The Influence of Direct Democracy on Political Interest,Electoral Turnout and Other Forms of Citizens’ Participation in Swiss Municipalities

Based on the data of a survey conducted among Swiss municipalities, this article inquires into the relationship between different institutional settings of local democracy and the amount of political interest of citizens as well as electoral participation and new forms of citizen participation like participatory planning or local agenda 21. The study identifies six distinct settings of local democracy in Switzerland, ranging from pure direct democracy to representative democracy. The analysis shows that the institutional setting of local democracy has no impact on the political interest of the citizens. It also reveals that instruments of direct democracy do not significantly weaken representative democracy as far as electoral participation is concerned. New forms of citizen participation are predominantly used alongside with means of direct democracy.     

Democracy,Regional Security Institutions,and Rivalry Mitigation: Evidence From Europe,South America,and Asia

The fact that democracies maintain peaceful relations with each other is regarded as one of the few law-like correlations in international relations, but the causes of this empirical phenomenon remain contested. This paper tries to fill this theoretical gap by attributing the remarkable stability between democracies to inter-democratic institutions. At the same time, it contributes to the debate on the need to differentiate among international organizations in order to assess their peace-building effects. We identify transnational and trans-governmental linkages as crucial features that distinguish inter-democratic from traditional institutions with non-democratic or mixed membership. In order to explain these institutions’ peace-building effect, we analyze the impact of international institutions on rivalry mitigation with a view to five pairs of states: France-Germany, Greece-Turkey, Argentina-Brazil, Indonesia-Malaysia, and Japan-South Korea. Those dyads all look back at a history of rivalry, conflict, and mutual threat perceptions, and they are located in highly institutionalized regional settings but vary with regard to their political regime type. The controlled comparison of cases demonstrates that the embeddedness of international institutions in transnational and trans-governmental linkages corresponds to each member's regime type and that these institutional differences are responsible for the varying extent of rivalry mitigation.     

Using Bayes’ theorem in behavioural crime linking of serial homicide

Purpose. The study extends research by Santtila et al. (2008) by investigating the effectiveness of linking cases of serial homicide using behavioural patterns of offenders, analysed through Bayesian reasoning. The study also investigates the informative value of individual behavioural variables in the linking process. Methods. Offender behaviour was coded from official documents relating to 116 solved homicide cases belonging to 19 separate series. The basis of the linkage analyses was 92 behaviours coded as present or absent in the case based on investigator observations on the crime scene. We developed a Bayesian method for linking crime cases and judged its accuracy using cross‐validation. We explored the information added by individual behavioural variables, first, by testing if the variable represented purely noise with respect to classification, and second, by excluding variables from the original model, one by one, by choosing the behaviour that had the smallest effect on classification accuracy. Results. The model achieved a classification accuracy of 83.6% whereas chance expectancy was 5.3%. In simulated scenarios of only one and two known cases in a series, the accuracy was 59.0 and 69.2%, respectively. No behavioural variable represented pure noise but the same level of accuracy was achieved by analysing a set of 15, as analysing all 92 variables. Conclusion. The study illustrates the utility of analysing individual behavioural variables through Bayesian reasoning for crime linking. Feasible applied use of the approach is illustrated by the effectiveness of analysing a small set of carefully chosen variables.     

Across time and space: Explaining variation in news coverage of the European Union

News about the European Union (EU) looks different in different countries at different points in time. This study investigates explanations for cross‐national and over‐time variation in news media coverage of EU affairs drawing on large‐scale media content analyses of newspapers and television news in the EU‐15 (1999), EU‐25 (2004) and EU‐27 (2009) in relation to European Parliament (EP) elections. The analyses focus in particular on explanatory factors pertaining to media characteristics and the political elites. Results show that national elites play an important role for the coverage of EU matters during EP election campaigns. The more strongly national parties are divided about the EU in combination with overall more negative positions towards the EU, the more visible the news. Also, increases in EU news visibility from one election to the next and the Europeanness of the news are determined by a country's elite positions. The findings are discussed in light of the EU's alleged communication deficit.     

‘A willing Odysseus’: The life and times of Albert O. Hirschman

Abstract

In this review essay of Jeremy Adelman's biography of Albert O. Hirschman, A worldly philosopher, supplemented by references to other secondary works on Hirschman, I take the opportunity to discuss the relationship between the economist's life and his main publications. I argue that in times of crisis more attempts like Hirschman's political economy are needed. I further argue that Hirschman has given us a good idea of what a new moral economy, which really deserves this name, would look like.     

Institutions and savings in developing and emerging economies

Domestic savings are an important prerequisite for capital formation and growth. In this paper we analyze a new channel through which institutions influence aggregate savings and economic development. Whereas research in the field of savings decisions concentrates largely on the level of the individual, the literature on institutions and growth as well as on aggregate savings formation focuses on the aggregate, national level. First, we develop a framework that brings together both lines of reasoning, arguing that institutions may influence the individual savings decision as well as national savings in aggregate. This potential for institutional quality to influence economic performance has been neglected so far. Second, we build upon the empirical literature on aggregate savings formation and provide results supporting our hypothesis that better economic institutions drive aggregate savings formation upwards. By contrast, we do not find such effects in the case of the political environment. Our findings are robust when checked against a number of changes in explanatory variables, estimation methods and the treatment of instruments.     

Parliamentary scrutiny as a function of interparliamentary cooperation among subnational parliaments

ABSTRACT

The paper analyses the scrutiny activities of three different types of institutionalised form of interparliamentary cooperation with participation of subnational parliaments: the Conference of European Legislative Assemblies; the Baltic Sea Parliamentary Conference; and the Interregional Parliamentary Council of the Grande Région. For the purpose of analysis, the analytical parameters of parliamentary functions are modified and applied to the forms of institutionalised interparliamentary cooperation. It is shown that the exertion of scrutiny activities increases in relation to the age and institutionalisation of an interparliamentary cooperation. Ex ante control, which may consist of as little as demands, develops more easily than ex post control. Moreover, the exercise of the scrutiny function becomes more difficult when the level(s) that populate(s) the interparliamentary cooperation is/are not congruent with the level(s) that populate(s) the executive body of the respective international organisation. Interparliamentary cooperation of subnational parliaments struggles to scrutinise an organisation in which national executives play a major role.     

Latency problems with smothering using soft cover

Smothering by covering the respiratory orifices with soft material is one of the rarely established forms of mechanically induced death by asphyxia. An important reason of latency is that this kind of homicide leaves almost no traces. The two described cases from the autopsy material of the Institute of Legal Medicine in Berlin (CCM) show the limits of medico-legal interpretation and the resulting special responsibility of the investigator. In the first case the defendant denied the offence and was acquitted of the charge, while in the second case the self-confessed offender was convicted.