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In this paper, we provide a comprehensive multivariate cointegration analysis of three parts of the steam coal value chain - export, transport and import prices. The analysis is based on a rich dataset of international coal prices: in particular, we combine data on steam coal prices with freight rates, covering the period December 2001 until August 2009 at weekly frequency. We then test whether the demand and supply side components of steam coal trade are consistently integrated with one another. In addition, export and import prices as well as freight rates for individual trading routes, across regions and globally are combined. We find evidence of significant yet incomplete integration. We also find heterogeneous short-term dynamics of individual markets. Furthermore, we examine whether logistics enter coal price dynamics through transportation costs, which are mainly determined by oil prices. Our results suggest that this is generally not the case.
Whereas the US President signed the Kyoto Protocol, the failure of the US Congress to ratify it seriously hampered subsequent international climate cooperation. This recent US trend, of signing environmental treaties but failing to ratify them, could thwart attempts to come to a future climate agreement. Two complementary explanations of this trend are proposed. First, the political system of the US has distinct institutional features that make it difficult for presidents to predict whether the Senate will give its advice and consent to multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) and whether Congress will pass the required enabling legislation. Second, elected for a fixed term, US presidents might benefit politically from supporting MEAs even when knowing that legislative support is not forthcoming. Four policy implications are explored, concerning the scope for unilateral presidential action, the potential for bipartisan congressional support, the effectiveness of a treaty without the US, and the prospects for a deep, new climate treaty.
Policy relevance
Why does the failure of US ratification of multilateral environmental treaties occur? This article analyses the domestic political mechanisms involved in cases of failed US ratification. US non-participation in global environmental institutions often has serious ramifications. For example, it sharply limited Kyoto's effectiveness and seriously hampered international climate negotiations for years. Although at COP 17 in Durban the parties agreed to negotiate a new agreement by 2015, a new global climate treaty may well trigger a situation resembling the one President Clinton faced in 1997 when he signed Kyoto but never obtained support for it in the Senate. US failure to ratify could thwart future climate agreements.
Over the last three decades, the German political economy can be characterized by both institutional continuity and change. Understanding the dynamics of institutional change therefore requires an examination of the interplay of changes in formal institutional rules and how organizations respond to these changes by strategic attempts to promote or hinder further change in institutions. The macro-level political story of institutional change shows a number of paradoxes resulting in unexpected and often incomplete forms of market liberalization shaped by continued support for some core features of Germany's social market economy. The resulting erosion of Germany's co-ordinated model of economic organization through networks and business associations has gone hand-in-hand with the attempts to preserve these institutions for core workers and sectors of the economy in the face of changing environments. The result is a more varied institutional landscape characterized by international diffusion of liberal policies and the politics of their variable re-embedding within a long-term path of institutional continuity.
Queerly intimate friends, fans and affective communication in a Super Girl fan fiction community
(2012)
This article examines the rise of the Girls' Love (GL) fan fiction community in contemporary China. More specifically, we focus on the 'Pink Super Girl Bar', an online fan fiction community devoted to the pairing of the contestants of the 2006 season of Super Girl, an entertainment program featured on Hunan Satellite TV that enjoys great popularity in the Sinophone world. Through an ethnographic account of the formation, convention and performativity of identities and socialities in this community, we demonstrate how Super Girl GL fans mobilize their emotional capital to create artworks, to have fun and to enrich their everyday lives. We argue that the GL fan fiction community has become a space of female homosociality, intimacy and affect in which a new generation of young Chinese women actively enact friendship and female subjectivity in a way that refuses the normalization of gender, sexuality and social relations. Moreover, by linking fan studies to affect studies and emotional geography, and by paying particular attention to indigenous concepts and cultural practices in mainland China's fan communities, we wish to contribute to fan studies with feminist, queer and transnational perspectives.
Long-term policy issues are a particularly vexing class of environmental policy issues which merit increasing attention due to the long-time horizons involved, the incongruity with political cycles, and the challenges for collective action. Following the definition of long-term environmental policy challenges, I pose three questions as challenges for future research, namely 1. Are present democracies well suited to cope with long-term policy challenges? 2. Are top-down or bottom-up solutions to long-term environmental policy challenges advisable? 3. Will mitigation and adaptation of environmental challenges suffice? In concluding, the contribution raises the issue of credible commitment for long-term policy issues and potential design options.
Cross-dressing took on new political meanings in Germany's Weimar Republic, with the emergence of organizations and periodicals aimed at promoting the interests of self-identified "transvestites." This new sexological category, developed by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1910, formed the basis for a shared sense of identity and belonging among individuals who identified as members of the "opposite" sex. Drawing on the experiences of the homosexual emancipation movement and discourses of bourgeois respectability, middle-class transvestites came together to demand legal and social recognition, including acknowledgement of "transsexual" desires. Their efforts represent a critical but forgotten moment in the history of transgender political activism.
Social Network Sites (SNSs) rely exclusively on user-generated content to offer engaging and rewarding experience to its members. As a result, stimulating user communication and self-disclosure is vital for the sustainability of SNSs. However, considering that the SNS users are increasingly culturally diverse, motivating this audience to self-disclose requires understanding of their cultural intricacies. Yet existing research offers only limited insights into the role of culture behind the motivation of SNS users to self-disclose. Building on the privacy calculus framework, this study explores the role of two cultural dimensions - individualism and uncertainty avoidance - in self-disclosure decisions of SNS users. Survey responses of US and German Facebook members are used as the basis for our analysis. Structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis results reveal the distinct role of culture in the cognitive patterns of SNS users. The authors find that trusting beliefs play a key role in the self-disclosure decisions of users from individualistic cultures. At the same time, uncertainty avoidance determines the impact of privacy concerns. This paper contributes to the theory by rejecting the universal nature of privacy calculus processes. The findings provide for an array of managerial implications for SNS providers as they strive to encourage content creation and sharing by their heterogeneous members.
This study follows the debate in comparative public administration research on the role of advisory arrangements in central governments. The aim of this study is to explain the mechanisms by which these actors gain their alleged role in government decision-making. Hence, it analyses advisory arrangements that are proactively involved in executive decision-making and may compete with the permanent bureaucracy by offering policy advice to political executives. The study argues that these advisory arrangements influence government policy-making by "institutional politics", i.e. by shaping the institutional underpinnings to govern or rather the "rules of the executive game" in order to strengthen their own position or that of their clients. The theoretical argument of this study follows the neo-institutionalist turn in organization theory and defines institutional politics as gradual institutionalization processes between institutions and organizational actors. It applies a broader definition of institutions as sets of regulative, normative and cognitive pillars. Following the "power-distributional approach" such gradual institutionalization processes are influenced by structure-oriented characteristics, i.e. the nature of the objects of institutional politics, in particular the freedom of interpretation in their application, as well as the distinct constraints of the institutional context. In addition, institutional politics are influenced by agency-oriented characteristics, i.e. the ambitions of actors to act as "would-be change agents". These two explanatory dimensions result in four ideal-typical mechanisms of institutional politics: layering, displacement, drift, and conversion, which correspond to four ideal-types of would-be change agents. The study examines the ambitions of advisory arrangements in institutional politics in an exploratory manner, the relevance of the institutional context is analyzed via expectation hypotheses on the effects of four institutional context features that are regarded as relevant in the scholarly debate: (1) the party composition of governments, (2) the structuring principles in cabinet, (3) the administrative tradition, and (4) the formal politicization of the ministerial bureaucracy. The study follows a "most similar systems design" and conducts qualitative case studies on the role of advisory arrangements at the center of German and British governments, i.e. the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Finance, for a longer period (1969/1970-2005). Three time periods are scrutinized per country; the British case studies examine the role of advisory arrangements at the Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister's Office, and the Ministry of Finance under Prime Ministers Heath (1970-74), Thatcher (1979-87) and Blair (1997-2005). The German case studies study the role of advisory arrangements at the Federal Chancellery and the Federal Ministry of Finance during the Brandt government (1969-74), the Kohl government (1982-1987) and the Schröder government (1998-2005). For the empirical analysis, the results of a document analysis and the findings of 75 semi-structured expert interviews have been triangulated. The comparative analysis reveals different patterns of institutional politics. The German advisory arrangements engaged initially in displacement but turned soon towards layering and drift, i.e. after an initial displacement of the pre-existing institutional underpinnings to govern they laid increasingly new elements onto existing ones and took the non-deliberative decision to neglect the adaption of existing rules of the executive game towards changing environmental demands. The British advisory arrangements were mostly involved in displacement and conversion, despite occasional layering, i.e. they displaced the pre-existing institutional underpinnings to govern with new rules of the executive game and transformed and realigned them, sometimes also layering new elements onto pre-existing ones. The structure- and agency-oriented characteristics explain these patterns of institutional politics. First, the study shows that the institutional context limits the institutional politics in Germany and facilitates the institutional politics in the UK. Second, the freedom of interpreting the application of institutional targets is relevant and could be observed via the different ambitions of advisory arrangements across countries and over time, confirming, third, that the interests of such would-be change agents are likewise important to understand the patterns of institutional politics. The study concludes that the role of advisory arrangements in government policy-making rests not only upon their policy-related, party-political or media-advisory role for political executives, but especially upon their activities in institutional politics, resulting in distinct institutional constraints on all actors in government policy-making – including their own role in these processes.