TY - JOUR A1 - Borgnäs, Kajsa T1 - The Policy Influence of Sustainability Indicators: Examining Use and Influence of Indicators in German Sustainability Policy Making JF - German politics N2 - In 2002 Germany adopted an ambitious national sustainability strategy, covering all three sustainability spheres and circling around 21 key indicators. The strategy stands out because of its relative stability over five consecutive government constellations, its high status and increasingly coercive nature. This article analyses the strategy's role in the policy process, focusing on the use and influence of indicators as a central steering tool. Contrasting rationalist and constructivist perspectives on the role of knowledge in policy, two factors, namely the level of consensus about policy goals and the institutional setting of the indicators, are found to explain differences in use and influence both across indicators and over time. Moreover, the study argues that the indicators have been part of a continuous process of ‘structuring’ in which conceptual and instrumental use together help structure the sustainability challenge in such a way that it becomes more manageable for government policy. Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2016.1193160 SN - 0964-4008 SN - 1743-8993 VL - 25 SP - 480 EP - 499 PB - Elsevier CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - de Guevara, Berit Bliesemann T1 - visits in zones of conflict and intervention JF - Journal of intervention and statebuilding N2 - This article explores the practice and political significance of politicians’ journeys to conflict zones. It focuses on the German example, looking at field trips to theatres of international intervention as a way of first-hand knowledge in policymaking. Paying tribute to Lisa Smirl and her work on humanitarian spaces, objects and imaginaries and on liminality in aid worker biographies, two connected arguments are developed. First, through the exploration of the routinized practices of politicians’ field trips the article shows how these journeys not only remain confined to the ‘auxiliary space’ of aid/intervention, but that it is furthermore a staged reality of this auxiliary space that most politicians experience on their journeys. The question is then asked, second, what politicians actually experience on their journeys and how their experiences relate to their policy knowledge about conflict and intervention. It is shown that political field trips enable sensory/affectual, liminoid and liminal experiences, which have functions such as authority accumulation, agenda setting, community building, and civilizing domestic politics, while at the same time reinforcing, in most cases, pre-existing conflict and intervention imaginaries. KW - field trips KW - on-site visits KW - battlefield tourism KW - sensory experience KW - affect KW - conflict knowledge KW - spaces of aid KW - liminality KW - German Bundestag KW - parliamentarians KW - German foreign policy KW - Lisa Smirl Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2015.1137394 SN - 1750-2977 SN - 1750-2985 VL - 10 SP - 56 EP - 76 PB - Soil Science Society of America CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ebinger, Falk A1 - Richter, Philipp T1 - Decentralizing for performance? A quantitative assessment of functional reforms in the German Lander JF - International review of administrative sciences : an international journal of comparative public administration N2 - In the last 10 years, the governments of most of the German Länder initiated administrative reforms. All of these ventures included the municipalization of substantial sets of tasks. As elsewhere, governments argue that service delivery by communes is more cost-efficient, effective and responsive. Empirical evidence to back these claims is inconsistent at best: a considerable number of case studies cast doubt on unconditionally positive appraisals. Decentralization effects seem to vary depending on the performance dimension and task considered. However, questions of generalizability arise as these findings have not yet been backed by more ‘objective’ archival data. We provide empirical evidence on decentralization effects for two different policy fields based on two studies. Thereby, the article presents alternative avenues for research on decentralization effects and matches the theoretical expectations on decentralization effects with more robust results. The analysis confirms that overly positive assertions concerning decentralization effects are only partially warranted. As previous case studies suggested, effects have to be looked at in a much more differentiated way, including starting conditions and distinguishing between the various relevant performance dimensions and policy fields. KW - decentralization KW - de-concentration KW - federalism KW - local government KW - performance measurement KW - public service delivery KW - social and environmental administration Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0020852315586916 SN - 0020-8523 SN - 1461-7226 VL - 82 SP - 291 EP - 314 PB - Sage Publ. CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Frieß, Nina A. T1 - "From Russia with Blood". Stalinist Repression an the Gulag in Contemporary Crime Fiction JF - (Hi-)Stories of the Gulag : fiction and reality Y1 - 2016 SN - 978-3-8253-6534-9 SP - 281 EP - 302 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ganghof, Steffen T1 - The Regime-Trilemma: On the Relationship between the Executive and Legislature in advanced Democracies JF - Politische Vierteljahresschrift : Zeitschrift der Deutschen Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft N2 - A comprehensive typology of basic executive formats is presented and linked to a discussion of tradeoffs in the design of executive-legislative relations. The focus is on the tradeoffs between three goals: (1) programmatic parties, (2) identifiable cabinets and (3) issue -specific legislative coalitions. To include semi-presidentialism into the typology in a logically consistent manner, a heretofore neglected executive format has to be defined, which is labelled semi-parliamentarism. Based on a discussion of Australian states, it is argued that semi-parliamentarism has the potential to mitigate the trilemma. KW - executive-legislative relations KW - semi-parliamentarism KW - bicameralism Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5771/0032-3470-2016-1-27 SN - 0032-3470 SN - 1862-2860 VL - 57 SP - 27 EP - + PB - Nomos CY - Hannover ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ganghof, Steffen T1 - Research Design in Political Science - Causal perspectives versus contrastive theory testing JF - Austrian journal of political science N2 - Die politikwissenschaftliche Literatur unterscheidet zwei Grundtypen von Forschungsdesigns: x- und y-zentriert. Dieser Beitrag argumentiert, dass ein „kontrastives“ Forschungsdesign als dritter Grundtyp abgegrenzt werden sollte. Die drei Designs unterscheiden sich durch die Anzahl der betrachteten Theorien und dadurch, ob mehrere Theorien konkurrierend oder komplementär sind. Die typologische Abgrenzung des kontrastiven Designs verdeutlicht auch die Vor- und Nachteile x- und y-zentrierter Designs. Anhand verschiedener Beispielstudien (experimentell und nicht-experimentell, quantitativ und qualitativ) werden die Charakteristika der drei Designs sowie ihre Kombinationsmöglichkeiten herausgearbeitet. Darüber hinaus wird das kontrastive Design als verbindendes Element zwischen den quantitativen und qualitativen Forschungs-„Kulturen“ hervorgehoben. The political science literature distinguishes two basic types of research designs: x- and y-centered. The article argues for the distinction of a third basic type: the "contrastive" design. The three designs differ in the number of relevant theories and in whether they see theories as competing or complementary. The typological differentiation of the contrastive research design helps to clarify the pros and cons of x- and y-centered designs. The article uses exemplary studies (experimental and observational, quantitative and qualitative) to illustrate the characteristics of the three designs as well as the possibilities of combining them. The contrastive design also constitutes a common element of the quantitative and qualitative research, "cultures". KW - Forschungsdesign, kausale Perspektiven, Theorietest, x-zentriert, y-zentriert, Experimente KW - research design KW - causal perspectives KW - theory test KW - effects of causes KW - causes of effects KW - experiments Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.15203/ozp.1037.vol45iss1 SN - 2313-5433 VL - 45 SP - 1 EP - 12 PB - Österreichische Gesellschaft für Politikwissenschaft CY - Wien ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ganghof, Steffen T1 - Reconciling Representation and Accountability: Three Visions of Democracy Compared JF - Government & opposition : an international journal of comparative politics N2 - An egalitarian approach to the fair representation of voters specifies three main institutional requirements: proportional representation, legislative majority rule and a parliamentary system of government. This approach faces two challenges: the under-determination of the resulting democratic process and the idea of a trade-off between equal voter representation and government accountability. Linking conceptual with comparative analysis, the article argues that we can distinguish three ideal-typical varieties of the egalitarian vision of democracy, based on the stages at which majorities are formed. These varieties do not put different relative normative weight onto equality and accountability, but have different conceptions of both values and their reconciliation. The view that accountability is necessarily linked to ‘clarity of responsibility’, widespread in the comparative literature, is questioned – as is the idea of a general trade-off between representation and accountability. Depending on the vision of democracy, the two values need not be in conflict. KW - visions of democracy KW - political equality KW - accountability Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2015.15 SN - 0017-257X SN - 1477-7053 VL - 51 SP - 209 EP - 233 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hartmann, Eddie T1 - Symbolic Boundaries and Collective Violence. A New Theoretical Argument for an Explanatory Sociology of Collective Violent Action JF - Journal for the theory of social behaviour N2 - The sociology of violence still struggles with two critical questions: What motivates people to act violently on behalf of groups and how do they come to identify with the groups for which they act? Methodologically the article addresses these puzzling problems in favor of a relational sociology that argues against both micro- and macro-reductionist accounts, while theoretically it proposes a twofold reorientation: first, it makes a plea for the so called cognitive turn in social theory; second, it proposes following praxeological accounts of social action that focus on the dynamic interpenetration of cognition and socio-cultural practices. The argument is that symbolic boundaries constitute the “missing link” that allows for overcoming the micro-macro gap in violence research: Symbolic boundaries can cause people's participation in collective violence by providing the essential relational resources for violent action and by triggering the cognitive/affective mechanisms necessary for social actors to become drawn into mobilization processes that can cause their engaging in coordinated attacks on sites across the boundary. The article offers a new theoretical argument by drawing on knowledge from violence research, social action theory and cognitive science allowing for a non-reductionist theory of action that explains how and why people engage in collective violence. KW - action theory KW - collective violence KW - praxeology KW - symbolic boundaries KW - terrorist behavior KW - urban riots Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12093 SN - 0021-8308 SN - 1468-5914 VL - 46 SP - 165 EP - 186 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Hoboken ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hustedt, Thurid A1 - Seyfried, Markus T1 - Co-ordination across internal organizational boundaries: how the EU Commission co-ordinates climate policies JF - Journal of European public policy N2 - Through an analysis of climate policy-making in the European Commission (EU), this article argues that co-ordination in the Commission displays the same characteristics as the co-ordination across ministries in central governments, i.e., the properties of negative co-ordination. The article is based on a survey among Commission officials. Overall, the article reveals that a public administration perspective on the Commission proves invaluable to gain insights on how decisions are made at the European Union level. The article contributes to the emerging literature viewing the Commission as an ordinary bureaucracy - as opposed to a unique supranational organization. KW - Bureaucratic organization KW - climate change policy KW - co-ordination KW - Directorate General KW - EU policy-making KW - European Commission Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2015.1074605 SN - 1350-1763 SN - 1466-4429 VL - 23 SP - 888 EP - 905 PB - Springer Publishing Company CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kuhlmann, Sabine A1 - Bogumil, Jörg A1 - Hafner, Jonas T1 - Verwaltungshandeln in der Flüchtlingskrise BT - Die Erstaufnahmeeinrichtungen der Länder und die Zukunft des Verwaltungsvollzugssystems Asyl JF - Verwaltung & Management : VM ; Zeitschrift für moderne Verwaltung N2 - In dem Beitrag werden das Verwaltungshandeln in der Flüchtlingskrise und mögliche Ursachen der aufgetretenen Vollzugsprobleme untersucht. Im Fokus stehen vor allem die Vollzugsrealität und die Verwaltungsvarianz im Bereich der Erstaufnahme von Flüchtlingen auf der Länderebene sowie die durch das BAMF als auch die Bundes länder mittlerweile begonnenen Reformen im Verwaltungsvollzugssystem. Leitfrage des Aufsatzes ist, ob das bestehende Verwaltungsvollzugssystem nicht nur in den jeweiligen Zuständigkeiten reformbedürftig ist, sondern ob es auch zu einer neuen Zuständigkeitsverteilung im Bundesstaat kommen sollte. Y1 - 2016 SN - 0947-9856 IS - 3 SP - 126 EP - 136 PB - Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft CY - Baden-Baden ER -