Autorität: Herrschaft ohne Zwang – Anerkennung ohne Deliberation

Alongside with democracy and justice, authority is one of the most important concepts of political thought. As authority is often understood as the unconstrained but also unquestionable acceptance of hierarchy, the relationship between authority and democracy has always been marked by tensions. Following four different chains of argument addressing authority, this article shows that this core concept is in danger of losing its precision in the attempt of dissolving those tensions in recent debates in political sciences. Either the term is used in such a broad sense that anyone can have or be assigned authority or it is identified with power in general or the legitimate power of command so that only and all the people in power have authority. Both strategies of dissolving the tensions between authority and democracy render the concept at best ambiguous and at worst diffuse or even dispensable. On the contrary, the aim of the paper is to argue for authority to be a political core category which can only maintain this position when it means something other than democratic power to act on the one hand and legitimate rule or decision-making competence, respectively, on the other.     

To depend on one's children or to depend on oneself: savings for old-age and children's impact on wealth

How did workers make provisions for old age before the introduction of old age pensions? What was the relative importance of dependence on children and saving for old age respectively? This article concerns the transition from a traditional family-based system for economic support in old age to a more modern system. Regarding the nineteenth century, studies have shown that (a) savings generally were insufficient for full retirement, and that (b) families were dependent on children's incomes when the breadwinner became older. Little attention has been paid to the question of how the relative importance of these two alternatives changed during the century. This question is addressed here in a cross-sectional study of net wealth based on probate inventories for three Swedish towns in the 1820s and the 1900s.

The results show that in general the economic importance of children was larger among the lower socio-economic strata. They also reveal that net costs for having children increased between the investigated periods. This means that dependence on children became more expensive. Consequently, the economic importance of this alternative decreased. This may have been a strong motive for the fertility transition.

On the other hand, net wealth for workers increased at the end of the nineteenth century. Financial assets constituted a great part of the increase. Workers with children had less financial savings than those without children, showing that there was a conflict between the traditional and the modern systems for support in old age. However, still at the turn of the twentieth century funds were generally too small to allow an old worker to retire. These results indicate that neither the old, nor the modern systems, fully satisfied the need for support in old age. This may explain why several Western European countries introduced old age pensions at the beginning of the twentieth century.     

‘Telling our Way of Life': Modes of Mediating Social Life in German and Polish Primary-School Textbooks

The events of 1989-1991 in Central and Eastern Europe brought political and economic changes to the post-Communist societies, which required them to redraw the social and psychological maps of their countries and carried with them the promise of partaking in the 'Western way of life'. The introduction of liberalised ideologies, both at the official level and in most of the freed media, also had to be translated into the countries' education systems. New textbooks that would accommodate the new social and political realities had to be written. We are interested in this article in whether and how these new realities are reflected in primary-school teaching materials. For this paper, our analysis will focus on data from two current textbooks that are used in German and Polish primary schools, respectively. We shall be focusing particularly upon those units of the book aimed at defining or describing realities. Taking into account both linguistic and visual modes of representation, we are interested in revealing the 'way of life', the lived ideologies, constructed in these textbooks.     

Allele frequencies of 19 STR loci in a Philippine population generated using AmpFlSTR multiplex and ALF singleplex systems

Allele frequencies for the 19 short tandem repeat (STR) loci CSF1PO, D2S1338, D3S1358, D5S818, D7S820, D8S306, D8S1179, D13S317, D16S539, D18S51, D19S433, D21S11, DHFRP2 (FOLP23), F13A01, FES/FPS, FGA, TH01, TPOX, and vWA were obtained from a sample of 106 unrelated Filipinos from different regions of the Philippine archipelago.     

The use of pulmonary interstitial emphysema as an indicator of live birth

Making the determination of live birth versus stillbirth in a discarded newborn infant based on gross and microscopic autopsy findings can be a challenging task for the forensic pathologist. The traditional criteria for live birth determination are frequently challenged in court, and indisputable evidence of live birth remains elusive. The histologic finding of pulmonary interstitial emphysema has not been considered as a useful determinant of live birth. The authors report two cases of discarded newborn infants in which the finding of pulmonary interstitial emphysema was used as an indicator of live birth.     

Political steering: how the EU employs power in its neighbourhood policy towards Morocco

Although the European Union’s engagement beyond its borders is ultimately about power, the concept remains under-utilized in empirical analyses of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). This article therefore proposes political steering as an analytical framework to conceptualize and track the empirical use and entanglements of diverse forms of power, highlighting genuine soft mechanisms. These bind actors to discursive practices because formalized sanctions or institutions are absent. This case study of the EU’s human rights and rule-of-law promotion in Morocco reveals how such soft mechanisms are intertwined with indirect steering mechanisms to achieve technicalization of policy reform at the governmental level and parallel politicization at the societal level.     

Public Opinion Polls,Voter Turnout,and Welfare: An Experimental Study

We experimentally study the impact of public opinion poll releases on voter turnout and welfare in a participation game. We find higher overall turnout rates when polls inform the electorate about the levels of support for the candidates than when polls are prohibited. Distinguishing between allied and floating voters, our data show that this increase in turnout is entirely due to floating voters. When polls indicate equal levels of support for the candidates, turnout is high and welfare is low (compared to the situation without polls). In contrast, when polls reveal more unequal levels of support, turnout is lower with than without this information, while the effect of polls on welfare is nonnegative. Finally, many of our results are well predicted by quantal response (logit) equilibrium.