European defence and the new détente: The collapse of the cold war system

France in World Politics. Edited by Robert Aldrich and John Connell. London: Routledge, 1989. Pp. 229. £30.00.

Franco‐British Defence Cooperation: A New Entente Cordiale? Edited by Yves Boyer, Pierre Lellouche and John Roper. London: Routledge for the Royal Institute of International Affairs and l'Institut Français des Relations Internationales, 1989. Pp. xii + 194. £30.00.

The New Détente: Rethinking East‐West Relations. Edited by Mary Kaldor, Gerard Holden and Richard Falk. London and Tokyo: Verso and the United Nations University, 1989. Pp. 420. £34.95 (hardback) and £11.95 (paperback).

Strangers and Friends: The Franco‐German Security Relationship. Edited by Robbin Laird. London: Pinter Publishers in association with John Spiers for the Central Research Program of the Institute for Defense Analyses. Pp. 150. £29.95.     

The Effects of ‘Social Expectation’ on the Development of Civil Society in Japan

The European Union (EU) stands out among the major trading powers for its significant and dramatic response to new demands for access and participation in its external trade policymaking process. A spectacular range of mechanisms designed to increase the involvement of civil society organizations, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), have been introduced recently. This article examines whether these new political opportunities in the EU have an impact on the trade processes and policy outcomes by revisiting a case that has been celebrated as indicative of the potential of global civil society to promote social justice—the Access to Medicines campaign. The findings show that although NGOs were instrumental in providing education, raising awareness, and giving a voice to broader societal concerns about the social and health-related aspects of the proposed trade deals, their impact on policy outcomes was limited. EU policymakers did not pursue policies that placed public health concerns over stringent intellectual property right protection, despite NGO involvement in the external trade policymaking process. I argue that the robust liberal and legal epistemic foundations of the international trade regime effectively hamstrung NGO efforts to move the external trade policies in more sustainable and just directions. These findings have broad implications for the power of epistemes and their ability to enable and delimit NGO agency in global economic governance.     

BundOnline 2005 — The E-Government Initiative of the German Federal Administration

Abstract

The German e-govemment initiative BundOnline 2005 was launched by the German government in 2001 to ensure that citizens, enterprises and the administration itself can access the services provided by the federal administration easier, faster and at lower costs through the Internet. Euro 1.65 billion are devoted to this purpose. The German e-government initiative is characterized by central coordination, central implementation of shared components and the establishment of competence centers. Finally, the current status is presented especially with respect to the challenges applying to the German legal environment-German data protection requirements and the federal legislation.     

The dark side of the German ‘welcome culture’: investigating the causes behind attacks on refugees in 2015

In 2015, Germany experienced a record high influx of refugees – and received international praise for its ‘welcome culture’. At the same time, however, attacks on refugees rose to an alarming level. This article describes the distribution of these attacks and probes their causes, using detailed socioeconomic and political data while modelling a hierarchical data structure. Controlling for further relevant factors taken from the extant literature, the analysis first tests whether the strength of extreme right political parties plays a role and, second, it models a contagion effect, taking into account spatial as well as temporal proximity. The findings suggest that the strength of right-wing parties in a district considerably boosts the probability of attacks on refugees in that area. They also corroborate the idea of behavioural contagion. The set of social-structural variables employed as controls yielded only limited explanatory power.     

Variability or Moderation? The Effects of Ambivalence on Political Opinions

Prior research theorizes that ambivalence makes opinions about an object unreliable in the sense of being haphazard, unpredictable, or variable. As such, ambivalence is a prominent explanation for seeming nonattitudes in opinion surveys. This study proposes an alternative account of the effects of ambivalence on attitudes. It posits that people who are ambivalent about an issue split the difference between their conflicting considerations by taking a position near the middle of the bipolar opinion scale, which reflects a moderate attitude. I show how the widely-used method of modeling the supposed variability of ambivalent opinions conflates variability and moderation. This problem is addressed by modeling variability and moderation of attitudes separately, without this confound. Using this strategy in analyses involving four datasets and three policy domains, the results show that ambivalence is associated with moderate, not variable, attitudes. Ambivalence does not increase the variability of opinions but, rather, moves them quite predictably toward the middle of the response scale. The results recast our understanding of the effects of ambivalence on political opinions and raise questions about the ability of ambivalence to explain nonattitudes in surveys.     

Economic mobility trajectories of the Russian population： The experience of the last two decades

This paper is to study the economic mobility trajectories of the Russian population in the last two decades, each of which has brought about both negative shocks and broadening of the opportunity horizons for people＇s economic advancement. The information base of the research is provided by the data of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey （RLMS） for the period of 1994-2008. The investigated period Russia clearly falls into two sub-periods-the 1990s and the 2000s： The first one is characterized by sharp shifts towards impoverishment of the population and growth of economic inequality; the second one-by considerable masses of people overcoming poverty with a still high level of economic inequality. The results indicate the following The proportion of the adult population who have been chronically poor during the whole contemporary history of Russia proves to be twice as little as the proportion of those who have been “chronically non-poor”. However, both groups in total have not constituted the majority, since the majority have been migrating between the extremes of persistent well-being and ill-being during this period with the stream of those coming out of poverty prevailing in numbers.     

The Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment on Participants’ Residential Environments

We used the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing experiment to inform how Housing Choice Vouchers and housing mobility policies can assist families living in high-poverty areas to make opportunity moves to higher quality neighborhoods, across a wide range of neighborhood attributes. We compared the neighborhood attainment of the three randomly assigned MTO treatment groups (low-poverty voucher, Section 8 voucher, control group) at 1997 and 2002 locations (4–7 years after baseline), using survey reports, and by linking residential histories to numerous different administrative and population-based data sets. Compared with controls, families in low-poverty and Section 8 groups experienced substantial improvements in neighborhood conditions across diverse measures, including economic conditions, social systems (e.g., collective efficacy), physical features of the environment (e.g., tree cover) and health outcomes. The low-poverty voucher group, moreover, achieved better neighborhood attainment compared with Section 8. Treatment effects were largest for New York, New York, and Los Angeles, California. We discuss the implications of our findings for expanding affordable housing policy.     

Who Takes the Blame? The Strategic Effects of Collateral Damage

Can civilians caught in civil wars reward and punish armed actors for their behavior? If so, do armed actors reap strategic benefits from treating civilians well and pay for treating them poorly? Using precise geo‐coded data on violence in Iraq from 2004 through 2009, we show that both sides are punished for the collateral damage they inflict. Coalition killings of civilians predict higher levels of insurgent violence and insurgent killings predict less violence in subsequent periods. This symmetric reaction is tempered by preexisting political preferences; the anti‐insurgent reaction is not present in Sunni areas, where the insurgency was most popular, and the anti‐Coalition reaction is not present in mixed areas. Our findings have strong policy implications, provide support for the argument that information civilians share with government forces and their allies is a key constraint on insurgent violence, and suggest theories of intrastate violence must account for civilian agency.     

‘New politics’ in German labour market policy? The implications of the recent Hartz reforms for the German welfare state

The twin predicaments of German labour market performance and welfare state performance triggered an ongoing debate on reforming the German model. Recently, this debate has yielded an outcome in the form of the so-called Hartz laws, a bundle of labour market policies aimed at the reduction of unemployment and the decrease of non-wage labour costs. The Hartz reforms have played a prominent role in the public discussion, but are they really a watershed as both optimists and pessimists claim? In this article we investigate in what sense the Hartz reforms mark a substantive political change and how they are related to similar processes in other countries. To characterise the policy output we discuss three views of policy reform: reform as a process of policy-learning, reform as a process of competitive realignment and reform as a process of reinforcing path dependence. We show which of the three paradigms accounts for which part of the political result. We find evidence for both policy diffusion and retrenchment, but it is too early to speak of a change of regime. Rather, both the changes thus far and the blocked proposals follow a traditional German logic of strong institutional resistance.     

The persecution of German Romanies: the case of Osnabrück, 1933–46

Studies of racial persecution in Germany, particularly during the Nazi period, now appear on almost a daily basis, so that every victimized minority has received attention. Antisemitism remains the main focus of research but the Romanies have now begun to attract scholars. While historians have studied Jews in virtually every location and over short time periods, they have tended to examine the situation of the Romanies at the national level using a longer time frame, recognizing the continuities of racial persecution that link the Nazi years with the rest of the twentieth century. Panayi brings out these longer-term patterns by focusing on the case of Osnabrück. He begins with an account of the historiography of Romanies at both the local and national level, and contrasts this with the general attention that German history of the first half of the twentieth century, especially the Third Reich, has received. The narrative then moves on to use the limited information available on the Osnabrück Romanies to carry out a detailed examination of the realities of their everyday life and the attitudes of the authorities towards them in the town between 1933 and 1946. Panayi’s study falls into the German social history approach of Alltagsgeschichte, which uses the specific to draw out the realities of the general national picture.     

The New White Flight?: The Effects of Political Appeals to Latinos on White Democrats

Political Behavior - One explanation for the post-1965 shift in the vote choice of White Americans posits that it was driven by a shift in the racial imagery of the two major parties. The growing...     

Intelligence and the ‘Mindset’: The German invasion of Norway in 1940

‘Weserübung’, the German invasion of Norway and Denmark on 9 April 1940, was a brilliantly successful surprise attack, both strategically and tactically. Strategic surprise was obtained because the idea that Germany was about to launch a major invasion of Norway was remote from any of the preconceived scenarios about Germany's next move. Germany's achievement of tactical surprise was also aided by bad weather in the North Sea. The main reason for the failure of both Norwegian and British policy-makers to comprehend what the Germans were up to lies in the importance of the ‘mindset’. On both sides of the North Sea the conventional wisdom was that Germany would not attempt an invasion of Norway against the supremacy of British sea power. Hence all incoming information was interpreted in Oslo in the light of the next mindset, namely that only a determined British attempt to take control of the Norwegian coast could trigger an armed German retaliation. In London, incoming intelligence was interpreted so as to conform to the Admiralty's preconceived scenario of a German naval breakout into the North Atlantic.     

Effects of Assets Structure on the Financial Performance： Evidence From Sultanate of Oman

The main objective of this study is to examine the effects of assets structure （fixed assets and current assets） on the financial performance of some manufacturing companies listed on Muscat Securities Market （MSM）. The methodology of the study is content analysis of annual reports of a sample of 28 out of 70 （40%） companies for the period 2008-2012. The assets structure is measured by fixed assets turnover and current assets turnover while the financial performance is measured by return on assets （ROA） and return on equity （ROE）. The study examines two main hypotheses. The first one examines the effects of total assets turnover on ROA whereas the second one examines the effects of total assets turnover on ROE. The overall result for the study is that the structure of assets does not have a strong impact on profitability in terms of ROE. This result means that if the structure of assets is changing then the ROA will not change. Another result of the study indicates that only the fixed assets have impact on ROE unlike ROA. Another result of the study suggests that the effect of asset structure has an impact on ROE only in petro-chemical sector.     

The more,the better? Counterfactual evidence on the effect of compulsory voting on the consistency of party choice

Compulsory voting (CV) undoubtedly raises electoral turnout. Yet does it also affect individual party choices and aggregate election outcomes? Previous studies have focused on partisan or ‘directional’ effects of CV in favour of, for example, social‐democratic or anti‐establishment parties. These effects are usually small, however. Using survey data from the Belgian General Elections Study, this article finds that CV primarily affects the consistency, rather than the direction, of party choices. In particular, the analyses suggest that CV compels a substantial share of uninterested and less knowledgeable voters to the polls. These voters, in turn, cast votes that are clearly less consistent with their own political preferences than those of the more informed and motivated voluntary voters. Claims that CV promotes equal representation of political interests are therefore questionable.     

German elections: more of the same?

As Germany's citizens prepare to vote in elections for the Bundestag, its European counterparts are paying closer attention than in previous years. But just as this election campaign has failed to spark much enthusiasm domestically, so its impact on Europe might be similarly anti-climactic.     

Vive la Différence? The Impact of Diversity on the Turnover Intention of Public Employees and Performance of Public Agencies

ABSTRACT

This article addresses previous shortcomings in diversity management scholarship by testing an expanded diversity model borrowed from the work of Page (2007 Page , S. E. 2007 . The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies . Princeton , NJ : Princeton University Press . [Google Scholar]). Page's model assumes diversity can be measured as both a mean and a variance, and that it consists of cognitive, identity, and preference characteristics. We link Page's conceptualization of diversity to both individual-level outcomes and organizational performance. Results indicate cognitive, preference, and identity diversity have either no or small, mixed effects on employee turnover intentions and agency performance; instead, findings suggest employee voice and organizational size and structure matter more than diversity in our sample. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical ramifications of our findings.     

The demise of the last westminster system? Comments on the report of New Zealand's Royal Commission on the Electoral System

The New Zealand government set up a Royal Commission to consider the country's electoral system. It produced an unexpectedly radical Report, challenging some of the basic assumptions of the Westminster system under which New Zealand has been governed for 100 years. This article considers the wider implications of the Report, criticizing some of its assumptions, but accepting its basic analysis—a general philosophical dislike of the principle of concentrating power in the hands of the majority. It also explores the Report's treatment of alternative forms of proportional representation.