Online protection of the child within Europe

This article discusses the online protection available to children and young people within Europe. Children and young people are significant users of information technology and they must be able and comfortable to safely use this technology. The European Union and the Council of Europe have been at the vanguard of attempts to regulate the information society in order to protect young netizens.     

The politics of bank ownership and currency policies in Central and Eastern Europe

This paper argues that state-owned, private domestic, and foreign banks have different preferences for exchange rate policies. More specifically, I posit that governments will be less willing and able to maintain fixed exchange rate arrangements in closed banking systems dominated by government-owned banks than in globalized banking systems with a large presence of foreign banks. The article’s principal claim rests on the notion that ownership structure of the banking system empowers different types of banks, affects their interests, and shapes the responsiveness of government politicians to bank demands. The bank ownership types further influence the stability of the domestic monetary system and financial regulation that are of paramount importance in the determination of exchange rate regimes. An empirical investigation of data on exchange rate regimes for 25 Central and Eastern European countries provides strong support for the theory. The results are robust to alternative estimation techniques, instrumental variable analysis, and the inclusion of several economic and political variables.     

Single-party government,Prime Minister psychology,and the diversionary use of force: theory and evidence from the British case

ABSTRACT

This paper develops expectations about the likelihood of diversionary conflict initiation by parliamentary democracies with single-party majoritarian (SPM) governments. While most of the literature on diversion and governmental arrangement claims that SPMs have little incentive and/or limited capacity to execute diversionary gambits, we contend that the structural and environmental impetuses for diversion in such states are in fact largely indeterminate. We posit that the psychological attributes of prime ministers under SPM – in particular, their level of distrust – is the most important predictor of how they view structural and environmental constraints, and thus of whether they will militarily divert from poor economic conditions. Distrustful prime ministers are predisposed to the use of force, will dwell on the costs of economic problems, and fear that co-partisan MPs (especially in the cabinet) have designs on their office. Thus, despite having a legislative majority, these leaders will choose diversionary conflict over economic policy fixes. We conduct a partial test of this hypothesis in the British case from 1945 to 2007, and our analyses provide robust support.     

Towards a school constitution for freedom -- a comparative analysis in Western and Eastern Europe

This article shows the recent European discussion on and developments in the reform of school government and administration. This reorganisation is directed at reducing state influence and widening self-responsibility of schools. It is a part of a general development towards decentralisation and deregulation, subsidiarity and plurality in civil society. This overview, with illustrations from different countries, shows a general agreement in Western and Eastern Europe that the humanisation of education must also be promoted through liberalisation and democratisation of decision-making. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Third Ways or New Ways? The Post‐Communist Left in Central Europe

Communist successor parties in central Europe are not a homogeneous group of political actors. Processes of organisational reform undertaken in the immediate post-1989 period placed them on a programmatic trajectory which has since proven difficult to successfully modify. Parties that centralised power around a small group of elite actors have enjoyed more flexibility in their attempts to maximise votes and remain ideologically broad. Parties that radically democratised by empowering their memberships and/or middle-ranking officials have remained much more ideologically conservative and have tend to be neo-communist in orientation. This has strongly affected not just their positions in national party systems, but also their attitudes and behaviour towards foreign actors/institutions. Some communist successor parties therefore remain side-lined on the anti-capitalist far-left while others have developed into confident, outward-looking centre-left actors while one - the Slovak SDL - imploded on account of its own internal contradictions.     

Gender mainstreaming and the framing of women's rights in Europe: The contribution of the Council of Europe

Drawing on published materials from the Committee of Ministers, Assembly and expert working groups of the Council of Europe, this paper investigates the distinctive contribution made to the framing of women's rights over the last two decades by this regional organisation, which recent studies of the `Europeanisation' of public policies have largely neglected. Elements of congruence are identified between the major mobilising themes of second wave feminism and the Council's emphasis on protecting individual rights, and its sensitivity to the incompleteness and shortcomings of `actually existing' democratic institutions and practices. The relative openness of its agenda-setting processes is also underlined. The Council's flag ship policies for women are shown to have centred since the mid-1980s on a `politics of presence' frame and the (contested) concept of `parity democracy', and the tensions between these and the more recent turn to gender mainstreaming are explored. But the paper also points to the Council's role in diffusing into the E.U. governance arena women's claims to equal participation and presence in the policy process, and notes recent French and U.K. legislation as testifying to the continuing salience of these claims at the national level. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Crime Trends in Western Europe from 1990 to 2000

This paper analyses the evolution of police recorded crime rates for nine offences (intentional homicide, assault, rape, robbery, theft, vehicle theft, burglary, domestic burglary, and drug offences) over the period 1990–2000 in 16 Western European Countries. The analysis shows that there was an increase in drug and violent offences, while property offences reached a peak at the beginning of the 1990s and started decreasing afterwards. The evolution of property offences can be related to the emergence of a large black market for stolen goods in Central and Eastern Europe at the beginning of the time series, while by the end of it that market was saturated and there had also been a reinforcement of police measures in the frontiers and of security measures in Western European households. The increase in drug offences is correlated to the rise of drug use in Europe shown by other indicators, and can be related to an increased availability of drugs in European markets. Finally, the upward trend in violent offences can be explained partially by gang struggles over the control of illegal markets and by the consolidation of problematic neighbourhoods, but seems also due to a large extent of increase in the reporting of violent offences by their victims and the recording of such offences by the police. The analysis shows that opportunity-based theories provide a satisfactory explanation of the trends in recorded crime, and that the crime opportunities are heavily influenced by socio-economical factors.Versions of this paper were presented at the 3rd Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology (Helsinki, August 27–30, 2003) and at the Societies of Criminology 1st Key Issues Conference (Paris, May 13–15, 2004). The paper was written during a stay at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law (Freiburg imBreisgau, Germany) made possible through the support of Swiss National Science Foundation     

西欧公共行政改革评述

瑞典、英国、荷兰、德国、奥地利、瑞士等西欧国家以新公共管理为主要标志的公共行政改革的总体趋势和基本内容主要包括:权力下放;敌革战略管理、控制和计划、预算制度;确立改革的市场或顾客取向;改革公共人事管理制度等。虽然西欧国家的公共行政改革取得了明显的成效,但也存在着一系列的问题。     

Failed expectations: Quality of government and support for populist parties in Europe

This article addresses an issue previously neglected in the research on support for populist parties: How do perceptions of the local quality of government (QoG) and local service delivery affect voters’ propensity to vote for a populist party? It argues that personal experience with poor QoG makes voters more likely to support populist parties. The argument highlights the interplay between supply and demand factors in explaining populist support and discusses why populist parties have been particularly successful in certain regions in Europe. A unique dataset from the Quality of Government Institute that surveys citizens’ perception of QoG in their area is used to estimate both individual‐ and regional‐level models of the link between perceived local QoG and populist support in Europe. The empirical results show a strong and robust association between within‐country variation in QoG and support for populist parties.     

Status conflicts between Russia and the West: Perceptions and emotional biases

This article looks at the status conflicts between Russia and the West and asks: why do these conflicts exist despite attempts to avoid them? If status conflicts refer to merely a symbolic recognition, then they should arguably be easier to solve than conflicts stemming from competition for power and resources. Yet, status conflicts can be difficult to solve even when they were not conceived as zero-sum games. The article argues that status conflicts cannot be understood without the interplay of perceptions and emotions. First, what really matters is not objective status but perceptions thereof and there seems to be a gap how Russia and the West perceive status in general. Secondly, the perceptions of when status is gained or lost seem to be emotionally loaded. Russia is more willing to understand its relative status when military or economic issues are at stake, but if the dispute deals with international norms and questions of justice Russia is more likely to interpret Western action as violating its status and conversely, it is more likely to interpret its own action as enhancing its status when it is defending such values differently from the West.