From Benchmarking to Final Status? Kosovo and The Problem of an International Administration's Open-Ended Mandate

This contribution examines certain inherent shortcomings ofan ‘open-ended’ institution-building operation forwhich the future status of the entity in statu nascendi remainsundecided. It first addresses the policy of conditionality throughwhich Kosovo’s international administration attempts tomeasure the performance of local institutions against imported‘standards’. The external representation functionof an international administration acting on behalf of a non-stateterritorial entity, as an agent of necessity, is then analysed,considering recent and little-known developments and suggestingthat UNMIK’s practice supports the argument that ‘internationalized’territories possess limited legal personality. Turning ‘inward’to a sphere of domestic governance, the contribution highlightssome of the problems encountered with regard to the privatizationof public assets in Kosovo. Here, it argues that UNMIK is awkwardlycaught between the pursuit of both the interests of the territoryunder its administration and the collective interest of theorganized international community – two sets of interestswhich can collide head-on. The article concludes by suggestingthat an international territorial agent should not, as a rule,attempt to mediate a solution, but endeavour to represent theterritory in good faith.

‘You gave us freedom, but not a future’.¹

     

Betriebsanlagengenehmigung,Gutachten

Sachverst?ndigengutachten aus den Jahren 1999 bzw 2002 k?nnen für die Beurteilung der Genehmigungsf?higkeit einer Betriebsanlage im Jahre 2011 keine taugliche Grundlage bilden. Der zum Beweis des Vorliegens der Genehmigungsvoraussetzungen des § 77 GewO 1994 herangezogene Sachverst?ndige kann seiner Beurteilung vom Konsenswerber vorgelegte Messberichte zu Grunde legen, sofern er diese nach eigenverantwortlicher überprüfung für unbedenklich h?lt.     

Bescheidverkündung nur unmittelbar nach Verhandlung zulässig

Aus § 67g Abs 2 Z 2 AVG folgt, dass die mündliche Verkündung eines Bescheides überhaupt zu entfallen hat, wenn dieser nicht unmittelbar im Anschluss an die mündliche Verhandlung beschlossen werden kann. Eine entgegen § 67g Abs 2 AVG erfolgte mündliche "Verkündung" des Bescheides ist unwirksam, sodass der Bescheid durch die Zustellung der schriftlichen Ausfertigung zu erlassen ist. Eine solche Verkündung unterbricht nicht die Verj?hrung.     

Trotz Art 6 MRK keine mündliche Verhandlung bei Aufhebung einer einstweiligen Verfügung, wenn nur Rechtsfragen und "technische Fragen" zu klären sind

Ist Verfahrensgegenstand eine einstweilige Verfügung nach § 382b EO, liegt eine Entscheidung über "civil rights" vor. Somit ist Art 6 MRK auch im Provisorialverfahren anwendbar. Die Aufhebung einer einstweiligen Verfügung erfordert trotz Art 6 MRK keine mündliche Verhandlung, wenn bei unstrittigem Sachverhalt lediglich Rechtsfragen oder in hohem Ma? technische Fragen zu kl?ren sind. Die blo?e ?nderung der Beweislage bildet keinen Grund für die Aufhebung einer einstweiligen Verfügung. Die analoge Anwendung der Vorschriften der ZPO über die Wiederaufnahmsklage ist im Provisorialverfahren nicht vorgesehen.     

Parties and their Leaders. Does it matter how they match? The German General Elections 2009 in comparison

The ‘personalization of politics’ hypothesis assumes that personalization takes place in election campaigns, in the mass-media, and in the calculus of voting. We claim that the distinction between person/leader and organization implicitly assumed by the personalization hypothesis does not capture how voters observe politics. In contrast, our hypothesis is that evaluation criteria regarding parties and leaders are not in competition but reinforcing. This hypothesis is investigated by looking at the relevance of party and leader evaluations for vote choice in the German Federal Elections in 1998, 2002, 2005, and 2009. The results show that party evaluation matter more than leader evaluation and, more importantly, a match of parties and their leaders with regard to general evaluations determine vote choice as good as single evaluations together.     

Turnout in gubernatorial and senatorial primary and general elections in the South, 1922–90: A rational choice model of the effects of short-run and long-run electoral competition on relative turnout

Using data on non-presidential-year elections for governor and U.S. Senators in eight southern states over the period 1922– 1990, we provide a rational-choice-inspired model of the factors that should be expected to affect the relative levels of turnout in primaries as compared to general elections. Both V.O. Key and Anthony Downs have argued that voters will be more likely to participate in the elections in which they can most expect to be decisive. V.O. Key (1949) proposed that when general elections are usually lop-sided because of one-party dominance of a state's politics the primary of the dominant party of the state should have a higher turnout than the general election. Downs argued that turnout should be higher in competitive elections. Our modelling combines these ideas. We use as our dependent variable the ratio of primary to general election turnout in each year. We posit that this ratio will increase (1) the greater the degree of within-party competition in the primary (especially that within the dominant party of a state, if there is one), and (2) the weaker the degree of between party competition in the general election. In addition to election-specific effects, we also posit long-run effects, such that the ratio for the offices of governor and U.S. Senator will be affected not merely by the degrees of competition within and between parties specific to any given election, but also by the long-run trends in party competition. This hypothesis leads us to expect that, (3) in the South, with the rise of the Republican party, the ratio of primary to general election turnout should decline over time. All of our expectations about the links between turnout and competition are strongly supported. We argue that rational choice models of turnout perform quite well when we view them in a comparative statics perspective, rather than using them to make predictions about who will and who will not vote in any given election.     

Democratization in Conflict Research: How Conceptualization Affects Operationalization and Testing Outcomes

Using the debate over democratization and conflict, we demonstrate how the connection between conceptualization and operationalization can play a decisive role in testing falsifiable hypotheses. We discuss seven different operationalizations of regime change based on three different conceptualizations of democracy. Although we find high correlations between different measures of democracy, when they are used to capture regime change, the correlations drop precipitously. In multivariate estimations of the effect of regime change on a range of conflict variables, we generate widely disparate results, providing no consistent support that democratization affects conflict. We thus demonstrate that decisions about conceptualization and subsequent operationalization have decisive impact on the inference we produce. In contrast, our controls for the effect of institutionalized democracy consistently show a negative relationship between joint democracy and conflict. Finally, autocratic regime change seems to be more robustly correlated with a range of conflict behaviors than heretofore recognized in this literature.