Refine
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Year of publication
- 2013 (2) (remove)
Document Type
- Postprint (2) (remove)
Language
- English (2) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2)
Keywords
- Germany (1)
- candidates (1)
- e-government (1)
- government-formation (1)
- informed consent (1)
- migrant integration (1)
- public policy (1)
- research ethics (1)
- social media analytics (1)
Institute
- Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät (2) (remove)
Research indicates that evidence-based policy making is most successful when public administrators refer to diversified information portfolios. With the rising prominence of social media in the last decade, this paper argues that governments can benefit from integrating this publically available, user-generated data through the technique of social media analytics (SMA). There are already several initiatives set up to predict future policy issues, e.g. for the policy fields of crisis mitigation or migrant integration insights. The authors analyse these endeavours and their potential for providing more efficient and effective public policies. Furthermore, they scrutinise the challenges to governmental SMA usage in particular with regards to legal and ethical aspects. Reflecting the latter, this paper provides forward-looking recommendations on how these technologies can best be used for future policy making in a legally and ethically sound manner.
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.