Private Military Services in the UK and Germany: Between Partnership and Regulation1

Abstract

Controversial cases such as the aborted coup in Equatorial Guinea and the employment of private contractors in the Abu Ghraib prison have brought the proliferation of private ‘mercenaries’ to worldwide attention. However, the privatization of military security is more diverse and complex than generally suggested. Specifically, one needs to distinguish between the use of private mercenaries in developing countries and the privatization of military services in Europe. Focussing on the latter, this article proposes that the privatization of military services in industrialized countries can be understood in terms of a shift from ‘government’ to ‘governance’. As a consequence, the emergence of a private military industry in Europe is not only characterized by distinct forms of governance failure; European governments have also developed new modes of governance to control the industry. Using the United Kingdom and Germany as examples, this article examines two modes in particular: public private partnerships and governmental regulation.     

Democratization as liberation: competing African perspectives on democracy

Do Africans tend to view democracy in more procedural or more substantive terms? This article argues that African endorsements of liberal and procedural understandings are not as pervasive as much of the literature on democratization suggests. Drawing upon Afrobarometer survey results as well as extensive fieldwork and interviews conducted over the past decade in South Africa, it demonstrates both the historical development and significance of these definitional understandings. By employing a substantive approach and thereby bringing questions of poverty and material inequality to the centre of the analysis, this article seeks to offer a perspective on democratization that helps to explain many of the challenges to the institutionalization of democratic regimes that procedural understandings fail to capture.     

Satisfaction with democracy and collective action problems: the case of the environment

Whether a country is able effectively to address collective action problems is a critical test of its ability to fulfill the demands of its citizens to their satisfaction. We study one particularly important collective action problem: the environment. Using a large panel dataset covering 25 years for some countries, we find that, overall, citizens of European countries are more satisfied with the way democracy works in their country if (a) more environmental policies are in place and if (b) expenditures on the environment are higher, but environmental taxes are lower. The relation between environmental policy and life satisfaction is not as pronounced. The evidence for the effect of environmental quality on both satisfaction with democracy and life satisfaction is not very clear, although we find evidence that citizens value personal mobility (in terms of having a car) highly, but view the presence of trucks as unpleasant. We also document that parents, younger citizens, and those with high levels of educational attainment tend to care more about environmental issues than do non-parents, older citizens, and those with fewer years of schooling.     

Accounting for Voter Heterogeneity within and across Districts with a Factor-Analytic Voter-Choice Model

José Afonso Mazzon Faculdade de Administração e Economia, University of São Paulo, Ave. Prof. Luciano Gualberto, 908, CEP 0558-900 São Paulo, Brazil. e-mail: jamazzon{at}usp.br e-mail: kamakura{at}duke.edu (corresponding author) In this study, we propose a model of individual voter behaviorthat can be applied to aggregate data at the district (or precinct)levels while accounting for differences in political preferencesacross districts and across voters within each district. Ourmodel produces a mapping of the competing candidates and electoraldistricts on a latent "issues" space that describes how politicalpreferences in each district deviate from the average voterand how each candidate caters to average voter preferences withineach district. We formulate our model as a random-coefficientsnested logit model in which the voter first evaluates the candidatesto decide whether or not to cast his or her vote, and then choosesthe candidate who provides him or her with the highest value.Because we allow the random coefficient to vary not only acrossdistricts but also across unobservable voters within each district,the model avoids the Independence of Irrelevant AlternativesAssumption both across districts and within each district, therebyaccounting for the cannibalization of votes among similar candidateswithin and across voting districts. We illustrate our proposedmodel by calibrating it to the actual voting data from the firststage of a two-stage state governor election in the Brazilianstate of Santa Catarina, and then using the estimates to predictthe final outcome of the second stage.     

Negative Issue Ownership

Existing research considers issue ownership to be a positive attribute of political parties, which are seen as ‘owning’ those policy areas where they are particularly competent and engaged. However, for some citizens a party may also be a negative issue owner if it has a particularly bad reputation for its handling of an issue. This article describes and explains aggregate and individual-level patterns of negative issue ownership using a survey-based measure of handling perceptions from the 2013 Austrian National Election Study (n = 3,266). Naming a particular party as a negative issue owner is affected by partisanship, but also by policy preferences and government performance evaluations. The effects of issue importance vary across issues. These findings lay the groundwork for more research on negative attributions of issue ownership and their empirical consequences on vote choice.     

Der Risikoansatz in der europäischen Hochwassermanagementrichtlinie

Zusammenfassung  Die Bewertung der Richtlinie 2007/60/EG (Hochwassermanagementrichtlinie) durch Michael Reinhardt aus ausschlie?lich rechtlicher Sicht greift zu kurz, um die Bedeutung für das deutsche Wasserrecht und vor allem die beh?rdliche Praxis zu erfassen. Der Hochwasserschutz in Deutschland folgt derzeit überwiegend noch einem Sicherheitsansatz, w?hrend die Hochwassermanagementrichtlinie im Geiste eines Risikoansatzes formuliert ist.     

Security governance and the private military industry in Europe and North America

Even before Iraq, the grow ing use of private military contractors has been widely discussed in the academic and public literature. However, the reasons for the proliferation of private military companies and its implications are frequently generalized due to a lack of suitable theoretical approaches for the analysis of private means of violence in contemporary security. Consequently, this article contends, the analysis of the growth of the private military industry typically conflates two separate developments: the failure of some developing states to provide for their national security and the privatization of military services in industrialized nations in Europe and North America. This article focuses on the latter and argues that the concept of security governance can be used as a theoretical framework for understanding the distinct development, problems and solutions for the governance of the private military industry in developed countries.