WHY PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT SERVICES ALWAYS FAIL. DOUBLE‐SIDED ASYMMETRIC INFORMATION AND THE PLACEMENT OF LOW‐SKILL WORKERS IN SIX EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

It has been a general finding across Europe that very few job matches are facilitated by public employment services (PES).The article explains this failure by highlighting the existence of a double‐sided asymmetric information problem on the labour market. It is argued that although a PES potentially reduces search costs, both employers and employees have strong incentives not to use PES. The reason is that employers try to avoid the ‘worst’ employees, and employees try to avoid the ‘worst’ employers. Therefore these services get caught in a low‐end equilibrium that is almost impossible to escape. The mechanisms leading to this low‐end equilibrium are illustrated by means of qualitative interviews with 40 private employers in six European countries.     

Democratization as an emancipative process: The neglected role of mass motivations

Abstract.  Despite major differences, prevailing approaches in democratization research have one thing in common: they downplay the role of mass attitudes. This article criticizes the neglect of mass attitudes, arguing that it ignores the very essence of democratization. In light of human development theory, democratization is essentially an emancipative process, for it manifests human freedom by empowering people with civil and political rights. From this premise, the author concludes that democratization should be driven by emancipative forces in the population and that these forces are reflected in particular mass attitudes: liberty aspirations. Based on evidence from the Values Surveys, the analyses show that more widespread liberty aspirations facilitate progress and impede regress in the process of democratization. No other indicator – including GDP/capita and social capital – outperforms the effect of liberty aspirations on democratization. The article concludes that human development theory is useful because its emphasis on people empowerment highlights something that has been ignored in the democratization literature: emancipative motivational forces in the population.     

Party patronage in contemporary democracies: Results from an expert survey in 22 countries from five regions

This Research Note presents a new dataset of party patronage in 22 countries from five regions. The data was collected using the same methodology to compare patterns of patronage within countries, across countries and across world regions that are usually studied separately. The Note addresses three research questions that are at the centre of debates on party patronage, which is understood as the power of political parties to make appointments to the public and semi‐public sector: the scope of patronage, the underlying motivations and the criteria on the basis of which appointees are selected. The exploration of the dataset shows that party patronage is, to a different degree, widespread across all regions. The data further shows differences between policy areas, types of institutions such as government ministries, agencies and state‐owned enterprises, and higher, middle and lower ranks of the bureaucracy. It is demonstrated that the political control of policy making and implementation is the most common motivation for making political appointments. However, in countries with a large scope of patronage, appointments serve the purpose of both political control and rewarding supporters in exchange for votes and services. Finally, the data shows that parties prefer to select appointees who are characterised by political and personal loyalty as well as professional competence.     

The opposition deficit in EU accountability: Evidence from over 20 years of plenary debate in four member states

Debates about the European Union's democratic legitimacy put national parliaments into the spotlight. Do they enhance democratic accountability by offering visible debates and electoral choice about multilevel governance? To support such accountability, saliency of EU affairs in the plenary ought to be responsive to developments in EU governance, has to be linked to decision‐making moments and should feature a balance between government and opposition. The recent literature discusses various partisan incentives that support or undermine these criteria, but analyses integrating these arguments are rare. This article provides a novel comparative perspective by studying the patterns of public EU emphasis in more than 2.5 million plenary speeches from the German Bundestag, the British House of Commons, the Dutch Tweede Kamer and the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados over a prolonged period from 1991 to 2015. It documents that parliamentary actors are by and large responsive to EU authority and its exercise where especially intergovernmental moments of decision making spark plenary EU salience. But the salience of EU issues is mainly driven by government parties, decreases in election time and is negatively related to public Euroscepticism. The article concludes that national parliaments have only partially succeeded in enhancing EU accountability and suffer from an opposition deficit in particular.     

What Motivates the Gatekeepers? Explaining Governing Party Preferences on Immigration

Most scholarship on immigration politics is made up of isolated case studies or cross‐disciplinary work that does not build on existing political science theory. This study attempts to remedy this shortcoming in three ways: (1) we derive theories from the growing body of immigration literature, to hypothesize about why political parties would be more or less open to immigration; (2) we link these theories to the broader political science literature on parties and institutions; and (3) we construct a data set on the determinants of immigration politics, covering 18 developed countries from 1987 to 1999. Our primary hypothesis is that political institutions shape immigration politics by facilitating or constraining majoritarian sentiment (which is generally opposed to liberalizing immigration). Our analysis finds that in political systems where majoritarianism is constrained by institutional “checks,” governing parties support immigration more strongly, even when controlling for a broad range of alternative explanations.     

Agents of past principals: The lasting effects of incumbents on the political ideology of bureaucrats

Understanding representation is central to politics. Numerous studies assess under which conditions politicians share citizens’ ideological preferences. However, under which conditions bureaucrats share citizens’ ideological preferences has not been systematically studied. Yet, bureaucratic preferences shape policy outcomes. Our paper thus studies why bureaucrats are more right or left-wing than citizens in some countries and points of time, yet not others. We theorize that political ideologies of past incumbents shape this variation. Incumbents can select ideologically aligned bureaucrats and socialize bureaucrats into ideological preferences; moreover, prospective bureaucrats may self-select into ideologically aligned governments. As bureaucratic tenure exceeds political tenure, this politicization has lasting effects. Survey data from 87 countries supports this argument: bureaucrats are more left-leaning than citizens in countries with longer prior rule by economically left-wing governments, and more right-wing in countries with more authoritarian pasts. This suggests that incumbents continue to shape the ideological preferences of bureaucrats after leaving office.     

The theory of human development: A cross-cultural analysis

Abstract. This article demonstrates that socioeconomic development, emancipative cultural change and democratization constitute a coherent syndrome of social progress – a syndrome whose common focus has not been properly specified by classical modernization theory. We specify this syndrome as 'human development', arguing that its three components have a common focus on broadening human choice. Socioeconomic development gives people the objective means of choice by increasing individual resources ; rising emancipative values strengthen people's subjective orientation towards choice; and democratization provides legal guarantees of choice by institutionalizing freedom rights . Analysis of data from the World Values Surveys demonstrates that the linkage between individual resources, emancipative values and freedom rights is universal in its presence across nations, regions and cultural zones; that this human development syndrome is shaped by a causal effect of individual resources and emancipative values on freedom rights; and that this effect operates through its impact on elite integrity , as the factor which makes freedom rights effective.     

Radbruch as an Affirmative Holist.On the Question of What Ought to Be Preserved of His Philosophy

Abstract. Gustav Radbruch is one of the most important German‐speaking philosophers of law of the twentieth century. This paper raises the question of how to classify Radbruch's theories in the international context of legal philosophy and philosophy in general. Radbruch's work was mainly influenced by the southwest German school of Neo‐Kantianism, represented by Windelband, Rickert, and Lask. Their theories of culture and value show an affirmative‐holistic understanding of philosophy as a source of wisdom and meaningfulness. Kant, on the other hand, belongs more to a fundamentally different, critical camp of philosophy. Although Radbruch has incorporated Kantian Elements into his theory, he is rather a member of the affirmative‐holistic camp. In the end the question will be raised as to what ought to be preserved of his philosophy.     

INFLUENCE AND SELECTION PROCESSES IN WEAPON CARRYING DURING ADOLESCENCE: THE ROLES OF STATUS,AGGRESSION, AND VULNERABILITY*

The role of peers in weapon carrying (guns, knives, and other weapons) inside and outside the school was examined in this study. Data stem from a longitudinal study of a high-risk sample of male students (7th to 10th grade; N = 167) from predominantly Hispanic low-socio-economic-status schools in the United States. Longitudinal social-network models were used to test whether similarity in weapon carrying among friends results from peer influence or selection. From a goal-framing approach, we argue that weapon carrying might function as a status symbol in friendship networks and, consequently, be subject to peer influence. The findings indicate that weapon carrying is indeed a result of peer influence. The role of status effects was supported by findings that weapon carrying increased the number of friendship nominations received by peers and reduced the number of given nominations. In addition, peer-reported aggressiveness predicted weapon carrying 1 year later. These findings suggest that adolescent weapon carrying emerges from a complex interplay between the attraction of weapon carriers for affiliation, peer influence in friendship networks, and individual aggression.