligung (1)
- Wahlsystem (1)
- Zeremonie (1)
- Zeremoniell (1)
- authoritarianism (1)
- career trajectories (1)
- consensus and efficiency (1)
- decision making of governments (1)
- deep pluralism (1)
- deliberative accountability (1)
- democratic backsliding (1)
- democratic decision making (1)
- democratic theory (1)
- disagreement (1)
- electoral law reform (1)
- gender (1)
- gender inequality (1)
- illiberalism (1)
- labour market attachment (1)
- leadership (1)
- liberal democracy (1)
- lockdowns (1)
- lottocracy (1)
- minipublics (1)
- natural resources (1)
- new politics (1)
- parental leave (1)
- parliaments (1)
- parties (1)
- political parties (1)
- proceduralism (1)
- remittances (1)
- substantive representation (1)
- survey experiment (1)
- sustainable policy performance (1)
- text as data (1)
- trajectory analysis (1)
- veto player theory (1)
Institute
- Institut für Politik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (23) (remove)
Publisher
- Sage (3)
- SAGE Publications (2)
- Springer Nature (2)
- Wiley (2)
- Cambridge University Press (1)
- De Gruyter Mouton (1)
- MDPI (1)
- Nomos (1)
- Peter Lang (1)
- Routledge (1)
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.
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.
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.
Abstract
This article investigates how the sex of party heads impacts party positions and uncovers that parties led by a woman modify their stances on sociocultural but not economic debates. I argue that this pattern is a consequence of dissimilar gender gaps in policy preferences across the two ideological dimensions at the elite level. The empirical evidence, based on data for 19 developed democracies around the world between 1995 and 2018, reveals that parties led by a woman tend to emphasise green, alternative and libertarian issues. In particular, anti‐growth, environmental protection and freedom and human rights become more prominent elements of party manifestos under women's leadership. Overall, these findings stress the importance of critical actors and the conditions under which the presence of women in political offices translates into responsiveness towards female citizens.
Extensive scholarly work engages with the growing number of women in legislatures around the world and highlights their role as advocates of women’s interests during parliamentary decision-making processes. This article sheds light on the reactions of men MPs (members of parliament) to this trend by uncovering how women's numerical strength in party parliamentary groups shapes the issues that their men colleagues emphasize when speaking about women during plenary debates. I argue that, the higher the share of women in a party parliamentary group, the more will men representatives emphasize women’s interests in the context of issues they can easily relate to—either because the issues lie in men’s area of responsibility according to ideas about traditional role distributions in the society, for example, the financing of gender equality projects, or because they are part of broader patterns of societal inequality, such as poverty or health. I provide empirical evidence for this argument based on original time-series cross-sectional data from plenary debates in six German states between 2005 and 2021 using a structural topic model. These findings shed light on men’s role as critical actors and have implications for gender equality and the functioning of representative democracy more broadly.
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.
A Brief History of APIs
(2021)
Online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter offer a wide range of data for scientific research. Since many of the social media providers have set up application programming interfaces (APIs), extensive volumes of data can be collected automatically (Jünger, 2018; Keyling & Jünger, 2016). Social media data are attractive, inter alia, because they not only include already available communication, such as that from public media, but they also make organisational and interpersonal communication visible (Ledford, 2020). In addition, these data are process-generated (Baur, 2011, p. 1234), meaning that they are generated independently of scientific research and thus promise an authentic insight into human behaviour. 1 A wide range of studies in the social sciences exploit APIs for data collection and analysis. Thus, the establishment and development of APIs has significant implications for science.
Das diplomatische Protokoll ist ein integraler Bestandteil der zwischenstaatlichen Beziehungen. Darüber hinaus regelt das Protokoll innerstaatliche zeremonielle Strukturen bzw. die offiziellen Formen der staatlichen Repräsentation. Neben der Pflege der internationalen Beziehungen zwischen Staaten gibt es eine Vielzahl von Bereichen, in denen offizielle Beziehungen zwischen staatlichen und nicht-staatlichen Akteuren bestehen. Beispielsweise nehmen internationale Unternehmen im Rahmen von Global Governance eine zunehmend bedeutende Rolle ein. Hierbei stellt sich die Frage, ob bzw. inwieweit sich Wirtschaftsunternehmen an die Einhaltung protokollarischer Gepflogenheiten gebunden fühlen. Die vorliegende Dissertation widmet sich der institutionellen Komposition von Ordnungen, die sich in der Politik sowie darüber hinaus in anderen Bereichen der Gesellschaft widerspiegeln. Sie untersucht die Anwendung von protokollarischen Gepflogenheiten in Unternehmen. Thematisch bewegt sich die Forschungsarbeit im disziplinenübergreifenden Dreieck aus internationaler Diplomatie, politischer Theorie und Unternehmenskommunikation bzw. -repräsentation. Die zentrale Frage lautet: Gibt es ein mit dem Staatsprotokoll vergleichbares Unternehmensprotokoll, welches entsprechend dem Staatsprotokoll funktioniert? Im Kern der empirischen Studie geht es darum aufzuzeigen, inwieweit das Protokoll in global agierenden Wirtschaftsunternehmen mit dem internationalen diplomatischen Protokoll vergleichbar ist. Die empirische Grundlage bilden zu Teilen Organisations- und Geschäftsverteilungspläne sowie 72 leitfadengestützte Experteninterviews, geführt im Zeitraum von 2008 bis 2012. Das Ergebnis belegt empirisch, dass es sich beim Protokoll um eine politische Institution handelt. Des Weiteren wird eruiert, wie sich das Protokoll aus der Sicht der interviewten Protokollexperten im staatlichen und öffentlichen Bereich darstellt. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden die hierbei gewonnenen Befunde mit denen aus den Interviews mit den Protokollexperten aus der Industrie abgeglichen. Abschließend kommt diese Forschungsarbeit zu dem Fazit, dass das Unternehmensprotokoll in großen Teilen mit dem diplomatischen Protokoll vergleichbar ist.
We use the Bertelsmann Foundation's Sustainable Government Indicators (SGI) to find out how executive efficiency and consensus capacity influence sustainable policy performance. Although those two concepts are often seen as opposites, we show that this is not the case and that they can actually complement each other: separately as well as together, an efficient executive and consensus capacity support more sustainable policy performance. However, government efficiency is a double-edged sword. Depending on the policy positions governments take, outcomes vary. In this respect, efficient government structures are an amplifier of policy outcomes. In the case of sustainable policy performance, left-leaning governments increase sustainable policy performance, while right-leaning governments do not.
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.
This article gives an initial overview of the explanatory power of established approaches in comparative political science of various lockdown strategies in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic in 35 democracies. In a macro-comparative statistical analysis of the first wave of the pandemic, I test partisan and veto player theories. I distinguish two phases of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, which show distinct patterns of political impacts. In the first phase of implementing lockdown strategies, central governments were relatively uncontested and partisan theory has strong explanatory power. In the second phase of lifting lockdowns, party differences lose relevance, but veto players have a strong influence during this time. The analysis shows that political science theories are useful for analysing political processes not only under normal conditions but also in extreme social crises. Moreover, it provides deeper insights into the democratic decision-making process of advanced democracies in exceptional situations.
What shapes the prospect for democracy in the aftermath of civil conflicts? Some authors claim a successful transition from violence to elections mainly depends on the ability of political institutions, such as power-sharing arrangements, to mitigate the security dilemma among former battlefield adversaries. Drawing on a broader literature, others point to potential effects of foreign aid on democratic development.
This predominant focus on elections and the security dilemma, however, limits our understanding in a number of ways. We do not know how the choice of post-conflict elites to hold elections is strategically intertwined with their willingness to reform other state institutions. We also have only begun to understand how post-conflict power-sharing governments function as revenue source for elites. Knowing how this economic function drives or obstructs post-conflict democratic development is particularly helpful if we shift our attention to a major source of income for post-conflict elites: foreign aid, and the democratic conditions donors attach to it.
Addressing these gaps, I argue that both the economic utility from office as well as political conditionalities give rise to a rent-seeking/democracy dilemma for post-conflict elites: they can either hold elections and face uncertainty over their access to power, but secure economic rents from aid. Or they refuse to democratize, secure their hold on power, but risk losing revenues when donors withdraw aid. In this situation, their optimal strategy is to agree to democratic reforms in the area on which donors place most value, elections. But to maximize their chances of electoral victory and continued access to rents from office, elites simultaneously restrain an independent rule of law and narrowly distribute private goods to their supporters.
This rent-seeking/democracy dilemma is particularly prevalent in one of the most popular forms of post-conflict institutions: power-sharing governments. Including rebel groups in post-conflict cabinets increases the number of constituencies that need to be sustained from the government budget. In addition, the interim nature of transitional power-sharing cabinets leads elites to steeply discount the future and increase rent-seeking in the short term. My main hypothesis is therefore that large aid flows to extensive power-sharing governments should be associated with improved elections, but limits in the rule of law and more provision of private instead of public goods.
To test this prediction quantitatively, I combine data on aid flows and rebel participation in post-conflict cabinets between 1990 and 2010 with indicators for democratic development, election quality, rule of law, and public goods provision. Results from a wide range of regression models provide empirical support for my argument. Individually, extensive power-sharing governments and large aid flows do not seem to have strong effects. Models that introduce an interaction term between aid and power-sharing, however, yield strong evidence of a rent-seeking/democracy dilemma: Power-sharing and foreign aid jointly predict a positive, but small change in democracy scores as well as cleaner elections. At the same time, they are jointly associated with a limited rule of law and stronger distribution of private goods. For each indicator, I document evidence for mechanisms and changes in the effect over time.
The theory and empirical results presented in this dissertation have a number of implications for future research. They highlight the importance of moving away from a singular focus on post-conflict elections and looking also at other institutional dimensions of post-conflict politics. My political economy model of power-sharing also demonstrates the utility of explicitly including economic functions of post-conflict institutions into power-sharing and broader peacebuilding research. And I introduce novel evidence into research and practice of aid delivery; this helps not only to clarify academic debates under which conditions aid can be effective, but also informs practitioners who help conflict-affected countries in their transition from war to democracy.
The substance of procedures
(2021)
In Democracy without Shortcuts, Cristina Lafont identifies proceduralist or ‘deep pluralist’ conceptions of democracy alongside epistemic and lottocratic approaches as shortcuts that avoid the more challenging but, in her view, preferable path of engaging with and attempting to sway competing views, values and beliefs of fellow citizens. I argue that with the wholesale dismissal of proceduralist accounts of democracy Lafont herself takes two shortcuts: The first concerns the characterization of deep pluralism as unable to explain substantive disagreement after a decision is settled, and the second undervalues proceduralism’s ability to evaluate and criticize the substance of the political decision-making process. While her critique is fitting for minimalist conceptions of proceduralism, a theory of normative proceduralism shares many objectives with Lafont’s vision of a participatory deliberative democracy. Integrating those approaches instead of dismissing proceduralism outright would render her project appealing to theorists who would not otherwise consider themselves deliberative democrats.
The thesis is about ideological change of political parties and the way parties gather information, learn by updating their beliefs and ultimately make "rational choices". Analyzing 1451 policy moves of 137 parties in 22 OECD-countries from 1950 to 2013 it is a story about rational learning, about emulating other parties abroad and chasing public opinion. Yet, the "internal life" of a party conditions the effects when activists have some influence over the formation of party policy. As volunteers facing a scarcity of time and resources, members of the party on the ground have a different information horizon, and may arrive at the opposite decision where to move than party elites which (can) rest their decision on a broader set of information resources. In some parties the party on the ground thus constitutes an "internal wall of resistance" to the strategy party elites would choose, if they were free from constraints.
The comment on Cristina Lafont’s book includes two main points. (1) Minipublics do not necessarily stand in opposition to political theories that justify electoral democracy and participatory conceptions of deliberative democracy. In contrast to such a view, I argue that minipublics should be combined with electoral and participatory forms of democracy. (2) A deliberative concept of accountability may overcome some of the shortcomings of the traditional, voluntaristic concepts of democratic accountability.
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.
Many intrastate conflicts see more than one mediation effort. As the sequencing of mediation efforts in intrastate conflicts is neglected in existing research, this project addresses the question how and why previous mediation outcomes have an impact on subsequent mediation onset and subsequent mediation success. Drawing on bargaining theory, it is argued that governments and rebel groups engaged in intrastate conflicts account for previous mediation outcomes in their cost-benefit calculations on subsequent mediation onset, and, should subsequent talks set on, their behaviour during subsequent mediation efforts, which influences subsequent mediation success.
If mediation did not produce an agreement, the persistence of the private information problem is noted by the conflict parties. Yet, no new costs of mediation are uncovered, and hence the conflict parties will agree to subsequent mediation onset. Being aware of the necessity to overcome the private information and the commitment problem, the mediator will seek to account for the concerns of the conflict parties, and thereby work towards subsequent mediation success. If mediation produced a partial agreement, the benefits of mediation are underlined. The private information and the commitment problem seem solved with the assistance of the mediator. Subsequent mediation onset and eventually subsequent mediation success are observed. If a mediated agreement was reneged on by the rebel group, the government will refrain from further talks, pointing out the rebel group’s illegitimacy. If the government reneged on the agreement itself, it will also decide against subsequent mediation, as the previous mediation effort produced an agreement which did not mirror the power distribution in the dyad. Costs of mediation, which outweigh the benefits of it, were highlighted. Rebel groups will opt for mediation regardless which side reneged on an agreement. As both governments and rebel groups have to agree to subsequent mediation for talks to set on, subsequent mediation onset is unlikely if a mediated agreement was reneged on. Given the onset of subsequent mediation after a mediated agreement was reneged on, subsequent mediation success is unlikely to be observed, due to the previously underlined hazards of sharing private information and the persistence of the commitment problem.
The theoretical argument is tested with a mixed-methods approach. The quantitative analysis accounts for mediation efforts in African intrastate conflicts between 1993 and 2007. The qualitative analysis scrutinises the mediation efforts between the Government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army. The results of both parts of analysis largely go hand-in-hand, and show that partial mediation success and mediation which did not produce an agreement have a positive impact on subsequent mediation onset in particular, but also on subsequent mediation success. Reneged on mediated agreements have a severe negative impact on subsequent mediation onset and subsequent mediation success though.
By addressing the question which impact previous mediation outcomes have on subsequent mediation efforts, this research shows that mediation which does not produce an agreement is not the mediation outcome which needs to be feared by the international community. Instead, the deteriorating impact of short-lived agreements, a mediation outcome which is unaccounted for in existing research as an explanatory variable, becomes apparent. This research has important policy implications, especially for mediators, as it suggests that accepting mediation efforts to end without an agreement is more conducive for subsequent mediation efforts. Moreover, this research points towards the necessity of including reneged on agreements in mediation research as an explanatory variable more extensively, thereby shedding more light onto the dynamics at play in consecutive mediation efforts.
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.