Fachgruppe Politik- & Verwaltungswissenschaft
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A room full of ‘views’
(2023)
Quantitative research into the effectiveness of the UN human rights treaty bodies (UNTBs) in eliciting remedial responses from states is impeded by a lack of usable data on how states respond to their decisions. The new Treaty Body Views Dataset (TBVD) aims to fill this gap. It comprises details on all published decisions in individual complaints cases issued by the UNTBs between 1979 and 2019 and matches these with information on their state of compliance. The TBVD can be used for research on the activities of the treaty bodies, the nature of the decisions themselves, or state behavior following a decision. An empirical application illustrates how the TBVD can advance knowledge about the factors that correlate with compliance with adverse UNTB decisions. Results show that the likelihood of implementation hinges critically on decision-level characteristics, and reveal differences and similarities between compliance with UNTB decisions and regional human rights court judgments.
Analyzing social wrongs
(2023)
Many international organisations (IOs) are currently challenged, yet are they also in decline? Despite much debate on the crisis of liberal international order, con-testation, loss of legitimacy, gridlock, pathologies and exiting member states, there is little research on IO decline. This article seeks to clarify this concept and argues that decline can be considered in absolute and relative terms. Absolute decline involves a decrease in the number of IOs and their authority, member-ship and output, whereas relative decline concerns a decrease in the centrality of IOs in international relations. Reviewing a wide range of indicators, this article argues that, whereas there is limited decline in absolute terms since 1945, there may well be important decline in relative terms. Relative decline is more difficult to measure, but to probe its significance this article presents data from speeches during the United Nations General Assembly General Debate. It shows that IOs were most often mentioned in 1996 and that there has been a decline since. These findings indicate that, whereas IOs might survive as institutions, they are decreasingly central to international relations.
This research investigated the relationship between frequent engagement in industrial action (also known as ‘employee strikes’) and the internal attractiveness of government employment. It focused on a special group of public employees: public university lecturers and public-school teachers in Uganda who frequently engaged in industrial action. At the very basic level, the research explored whether public employees frequently engaged in industrial action because they considered public service employment to be unattractive or whether frequent engagement in industrial action was in fact part of the attractiveness of government employment. Beyond exploring these relationships, it also explained why (or why not) such relationships existed.
Methodologically, the research was conducted using an exploratory sequential design – a mixed methods study design that starts with a qualitative followed by a quantitative phase. It is the results of the initial qualitative phase that determined the direction of the subsequent quantitative phase. The qualitative phase started with an exploration of the relationship between industrial action and internal public service attractiveness, resulting into two specific research questions:
1) Why do public employees engage in industrial action and what role does frequent engagement in industrial action play in their perception of public service attractiveness?
2) Why and how is organizational justice related to public employees’ perception of public service attractiveness?
The above questions were answered both qualitatively and quantitatively. The theoretical postulations of the Social Movements Theories, Social Exchange Theory, and the Signaling Theory were used to structure the research assumptions and hypotheses.
The results showed that public employees engaged in industrial action mostly because of relative, rather than absolute deprivation. An established culture of workplace militancy was also found to be key in actualizing industrial action as was the (perceived) absence of alternatives to achieve workplace justice. Importantly, there was a clear dichotomy between absolute working conditions and frequent engagement in industrial action. Frequent engagement in industrial action was itself found to have both positive and negative effects on internal public service attractiveness. It was also found that public service attractiveness from the perspective of current public employees might be different from what it is from the perspective of prospective employees. This is because current public employees do not assume what it feels like to work for government, but mostly use their day-to-day lived experiences to judge the attractiveness of their employer. The existing literature is particularly deficient on analyzing public service attractiveness from an internal perspective, which is surprising given the public sector’s high reliance on internal recruitment.
The research results underlined key implications for theory, practice, and research. At theory level, the results suggested that public employee ratings of internal public service attractiveness were heavily affected by halo effects and should therefore not be taken at face value. The complex workplace social exchanges which are deeply rooted in organizational justice and the ‘personification metaphor’ were also emphasized. From an empirical perspective, the results underlined the need to prioritize internal public service attractiveness as recent research has confirmed the value of family socialization and internal recommendations in making public sector employment attractive, even to external applicants. This research argues that the centrality of organizational justice in public sector employee relations requires public sector organizations to be intentional in their bid to create fair, just, and attractive workplaces. Beyond assessing the fairness of personnel policies, procedures, and interactional relationships, it is also important to prepare and equip public managers with the right skills to promote and practice justice in their day-to-day interactions with public employees, and to encourage, improve, and facilitate alternative public employee feedback mechanisms.
The study of subnational and local government systems and reforms has become an increasingly salient topic in comparative public administration. In many European countries, policy implementation, the execution of public tasks and the delivery of services to citizens are largely carried out by local governments, which, at the same time, have been subjected to multiple reforms and sometimes comprehensive institutional re-organizations. This chapter discusses analytical key concepts and outcomes of the comparative study of local governments and local government reforms. It outlines frameworks and analytical tools to capture the variety of institutional settings and developments at the local level of government. It provides an introduction into crucial comparative dimensions, such as functional, territorial and political profiles of local governments, and analyses current reform approaches and outcomes based on recent empirical findings. Finally, the chapter addresses salient issues to be taken up in future comparative studies about local government.
Thermal energy from concentrating solar thermal technologies (CST) may contribute to decarbonizing applications from heating and cooling, desalination, and power generation to commodities such as aluminium, hydrogen, ammonia or sustainable aviation fuels (SAF). So far, successful commercial-scale CST projects are restricted to solar industrial process heat (SIPH) and concentrating solar power (CSP) generation and, at least for the latter, depend on support from public policies that have been stagnating for years. As they are technologically similar, spillovers between SIPH or CSP and other emerging CST could accelerate commercialization across use cases while maximizing the impact of scarce support. Here, we review the technical potential for cross-fertilization between different CST applications and the ability of the current policy regime to enable this potential. Using working temperature as the key variable, we identify different clusters of current and emerging CST technologies. Low-temperature CST (<400℃) applications for heating, cooling and desalination already profit from the significant progress made in line-focussing CSP over the last 15 years. A newly emerging cluster of high temperature CST (>600℃) for solar chemistry and high-grade process heat has significant leverage for spillovers with point-focussing solar tower third-generation CSP currently under development. For these spillovers to happen, however, CSP policy designs would need to prioritize innovation for high working temperature and encourage modular plant design, by adequately remunerating hybridized plants with heat and power in and outputs that include energy sources beyond CST solar fields. This would enable synergies across applications and scales by incentivizing compatibility of modular CST components in multiple sectors and use cases.
Conclusion
(2023)
Based on the previous findings in this book, Chapter 18 by Heike Krieger and Andrea Liese discusses the general dynamics of change or metamorphosis in the international legal order. They discern a mixed picture of an international order between metamorphosis—that is, a more fundamental transformation—of international law, norm change, turbulences, and robustness. They explain drivers of change and highlight factors such as national interests during the war on terror, changing long-term foreign policy beliefs, and the rise in populism and autocracy, before discussing the most common strategies the actors involved use. Other relevant factors include changes in the political environment, such as shocks and power shifts or the ambiguous role of fragmentation. Moreover, they identify factors that make legal norms robust, including the vital role of norm defenders and legal and institutional structures as stabilizing elements. Krieger and Liese conclude by cautioning that if the attacks on the international order continue at the current frequency and magnitude, a metamorphosis of international law will likely be unstoppable.
Creativity is a crucial part of policy capacity in governments. Existing studies on creative behavior in the public sector assess employees' openness to new ideas and creative solutions, and they confirm the relevance of organizational and individual determinants for pro-creativity attitudes. Yet we lack systemic evidence on the explicit level of work-related creativity among policy officials in government organizations. At the same time, novel technologies and particularly social networking services change the working environment of policy officials radically, alter organizational features, and may also yield crucial individual effects. Our study analyses “policy creativity” of policy officials in three European governments. We demonstrate the importance of organizational and individual features, including the stress triggered by using social networking services. Our study captures officials' creativity explicitly and adds to debates on creativity and innovation in the public sector as well as the micro-level foundations of the digital transformation in the public sector.
This chapter addresses the role of evaluation of and in public administration. We focus on two analytical key dimensions: a) the provider of the evaluation and b) the subject of the evaluation. Four major types of evaluation are distinguished: (1) external institutional evaluation, (2) internal institutional evaluation, (3) external evaluation of administrative action/results, (4) internal evaluation of administrative action/results. Type 1 and 2 refer to evaluation of administrative structures and processes as the subject of administrative reform. Type 3 and 4 represent different versions of evaluation in public administration, because the subject is administrative action and its outputs. The chapter highlights salient approaches and organizational settings of evaluation and provides insights into the institutionalization of an evaluation function in public administration. Finally, the chapter draws lessons regarding strengths and potentials but also remaining weaknesses and challenges of evaluation of and in public administration.
International institutions are an essential driving force of contemporary policies to combat gender-based violence but remain toothless if political actors do not implement them in domestic policies. How can scholars conceptualise the transposition of international gender-based violence norms into domestic policies? I argue that discourse network analysis provides a powerful conceptual and methodological extension of critical frame analysis to understand how frames shape the meaning of gender-based violence norms in multi-level institutional contexts. Frames’ normative and cognitive network structure invites combining discourse network and frame analysis techniques that locate frames’ power in their ability to connect different institutional spheres temporally and spatially. I outline a multi-level research agenda that traces the framing processes of international norms and their domestic implementation through gender-based violence policies in the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention. This agenda includes avenues to study how complex transnational policy frameworks like the Istanbul Convention play out in domestic policy implementation.