Policy sciences teaching in context: A note on Germany

This is an attempt to relate the specific opportunities for policy sciences teaching to the broader context of a changing policymaking system. In West Germany, policy-sciences teaching could not develop as long as legal education remained the predominant type of pre-entry training for the career civil service, and as long as constitutional and administrative law seemed to supply decision premises fully adequate for the types of policy problems that were regarded as critical. This pattern was functional as long as the basic conservatism of post-war policies did obscure the problem of policy choice and the need for policy analysis. It became dysfunctional, however, when the fiscal crisis of 1966/67 dramatized the need for a rationalization of budgetary choices, and when the urgency of new problems and new political demands exposed the insufficiency of conservative policies.These emerging demands on policymakers at all levels of government have led to an increasing awareness of the need for better policy-analysis and planning, and for the recruitment of personnel trained in policy sciences. While retraining programs will meet some of this demand, the growing number of planning staffs has created an opportunity for new policy-oriented programs of pre-entry training for civil service functions. The article concludes with the outline of one such program.     

How to organize secondary capital city regions: Institutional drivers of locational policy coordination

We analyze locational policy coordination in the metropolitan regions of secondary capital cities. Secondary capital cities—defined as capitals that are not the primary economic city of their nation states—serve as the political center of their nation states; however, they must simultaneously explore new ways to develop their own regional economies. Locational policies, and their regional coordination, aim to strengthen the economic competitiveness of metropolitan regions. Our comparison of the metropolitan regions of Bern, Ottawa–Gatineau, The Hague, and Washington, D.C., reveals that vertical institutional fragmentation, together with high local tax autonomy, create an unlevel playing field, which prompts jurisdictions to behave fiercely in regional tax competition. These findings are troubling for secondary capital cities given their propensity to be located in fragmented metropolitan regions and the capital city‐specific local tax autonomy constraints imposed on them.     

Die Ausgaben der Schweizer Kantone ‐ Eine Fuzzy Set QCA

The paper investigates the factors influencing the 26 Swiss Cantons' government expenditures. While the question has been subject to various statistical analyses, the present study has an alternative focus by adopting a configurative perspective. We take the findings of the 2002‐study by Vatter and Freitag, as our point of departure and re‐analyse their significant variables with regard to their combined impact using updated data from 2000 to 2006 and employing Fuzzy Set QCA. The results underline the important effect of monetary transfers from the federation thus corroborating the Flypaper Effect thesis from Economic Theory.     

Poisonings with diphenhydramine--a survey of 68 clinical and 55 death cases

The antihistaminic drug diphenhydramine (DPH) is mainly used as a sedative, hypnotic and antiemetic. In many countries it is over-the-counter available, very common, and generally regarded as a harmless drug. Sixty-eight non-fatal and 55 fatal poisonings with DPH alone or in combination with other drugs were investigated in the Institute of Legal Medicine of the University Hospital Charité between 1992 and 2004. The analytical investigations were performed by HPLC with photodiode array detector (HPLC-DAD). The DPH concentrations ranged from 0.5 to 8.9 microg/mL in the non-fatal cases and from 0.3 to 119 microg/mL in fatal cases. The intoxication symptoms stated during emergency admission were inconsistent, with somnolence, sedation and retardation on one hand and tachycardia, anticholinergic syndrome, agitation, hallucinations, confusion, tremor, convulsions, delirium and coma on the other. In three cases rhabdomyolysis occurred. A concentration above 5 microg/mL can be regarded as potentially lethal. In many of the survivors the time course of the concentrations of DPH and the metabolites desmethyldiphenhydramine (DM-DPH) and diphenylmethoxyacetic acid (DPMA) were investigated. Whereas DM-DPH is present in blood from the very beginning because of the high first pass metabolism, DPMA is slowly formed over several metabolic steps. For this reason, the concentration ratio DPMA/DPH can be used for an approximate estimation of the time between drug intake and sampling in clinical cases or of the survival time after drug ingestion in death cases. In some of the deaths the concentrations in heart blood were much higher than in venous blood. This is explained mainly by agonal aspiration of the vomited gastric content. Besides the majority of suicidal cases also a case of child maltreatment and a case, in which the drug was forcibly administrated in a drug facilitated crime, were investigated. From the results it follows that diphenhydramine is not less poisonous than other prescribed hypnotics. However, despite the hallucinogenic effects, an abuse for recreational purposes was not observed until now.     

Determination of cathinone,cathine and norephedrine in hair of Yemenite khat chewers

A sensitive and reproducible method for the quantitative determination of cathinone (CTN), norpseudoephedrine (NPE, cathine) and norephedrine (NE) from hair was developed. The compounds were extracted for 4 hours with phosphate buffer pH 2.0, followed by a standard solid phase extraction procedure on a mixed phase column, derivatization with heptafluorobutyric anhydride (HFBA) and GC-MS separation and quantification using D(3)-ephedrine (D(3)-E) and alpha-aminoacetophenone (AAP) as the internal standards. The diastereomers NPE and NE were satisfactorily separated. In the validation, the limits of detection and of quantification were determined at 0.03-0.08 ng/mg and 0.10-0.24 ng/mg, respectively and the interday standard deviation was between 10 and 15%. The method was applied to hair samples of 24 Yemenite khat chewers. All three compounds were detected in 23 of these cases. The concentrations ranged from 0.57 to 23.9 ng/mg for NPE, 0.19-25.0 ng/mg for NE and 0.11-22.7ng/mg for CTN. A highly significant correlation was found between the self-reported data about the khat consumption habits of the volunteers (4-56h chewing per week) and the concentrations of norephedrine and norpseudoephedrine in hair.     

A note on the political economy of immigration

In this note it is shown that the different attitudes towards immigration can be explained in terms of economic interest, although the public immigration debate is dominated by moral and political arguments. On the one hand, immigration supporters are mainly found among those who may expect economic gains from immigration – skilled workers and especially members of certain professions. On the other hand, unskilled workers who stand to lose economically because they can be easily substitued for by immigrants are for the most part opposed to immigration.     

Common pool effects and local public debt in amalgamated municipalities

This paper investigates whether the large scale municipal amalgamations in the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg in the early 1970s led to considerable common pool exploitation. Through amalgamation the resources of several municipalities are pooled together disclosing the former independent municipalities a larger source of funds. Additionally, the pooling also decreases the cost of local public goods, as those have to be borne by the whole of the amalgamated municipality. By exploiting the huge variance in the amalgamation process in terms of number of participating municipalities, but also in municipality size or amalgamation strategy, we identify considerable common pool effects. Amalgamated municipalities show considerably stronger acceleration in debt accumulation compared to non-amalgamating municipalities. This common pool exploitation is stronger if more municipalities participate and when municipalities amalgamate by annexation.

     

Governance and Coercion

The present article departs from the assumption often found in literature concerning governance, which is that coercion is the quintessence of government and that, therefore, the growing importance of new forms of governance in policy formulation and implementation will lead to the adoption of softer policy instruments. This hypothesis will first be discussed in the wider context of the instrument choice literature, whereby an opposing view is derived. The two competing hypotheses are then tested in a comparison of the alcohol control policy designs of the Swiss member states, i.e. the cantons. The results of a multivariate regression analysis show that strong governance structures understood as networks embracing both public and private actors lead to the adoption of restrictive policy designs that must be enforced by public authority and as such cannot be employed by non-public governance actors. It is concluded that in their evaluation of policy instruments, governance actors follow a logic of consequentiality rather than a logic of appropriateness.     

Aristotelian framing: logos,ethos, pathos and the use of evidence in policy frames

In this research note, we propose to complement the analytical toolbox for framing analyses with the categories of Aristotelian rhetoric. As our case, we analyse the function of the use of evidence in frame building in the context of Swiss direct-democratic campaigns preceding votes on smoking bans. Based on rhetoric, a frame can be considered to contain three interrelated elements: (1) political arguments (logos), (2) cultural symbols (ethos), and (3) emotional appeal (pathos). By comparing evidence-based arguments with arguments that do not refer to evidence, the research note illustrates that backing arguments (logos) by evidence increases their trustworthiness (ethos) but not their emotional appeal (pathos). We consider the Aristotelian categories a fruitful tool to enlarge existing framing research with regard to the use of evidence.