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Following decision theory (Boudon, Raymond. 1974. Education, Opportunity, and Social Inequality: Changing Prospects in Western Society. New York: Wiley.), social origin strongly affects educational decisions, especially at transition points in educational attainment. In Japan, the fierce competition in gaining access to the next level of schooling intensifies the impact of educational decisions on students' future careers. In addition to selecting a certain school, families are forced to decide whether or not to invest in shadow education. Thus far, socioeconomic background and parents' educational aspirations, in conjunction with students' academic achievement, have been deemed influential to such decisions in Japan. The agency of the student is rarely even considered. Based on calculations from the 2011 Hyogo High School Students' (HHSS) survey, the theoretical approach presented in this article stresses the importance of acknowledging the existence of a multitude of actors involved in each phase of the decision-making process, including the students themselves, especially when explaining inequalities in modern societies.
The impact of humanitarian context conditions and individual characteristics on aid worker retention
(2015)
High employee turnover rates constitute a major challenge to effective aid provision. This study examines how features of humanitarian work and aid workers' individual characteristics affect retention within one humanitarian organisation, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Holland. The study extends existing research by providing new theoretical explanations of employment opportunities and constraints and by engaging in the first large-scale quantitative analysis of aid worker retention. Using a database of field staff (N=1,955), a logistic regression is performed of the likelihood of reenlistment after a first mission. The findings demonstrate that only 40 per cent of employees reenlist for a second mission with MSF Holland, and that workplace location and security situation, age, and gender have no significant effect. Individuals are less likely to reenlist if they returned early from the first mission for a personal reason, are in a relationship, are medical doctors, or if they come from highly developed countries. The paper reflects on the findings in the light of policy.
This article expands our current knowledge about ministerial selection in coalition governments and analyses why ministerial candidates succeed in acquiring a cabinet position after general elections. It argues that political parties bargain over potential office-holders during government-formation processes, selecting future cabinet ministers from an emerging bargaining pool'. The article draws upon a new dataset comprising all ministrable candidates discussed by political parties during eight government-formation processes in Germany between 1983 and 2009. The conditional logit regression analysis reveals that temporal dynamics, such as the day she enters the pool, have a significant effect on her success in achieving a cabinet position. Other determinants of ministerial selection discussed in the existing literature, such as party and parliamentary expertise, are less relevant for achieving ministerial office. The article concludes that scholarship on ministerial selection requires a stronger emphasis for its endogenous nature in government-formation as well as the relevance of temporal dynamics in such processes.
The point of departure of this article is limited systematic research on the rotating EU Council Presidency after the Lisbon Treaty. In order to assess rotating presidencies the paper proposes a three-tier approach which includes a functional, a behavioural and a contingency dimension. These dimensions are supplemented by the institutional changes of the Lisbon Treaty referring to the rotating presidencies. Next, the paper applies this evaluation framework to the Polish Presidency that took place in the second half of 2011. Finally, it draws conclusions from the Polish case for both the leadership capacity of the rotating Council Presidency in the post-Lisbon European Union and the performance of Poland's EU Council Presidency.
This note presents results from an experiment studying a two person 4 4 pure coordination game. We explore different strategy labels in an attempt to implement the mixed strategy equilibrium that selects all four strategies with equal probability. Such strategy labels must be free from salient properties that might be used by participants to coordinate. Testing 23 different sets of strategy labels, we identify two sets that produce a distribution of subjects' choices which approximate the uniform distribution quite well. Our results are relevant for studies intending to compare the behavior of subjects who play against a random mechanism with that of participants who play against human counterparts.
International organizations in a complex world- borders and Aadded value of a pluralistic research
(2014)
International public administrations are increasingly perceived as autonomous actors prompting states to adopt policies without resorting to coercion or legal obligations. Starting from these observations, I determine abilities and characteristics of international public administrations that contribute to their autonomy as agents of non-hierarchical policy transfers. To this end, I draw on theoretical considerations and empirical results from policy transfer research. I find that the various abilities that contribute to this autonomy of international public administrations are essentially rooted in two structural characteristics: in as many states as possible their staff should (a) be present and (b) analyze the state, development and reform need of national policies on a regular basis.
The present article shows, in a case study, how basic problems of interactions in Job Centres are shaped by expectations deriving from the social levels of organization and interaction and can be solved by a specific modification of the person category of the good customer. This client is categorized as a customer with the will to be willing: By wanting what the Job Center staff wants him or her to want and by accommodating to the contingent goals of political discourse and public administration as much as possible she or he enables the interaction to transform organizational and interactional expectations into addressable expectations. In this way he or she constitutes a vital link within the managerial guidance system of a modern labor administration.
Giving less by doing more? Dynamics of social policy expansion and dismantling in 18 OECD countries
(2014)
Protection against social risks is generally popular among voters and should enjoy the benefits of institutional inertia. Yet retrenchment occurs rather frequently in advanced welfare states without this systematically leading to electoral punishment. We solve this paradox by, first, arguing that governments can avoid the blame of retrenchment by pursuing a strategy of expansionary dismantling' where new policies and instruments are used to compensate reform losers and to obfuscate cutbacks. Second, we test our argument with a huge new dataset consisting of changes in unemployment legislation and replacement rates in 18 OECD countries from 1976 to 2000. The statistical tests provide robust support for our argument, suggesting that the introduction of new policies and instruments leads to cutbacks in replacement rates. We also find that left-leaning governments are least likely to engage in expansionary dismantling.