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A widespread view in political science is that minority cabinets govern more flexibly and inclusively, more in line with a median-oriented and 'consensual' vision of democracy. Yet there is only little empirical evidence for it. We study legislative coalition-building in the German state of North-Rhine-Westphalia, which was ruled by a minority government between 2010 and 2012. We compare the inclusiveness of legislative coalitions under minority and majority cabinets, based on 1028 laws passed in the 1985–2017 period, and analyze in detail the flexibility of legislative coalition formation under the minority government. Both quantitative analyses are complemented with brief case studies of specific legislation. We find, first, that the minority cabinet did not rule more inclusively. Second, the minority cabinet’s legislative flexibility was fairly limited; to the extent that it existed, it follows a pattern that cannot be explained on the basis of the standard spatial model with policy-seeking parties.
Why choice matters
(2018)
Measures of democracy are in high demand. Scientific and public audiences use them to describe political realities and to substantiate causal claims about those realities. This introduction to the thematic issue reviews the history of democracy measurement since the 1950s. It identifies four development phases of the field, which are characterized by three recurrent topics of debate: (1) what is democracy, (2) what is a good measure of democracy, and (3) do our measurements of democracy register real-world developments? As the answers to those questions have been changing over time, the field of democracy measurement has adapted and reached higher levels of theoretical and methodological sophistication. In effect, the challenges facing contemporary social scientists are not only limited to the challenge of constructing a sound index of democracy. Today, they also need a profound understanding of the differences between various measures of democracy and their implications for empirical applications. The introduction outlines how the contributions to this thematic issue help scholars cope with the recurrent issues of conceptualization, measurement, and application, and concludes by identifying avenues for future research.
Um die gegenwärtige Transformation der Öffentlichkeit im digitalen Zeitalter erfassen zu können, ist in der Öffentlichkeitstheorie eine erweiterte Perspektive notwendig, die nicht nur den massenmedialen Diskurs, sondern auch die Veränderung sozialer Praktiken und institutioneller Strukturen in den Blick nimmt. Das Ziel dieses Buches besteht darin, die Grundlagen einer solchen Perspektive auf die Theorie digitaler Öffentlichkeiten zu entwickeln. Im vorgeschlagenen Ansatz wird Öffentlichkeit im Anschluss an John Dewey als Prozess verstanden. In seiner prozessualen und funktionalen Bestimmung von Öffentlichkeit liegt eine besondere Originalität, die seinen Ansatz von anderen Öffentlichkeitskonzeptionen unterscheidet. Das Buch liefert sowohl eine systematische Rekonstruktion und Interpretation der Philosophie John Deweys als auch einen Vorschlag zur gesellschaftstheoretischen Deutung des digitalen Wandels.
The project of public-reason liberalism faces a basic problem: publicly justified principles are typically too abstract and vague to be directly applied to practical political disputes, whereas applicable specifications of these principles are not uniquely publicly justified. One solution could be a legislative procedure that selects one member from the eligible set of inconclusively justified proposals. Yet if liberal principles are too vague to select sufficiently specific legislative proposals, can they, nevertheless, select specific legislative procedures? Based on the work of Gerald Gaus, this article argues that the only candidate for a conclusively justified decision procedure is a majoritarian or otherwise ‘neutral’ democracy. If the justification of democracy requires an equality baseline in the design of political regimes and if justifications for departure from this baseline are subject to reasonable disagreement, a majoritarian design is justified by default. Gaus’s own preference for super-majoritarian procedures is based on disputable specifications of justified liberal principles. These procedures can only be defended as a sectarian preference if the equality baseline is rejected, but then it is not clear how the set of justifiable political regimes can be restricted to full democracies.
Einleitung zu Georg Lukács
(2015)
Two short typescripts by G. Lukacs from the archive, dating from 1941/42, shed light on his appraisal of the cultural ‘inner reserves’ of Germany and the ‘moral reserves’ of the democracies involved in the Second World War, as well as on Lukacs’s political philosophy at that time. The conception of an intrinsic interrelation of a humanist philosophical anthropology and rationalist epistemology elucidates his egalitarian and democratic account. Both texts are located within the intellectual development of the author in an introduction by the editor, which sketches the historical background and indicates relevant contemporaneous theoretical and political debates, such as the controversies over realism and humanism and also a dispute with K. Jaspers on German collective guilt.
Since the beginning of the 1970s a lot of countries in Latin America has been starting the transition to democracy. The article analyses the role played by the military in this process, especially the effects of civildemocratic governments – sometimes failing in – gaining power over the military. It is described how and why the army occasionally kept their independence from the civil power and how this influenced the consolidation of democracy.
Editorial
(2005)
Patrimonialer Sozialismus Clan-Herrschaft in Turkmenistan Polizei in Georgien Zentralasiens Präsidenten Organisiertes Verbrechen in Bulgarien Albanien als Familienstaat Hybride Staaten im Südkaukasus Entwicklungspolitik von NGOs Afrika ad portas? Die T-Frage im Bundestag Vom Sein und Schein der Transformation
Über den Einsatz bewaffneter Bundeswehrsoldaten im Ausland entscheidet der Bundestag. Die demokratische Legitimität von Bundeswehreinsätzen beruht daher auf der parlamentarischen Mehrheitsentscheidung. Doch durch die Auslagerung von Entscheidungen auf multinationale Sicherheitssysteme, wie die NATO und die EU, ergeben sich Handlungsbeschränkungen für das deutsche Parlament. In dieser Publikation analysiert die Politikwissenschaftlerin Martina Kolanoski die tatsächliche Entscheidungsmacht des Bundestags am Beispiel von Bundeswehreinsätzen im Rahmen der Europäische Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik (ESVP). Sie zeigt, weshalb die parlamentarischen Einflüssmöglichkeiten nur sehr begrenzt sind und argumentiert damit gegen die These des Parlamentarischen Friedens. Die Weiterentwicklung der ESVP durch den Vertrag von Lissabon, die multinationale Streitkräfteintegration, das Konzept der European Battlegroups und der deutsche Entscheidungsprozess zur EU-Mission EUFOR RD Congo werden auf die Frage hin untersucht, ob die Einsatzentscheidung durch politische und/oder militärische Integration vorweg genommen wird.