Invasive Neobiota – neue Herausforderung im Umweltrecht

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The breakdown of the EU’s strategic partnership with Russia: from strategic patience towards a strategic failure

This article investigates the evolution of the European Union (EU)–Russia relationship to understand whether Russia’s violations of Ukraine’s territorial integrity in 2014 destroyed the EU–Russia strategic partnership. It uncovers fundamental differences in three key sectors—security, trade and energy—and regarding the broader design of their contractual relationship. Despite the appearance to the contrary, their relationship was never a well-functioning ‘partnership of choice’. Structural asymmetries contradictory approaches to and fundamentally different understandings of the role and utility of their relationship affected the EU–Russia relationship from the very beginning. The widening gaps were not addressed nor were the differences of the two actors acknowledged, let alone overcome. The confrontation over Ukraine was therefore not the cause but rather a symptom of deeply rooted problems. The blame for talking past each other and engaging in a marriage of convenience, rather than a real partnership, falls on both the EU and the Russian leadership.     

Bündnisse für Arbeit: Nationale Handlungsfähigkeit im europäischen Regimewettbewerb

In recent years, new forms of tripartite concertation between governments, employers’ confederations and trade unions have re-emerged in the form of social pacts. The paper aims at explaining the emergence of social pacts under the impact of European regime competition. It argues that governments increasingly seek structural reforms of the labour market in order to solve the employment crisis. These structural reforms are however hardly attainable without the co-operation of the social partners. Using tripartite agreements, governments try to get the acceptance of trade unions to a reform policy which is conducive for employment growth. While social pacts are struck under the impact of regime competition, the political exchange between trade unions and governments does not have to foster this competition, but social pacts can facilitate European co-ordination of employment policies, since they strengthen the role of social partners.     

The Limits of Issue Ownership Dynamics: The Constraining Effect of Party Preference

Issue ownership theory argues that when a voter considers a party to be the most competent amongst others to deal with an issue (that is, the party “owns” the issue), chances are the voter will vote for that party. Recent work has shown that perceptions of issue ownership are dynamic: they are affected by the media coverage of party messages. However, based on the broad literature on partisan bias, we predict that parties' efforts to change issue ownership perceptions will have a difficult time breaching the perceptual screen created by a voter's party preference. Using two separate experiments with a similar design we show that the effect of partisan issue messages on issue competence is moderated by party preference. The effect of issue messages is reinforced when people already like a party, and blocked when people dislike a party.