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In spring 2015, Turkey witnessed the unexpected rise of the HDP, founded by the Kurdish Liberation Movement together with the Turkish radical left, against President Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule. In this article, I will employ contemporary literature on left populism to explain the HDP’s rise as an alternative left hegemonic project against the neoliberal authoritarianism that Erdoğan represents. After discussing the historical context from which the HDP emerged and grew, I will evaluate its discourse and strategies based on a conceptualization of left-wing populism. Lastly, I will discuss the challenges that the HDP confronted after the June 2015 elections and the differences between the Turkish and Western European contexts for a left-wing populist strategy.
This article contributes to the politics of policy‐making in executive government. It introduces the analytical distinction between generalists and specialists as antagonistic players in executive politics and develops the claim that policy specialists are in a structurally advantaged position to succeed in executive politics and to fend off attempts by generalists to influence policy choices through cross‐cutting reform measures. Contrary to traditional textbook public administration, we explain the views of generalists and specialists not through their training but their positions within an organization. We combine established approaches from public policy and organization theory to substantiate this claim and to define the dilemma that generalists face when developing government‐wide reform policies (‘meta‐policies’) as well as strategies to address this problem. The article suggests that the conceptual distinction between generalists and specialists allows for a more precise analysis of the challenges for policy‐making across government organizations than established approaches.
Global food security governance is fraught with fragmentation, overlap and complexity. While calls for coordination and coherence abound, establishing an inter-organizational order at this level seems to remain difficult. While the emphasis in the literature has so far been on the global level, we know less about dynamics of inter-organizational relations in food security governance at the country level, and empirical studies are lacking. It is this research gap the article seeks to address by posing the following research question: In how far does inter-organizational order develop in the organizational field of food security governance at the country level? Theoretically and conceptually, the article draws on sociological institutionalism, and on work on inter-organizational relations. Empirically, the article conducts an exploratory case study of the organizational field of food security governance in Côte d’Ivoire, building on a qualitative content analysis of organizational documents covering a period from 2003 to 2016 and semi-structured interviews with staff of international organizations from 2016. The article demonstrates that not all of the developments attributed to food security governance at the global level play out in the same way at the country level. Rather, in the case of Côte d’Ivoire there are signs for a certain degree of coherence between IOs in the field of food security governance and even for an – albeit limited – division of labour. However, this only holds for specific dimensions of the inter-organizational order and appears to be subject to continuous contestation and reinterpretation under the surface.
In a critical approach to Mommsen’s classical thesis, which states the dependence of Weber’s sociology on his political position, the article reconstructs the foundation of Weber’s ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ on his sociological analyses of the political domain in the manuscripts for the posthumous publication of Economy and Society. The first two pages of his 1919 lecture particularly show that Weber can fall back on the definitions of State and politics that he had already developed for his political sociology. Yet, to appreciate the full extent of this theoretical contribution, it is necessary to present Weber’s entire ideal-typical analysis of the political. The article then shows that Weber provides an unlabelled definition of ‘modern politics’ that negates ante litteram Carl Schmitt’s foundation of politics on the idea of enmity. In this context, Weber’s sound plea for parliamentarism and against the fascination of civil war comes to the fore that he wanted to deliver to his audience of young revolutionaries in January 1919.
The Government will create a motivated, merit-based, performance-driven, and professional civil service that is resistant to temptations of corruption and which provides efficient, effective and transparent public services that do not force customers to pay bribes.
— (GoIRA, 2006, p. 106)
We were in a black hole! We had an empty glass and had nothing from our side to fill it with! Thus, we accepted anything anybody offered; that is how our glass was filled; that is how we reformed our civil service.
— (Former Advisor to IARCSC, personal communication, August 2015)
How and under what conditions were the post-Taleban Civil Service Reforms of Afghanistan initiated? What were the main components of the reforms? What were their objectives and to which extent were they achieved? Who were the leading domestic and foreign actors involved in the process? Finally, what specific factors influenced the success and failure Afghanistan’s Civil Service Reforms since 2002? Guided by such fundamental questions, this research studies the wicked process of reforming the Afghan civil service in an environment where a variety of contextual, programmatic, and external factors affected the design and implementation of reforms that were entirely funded and technically assisted by the international community.
Focusing on the core components of reforms—recruitment, remuneration, and appraisal of civil servants—the qualitative study provides a detailed picture of the pre-reform civil service and its major human resources developments in the past. Following discussions on the content and purposes of the main reform programs, it will then analyze the extent of changes in policies and practices by examining the outputs and effects of these reforms.
Moreover, the study defines the specific factors that led the reforms toward a situation where most of the intended objectives remain unachieved. Doing so, it explores and explains how an overwhelming influence of international actors with conflicting interests, large-scale corruption, political interference, networks of patronage, institutionalized nepotism, culturally accepted cronyism and widespread ethnic favoritism created a very complex environment and prevented the reforms from transforming Afghanistan’s patrimonial civil service into a professional civil service, which is driven by performance and merit.
In light of the debate on the consequences of competitive contracting out of traditionally public services, this research compares two mechanisms used to allocate funds in development cooperation—direct awarding and competitive contracting out—aiming to identify their potential advantages and disadvantages.
The agency theory is applied within the framework of rational-choice institutionalism to study the institutional arrangements that surround two different money allocation mechanisms, identify the incentives they create for the behavior of individual actors in the field, and examine how these then transfer into measurable differences in managerial quality of development aid projects. In this work, project management quality is seen as an important determinant of the overall project success.
For data-gathering purposes, the German development agency, the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), is used due to its unique way of work. Whereas the majority of projects receive funds via direct-award mechanism, there is a commercial department, GIZ International Services (GIZ IS) that has to compete for project funds.
The data concerning project management practices on the GIZ and GIZ IS projects was gathered via a web-based, self-administered survey of project team leaders. Principal component analysis was applied to reduce the dimensionality of the independent variable to total of five components of project management. Furthermore, multiple regression analysis identified the differences between the separate components on these two project types. Enriched by qualitative data gathered via interviews, this thesis offers insights into everyday managerial practices in development cooperation and identifies the advantages and disadvantages of the two allocation mechanisms.
The thesis first reiterates the responsibility of donors and implementers for overall aid effectiveness. It shows that the mechanism of competitive contracting out leads to better oversight and control of implementers, fosters deeper cooperation between the implementers and beneficiaries, and has a potential to strengthen ownership of recipient countries. On the other hand, it shows that the evaluation quality does not tremendously benefit from the competitive allocation mechanism and that the quality of the component knowledge management and learning is better when direct-award mechanisms are used. This raises questions about the lacking possibilities of actors in the field to learn about past mistakes and incorporate the finings into the future interventions, which is one of the fundamental issues of aid effectiveness. Finally, the findings show immense deficiencies in regard to oversight and control of individual projects in German development cooperation.
This article analyses salient trade-offs in the design of democracy. It grounds this analysis in a distinction between two basic models of democracy: simple and complex majoritarianism. These models differ not only in their electoral and party systems, but also in the style of coalition-building. Simple majoritarianism concentrates executive power in a single majority party; complex majoritarianism envisions the formation of shifting, issue-specific coalitions among multiple parties whose programs differ across multiple conflict dimensions. The latter pattern of coalition formation is very difficult to create and sustain under pure parliamentary government. A separation of powers between executive and legislature can facilitate such a pattern, while also achieving central goals of simple majoritarianism: identifiable cabinet alternatives before the election and stable cabinets afterward. The separation of powers can thus balance simple and complex majoritarianism in ways that are unavailable under parliamentarism. The article also compares the presidential and semi-parliamentary versions of the separation of powers. It argues that the latter has important advantages, e.g., when it comes to resolving inter-branch deadlock, as it avoids the concentration of executive power in a single human being.
This article analyses salient trade-offs in the design of democracy. It grounds this analysis in a distinction between two basic models of democracy: simple and complex majoritarianism. These models differ not only in their electoral and party systems, but also in the style of coalition-building. Simple majoritarianism concentrates executive power in a single majority party; complex majoritarianism envisions the formation of shifting, issue-specific coalitions among multiple parties whose programs differ across multiple conflict dimensions. The latter pattern of coalition formation is very difficult to create and sustain under pure parliamentary government. A separation of powers between executive and legislature can facilitate such a pattern, while also achieving central goals of simple majoritarianism: identifiable cabinet alternatives before the election and stable cabinets afterward. The separation of powers can thus balance simple and complex majoritarianism in ways that are unavailable under parliamentarism. The article also compares the presidential and semi-parliamentary versions of the separation of powers. It argues that the latter has important advantages, e.g., when it comes to resolving inter-branch deadlock, as it avoids the concentration of executive power in a single human being.