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In the past decades, development cooperation (DC) led by conventional bi- and multilateral donors has been joined by a large number of small, private or public-private donors. This pluralism of actors raises questions as to whether or not these new donors are able to implement projects more or less effectively than their conventional counterparts. In contrast to their predecessors, the new donors have committed themselves to be more pragmatic, innovative and flexible in their development cooperation measures. However, they are also criticized for weakening the function of local civil society and have the reputation of being an intransparent and often controversial alternative to public services. With additional financial resources and their new approach to development, the new donors have been described in the literature as playing a controversial role in transforming development cooperation. This dissertation compares the effectiveness of initiatives by new and conventional donors with regard to the provision of public goods and services to the poor in the water and sanitation sector in India.
India is an emerging country but it is experiencing high poverty rates and poor water supply in predominantly rural areas. It lends itself for analyzing this research theme as it is currently being confronted by a large number of actors and approaches that aim to find solutions for these challenges .
In the theoretical framework of this dissertation, four governance configurations are derived from the interaction of varying actor types with regard to hierarchical and non-hierarchical steering of their interactions. These four governance configurations differ in decision-making responsibilities, accountability and delegation of tasks or direction of information flow. The assumption on actor relationships and steering is supplemented by possible alternative explanations in the empirical investigation, such as resource availability, the inheritance of structures and institutions from previous projects in a project context, gaining acceptance through beneficiaries (local legitimacy) as a door opener, and asymmetries of power in the project context.
Case study evidence from seven projects reveals that the actors' relationship is important for successful project delivery. Additionally, the results show that there is a systematic difference between conventional and new donors. Projects led by conventional donors were consistently more successful, due to an actor relationship that placed the responsibility in the hands of the recipient actors and benefited from the trust and reputation of a long-term cooperation. The trust and reputation of conventional donors always went along with a back-up from federal level and trickled down as reputation also at local level implementation. Furthermore, charismatic leaders, as well as the acquired structures and institutions of predecessor projects, also proved to be a positive influencing factor for successful project implementation.
Despite the mixed results of the seven case studies, central recommendations for action can be derived for the various actors involved in development cooperation. For example, new donors could fulfill a supplementary function with conventional donors by developing innovative project approaches through pilot studies and then implementing them as a supplement to the projects of conventional donors on the ground. In return, conventional donors would have to make room the new donors by integrating their approaches into already programs in order to promote donor harmonization. It is also important to identify and occupy niches for activities and to promote harmonization among donors on state and federal sides.
The empirical results demonstrate the need for a harmonization strategy of different donor types in order to prevent duplication, over-experimentation and the failure of development programs. A transformation to successful and sustainable development cooperation can only be achieved through more coordination processes and national self-responsibility.
Text des Vortrages vom 13. April 2008, gehalten im Rahmen der öffentlichen Sonntagsvorlesung "Potsdamer Köpfe" im Alten Rathaus Potsdam Inhalt: Warum Potsdam ein ,neues Toleranzedikt' braucht Tolerantes Brandenburg als Zukunftsfrage Ideengeschichtliche Impulse Potsdam erfindet sich neu Informationen zum Potsdamer Toleranzedikt
Voting for Votes
(2022)
Scholars frequently expect parties to act strategically in parliament, hoping to affect their electoral fortunes. Voters assumingly assess parties by their activity and vote accordingly. However, the retrospective voting literature looks mostly at the government's outcomes, leaving the opposition understudied. We argue that, for opposition parties, legislative voting constitutes an effective vote-seeking activity as a signaling tool of their attitude toward the government. We suggest that conflictual voting behavior affects voters through two mechanisms: as a signal of opposition valence and as means of ideological differentiation from the government. We present both aggregate- and individual-level analyses, leveraging a dataset of 169 party observations from 10 democracies and linking it to the CSES survey data of 27,371 respondents. The findings provide support for the existence of both mechanisms. Parliamentary conflict on legislative votes has a general positive effect on opposition parties' electoral performance, conditional on systemic and party-specific factors.
Der Beitrag widmet sich zwei überaus fruchtbaren theoretischen Ansätzen in der Policy-Forschung und darüber hinaus: der Vetospielertheorie und Vetopunkt-Ansätzen. Neben den Grundzügen beider Ansätze stellen wir grundlegende Entwicklungslinien und Probleme dieser Literaturen anhand beispielhafter Studien dar. Es zeigt sich, dass beide Ansätze teils kontroverse Annahmen treffen, zu denen es plausible Alternativen gibt. Zum Beispiel kann das Verhalten von Koalitionsparteien im Policy-Prozess anders als von der Vetospielertheorie angenommen modelliert werden. Die kausalen Effekte bestimmter Institutionen oder Vetopunkte können zudem je nach Kontext variieren. Diesem Kontext sollte größere Beachtung geschenkt werden.
Quality management (QM) in teaching and learning has strongly “infected” the higher education sector and spread around the world. It has almost everywhere become an integral part of higher education reforms. While existing research on QM mainly focuses on the national level from a macro-perspective, its introduction at the institutional level is only rarely analyzed. The present article addresses this research gap. Coming from the perspective of organization studies, it examines the factors that were crucial for the introduction of QM at higher education institutions in Germany. As the introduction of QM can be considered to be a process of organizational change, the article refers to Kurt Lewin’s seminal concept of “unfreezing” organizations as a theoretical starting point. Methodologically, a mixed methods approach is applied by combining qualitative data derived from interviews with institutional quality managers and quantitative data gathered from a nationwide survey. The results show that the introduction of QM is initiated by either internal or external processes. Furthermore, some institutions follow a rather voluntary approach of unfreezing, while others show modes of forced unfreezing. Consequently, the way how QM was introduced has important implications for its implementation.
In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir den Zusammenhang zwischen staatlicher Regulierung im Umweltschutz und der Umweltperformanz. Ausgehend von drei theoretischen Perspektiven, welche die Beziehung von Staat und Markt beim Umweltschutz unterschiedlich konzeptualisieren, identifizieren wir fünf Pfade, wie staatlicher Eingriff und Umweltperformanz miteinander verknüpft sein könnten. Wir untersuchen dann die empirische Relevanz dieser Pfade mit einer quantitativen Analyse, die 29 umweltpolitische Maßnahmen in für 37 Länder und den Zeitraum von 1970 bis 2010 umfasst. Dabei finden wir zumindest für einige Politikbereiche und einige Länder Hinweise, die auf eine Effektivität nationalstaatlicher Regulierung hinweisen. Zukünftige Forschung kann auf unserem Rahmen aufbauen, um weitere Hypothesen zum Policy-Outcome-Nexus zu generieren und zu testen.
Typen von Forschungsdesigns
(2022)
Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschungsdesigns umfassen alle wesentlichen Entscheidungen, die im Forschungsprozess getroffen werden müssen. Der Beitrag unterscheidet drei rundlegende Typen von Forschungsdesigns: x-zentriert, y-zentriert und kontrastiv. Das x-zentrierte Design versucht einen theoretisch spezifizierten kausalen Effekt zu identifizieren und dessen Größe möglichst genau und ohne Verzerrungen zu schätzen. Das y-zentrierte Design versucht mehrere komplementäre Theorien über kausale Effekte so zu kombinieren, dass bestimmte Phänomene möglichst gut erklärt werden. Das kontrastive Design vergleicht die Erklärungskraft von zwei oder mehr konkurrierenden Theorien. Die Unterscheidung der drei Typen ist für qualitative Fallstudien ebenso relevant wie für Experimente oder statistische Studien mit Beobachtungsdaten. Der Beitrag grenzt die drei Typen voneinander ab, erklärt ihre jeweiligen Annahmen und diskutiert ihre Vor- und Nachteile sowie die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen ihrer Kombination. Daneben diskutiert er den Unterschied zwischen Modellen und Theorien sowie die Bedeutung des Sparsamkeitsprinzips bei der Entwicklung und Bewertung wissenschaftlicher Theorien und Erklärungen.
Translating innovation
(2017)
This doctoral thesis studies the process of innovation adoption in public administrations, addressing the research question of how an innovation is translated to a local context. The study empirically explores Design Thinking as a new problem-solving approach introduced by a federal government organisation in Singapore. With a focus on user-centeredness, collaboration and iteration Design Thinking seems to offer a new way to engage recipients and other stakeholders of public services as well as to re-think the policy design process from a user’s point of view. Pioneered in the private sector, early adopters of the methodology include civil services in Australia, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the United States as well as Singapore. Hitherto, there is not much evidence on how and for which purposes Design Thinking is used in the public sector.
For the purpose of this study, innovation adoption is framed in an institutionalist perspective addressing how concepts are translated to local contexts. The study rejects simplistic views of the innovation adoption process, in which an idea diffuses to another setting without adaptation. The translation perspective is fruitful because it captures the multidimensionality and ‘messiness’ of innovation adoption. More specifically, the overall research question addressed in this study is: How has Design Thinking been translated to the local context of the public sector organisation under investigation? And from a theoretical point of view: What can we learn from translation theory about innovation adoption processes?
Moreover, there are only few empirical studies of organisations adopting Design Thinking and most of them focus on private organisations. We know very little about how Design Thinking is embedded in public sector organisations. This study therefore provides further empirical evidence of how Design Thinking is used in a public sector organisation, especially with regards to its application to policy work which has so far been under-researched.
An exploratory single case study approach was chosen to provide an in-depth analysis of the innovation adoption process. Based on a purposive, theory-driven sampling approach, a Singaporean Ministry was selected because it represented an organisational setting in which Design Thinking had been embedded for several years, making it a relevant case with regard to the research question. Following a qualitative research design, 28 semi-structured interviews (45-100 minutes) with employees and managers were conducted. The interview data was triangulated with observations and documents, collected during a field research research stay in Singapore.
The empirical study of innovation adoption in a single organisation focused on the intra-organisational perspective, with the aim to capture the variations of translation that occur during the adoption process. In so doing, this study opened the black box often assumed in implementation studies. Second, this research advances translation studies not only by showing variance, but also by deriving explanatory factors. The main differences in the translation of Design Thinking occurred between service delivery and policy divisions, as well as between the first adopter and the rest of the organisation. For the intra-organisational translation of Design Thinking in the Singaporean Ministry the following five factors played a role: task type, mode of adoption, type of expertise, sequence of adoption, and the adoption of similar practices.