Interplay management: enhancing environmental policy integration among international institutions

This article investigates how and to what extent the current management of inter-institutional relationships within International Environmental Governance (‘interplay management’) contributes to Environmental Policy Integration (EPI), and identifies options for enhancing EPI among international institutions. To this end, it first develops a framework for the systematic analysis and assessment of interplay management as a means for achieving ‘strong’ EPI, distinguishing four levels and two principal modes of management. On this basis, the article assesses the current contribution of International Environmental Governance to advancing EPI as regards three categories of institutional interaction. The analysis demonstrates the need to fit interplay management to the particular governance conditions of varying interaction situations and highlights the lack of systematic and consistent support for EPI among international institutions. Options to improve this situation include in particular promoting inter-institutional learning and assistance for the benefit of environmental institutions as well as ensuring consideration of and respect for environmental requirements. Adapting the statutes and mandates of individual institutions and developing suitable guidance under general international (environmental) law have the highest potential for implementing these options. In contrast, joint management initiatives and a strengthened international environmental organisation have a much more limited, supplementary potential.     

UK court considers the industrial application of biotech patent claims

Speculative uses for a protein are not sufficient to fulfilthe requirement for industrial application since a patent isnot a ‘hunting licence’ to find a use for an invention.     

The dark side of the German ‘welcome culture’: investigating the causes behind attacks on refugees in 2015

In 2015, Germany experienced a record high influx of refugees – and received international praise for its ‘welcome culture’. At the same time, however, attacks on refugees rose to an alarming level. This article describes the distribution of these attacks and probes their causes, using detailed socioeconomic and political data while modelling a hierarchical data structure. Controlling for further relevant factors taken from the extant literature, the analysis first tests whether the strength of extreme right political parties plays a role and, second, it models a contagion effect, taking into account spatial as well as temporal proximity. The findings suggest that the strength of right-wing parties in a district considerably boosts the probability of attacks on refugees in that area. They also corroborate the idea of behavioural contagion. The set of social-structural variables employed as controls yielded only limited explanatory power.     

The effect of a reduction in the opening hours of polling stations on turnout

In recent years, scholars and policymakers alike have discussed potential causes and consequences of low voter turnout. Election administration laws may provide means to encourage turnout that are of low cost and easily implementable. In this paper, I provide a policy evaluation of a change in an election administration law. Specifically, I estimate the causal effect of a reduction in the opening hours of polling stations on turnout. To this end, I make use of a policy change in a German state that cut the number of opening hours of polling stations. Using political units from an adjacent state with the same election dates and effectively the same election system as a control group in a difference-in-differences design, I find that reducing the opening hours of polling stations significantly reduces voter turnout.     

The role of actors in the policy design process: introducing design coalitions to explain policy output

Policy Sciences - Despite a renaissance of policy design thinking in public policy literature and a renewed interest in agency in the policy process literature, agency in the policy design process...     

Should the Media Be More or Less Powerful in Politics? Individual and Contextual Explanations for Politicians and Journalists

The normative question regarding whether the media should have more or less impact on politics, as viewed by politicians and journalists, is important assuming that norms about media influences can influence behaviors. The present study is the first that combines individual and structural factors that explain political actors’ and journalists’ normative views on the media’s influence on politics. Based on a conceptualization of political communication cultures, representative micro-level survey data from more than 600 political actors and journalists within 52 German cities were combined with macro-level indicators for the political and media competition in each city. Multilevel analyses show that interactions between the actors’ characteristics and their competitive working conditions help explain their normative evaluations of the media’s influence on politics. However, individual characteristics such as actors’ role conceptions influence normative views more so than media and political competition do.     

Merging county administrations – cross-national evidence of fiscal and political effects

ABSTRACT

While many central governments amalgamate municipalities, mergers of larger county administrations are rare and hardly explored. In this article, we assess both fiscal and political effects of county mergers in two different institutional settings: counties act autonomously as upper-level local governments (Germany), or counties being decentralised branches of the state government (Austria). We apply difference-in-differences estimations to county merger reforms in each country. In both cases, some counties were amalgamated while others remain untouched. Austrian counties (Bezirke) and German counties (Landkreise) widely differ in terms of autonomy and institutions, but our results are strikingly similar. In both cases, we neither find evidence for cost savings nor for staff reductions. Instead, voter turnout consistently decreases in merged counties, and right-wing populists seem to gain additional support. We conclude that political costs clearly outweigh fiscal null benefits of county merger reforms – independent of the underlying institutional setting.     

Besprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Is there anything Left? The politics of social spending in new democracies

The evolution of public social expenditures displays divergent patterns across non‐western countries. This exploratory article argues that in order to understand the domestic sources of this divergence, institutional and structural explanations should be complemented with an actor‐oriented perspective. Analyses of the role of party politics in non‐OECD democracies, through multivariate fixed‐effect regressions using data from 46 countries between 1995 and 2015, reveals a robust positive association between shifts towards Left party government and increases in total public social expenditures, also when controlling for structural and institutional factors. This association however seems potentially conditional on sufficient levels of economic growth. While indicating an impact of partisanship, further research is arguably needed regarding the origins, organization and policy outputs of parties in more recently democratized countries, as well as regarding the conditions under which the ideological orientation of parties in government are actually consequential.