Parteiendemokratie im Wandel — Reaktionsstrategien von politischen Parteien

Ohne Zusammenfassung Rezension zu: Peter Mair, Wolfgang C. Müller und Fritz Plasser (Hg.): Parteien auf komplexen W?hlerm?rkten. Reaktionsstrategien politischer Parteien in Westeuropa. Wien: Signum 1999, 403 S., DM 88,-.     

The Complexity of Social Outcomes from Cooperative,Competitive, and Individualistic Reward Systems

Previous research on cooperative and competitive reward systems has investigated the relation between extreme cooperative and competitive conditions, along with an intermediate noninterdependent neutral condition, to numerous outcome variables. This study added two additional conditions to these three usual conditions, between the neutral midpoint and the cooperative or competitive extremes, to see if these intermediate conditions might be distinctive in the outcomes they produced. The study used 240 participants, divided into groups of three that played a board game under these five different reward conditions. Participants' attitudes toward self, others, and task were then assessed and analyzed along with objective measures of performance, measures of self-esteem, state and trait anxiety, and results coded from an autobiographical report in game-defined roles. Results indicated that the intermediate cooperative condition was distinctively different from the extreme cooperative condition in predicted ways, and that the intermediate competitive condition was distinctively different from the extreme competitive condition, but in unpredicted ways. The research also demonstrated that an individualistic condition, which had previously been thought to produce neither a cooperative nor competitive social orientation, in fact produced both, raising questions as to whether reward interdependence, as researchers have defined it, is really the cause of cooperation and competition.     

Adaptive governance as a reform strategy

This article expands research on adaptive governance in natural resource and climate change policy into other policy areas and the larger context of reform. The purpose is to clarify adaptive governance as a reform strategy, one that builds on experience in a variety of emergent responses to the growing failures of scientific management, the established pattern of governance. Emergent responses in information technology, national security, development aid, and health care policy are reviewed here. In these cases, factoring a large national or international problem into many smaller problems, each more tractable scientifically and politically, opened additional opportunities for advancing common interests on the ground. The opportunities include simplification of research through intensive inquiry, participation in policy decisions by otherwise neglected groups, and selecting what works on the basis of practical experience rather than theory. What works can be improved incrementally in the context at hand, diffused through networks for voluntary adaptation elsewhere, and used to inform higher-level decisions from the bottom up. Adaptive governance is a promising strategy of reform. The open question is whether it will be used well enough to sustain a once-progressive evolution toward fuller realization of human dignity for all.     

FDI and the costs of contract enforcement in developing countries

This article examines the relationship between foreign direct investment and host countries’ contracting institutions, the rule systems which govern commercial transactions between private actors. Given their liability of foreignness and costly exit options, we suggest that multinational corporations have incentives to influence the formal contracting environment in host countries. Further, host governments are more likely to respond to multinationals’ wishes when they are more dependent on foreign capital markets. We draw on the World Bank’s Lex Mundi dataset (Djankov et al. 2003) on micro-level contracting environment for private actors. Our analysis of a cross section of 98 developing countries suggests that FDI is associated with lower contract enforcement costs, particularly when the host country is more indebted.