Leadership Traits and Ghana’s Foreign Policy: The Case of Jerry Rawlings’ Foreign Economic Policy of the 1980s

This article examines Ghana’s foreign policy-making with reference to internal and external determinants (structural/systemic). Besides these determinants, political actors (primarily, presidents/heads of state) have shaped the country’s foreign policy outcomes, but this field of enquiry (i.e. the individual-level analysis) has not, received much attention in the literature. To enhance the understanding of leadership and personality traits in foreign policy-making, this study draws on the theory of Leadership Trait Analysis to examine Jerry John Rawlings and Ghana’s foreign economic policy in the early 1980s. It argues that the leadership traits of Rawlings to some extent shaped Ghana’s foreign economic policy decisions in the early 1980s.     

Regulation vs Symbolic Policy-Making: Genetically Modified Organisms in the German States

Germany’s federal states can enforce stricter regulations on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) than does the national government. Empirically, the study analyses two outcomes at the state level: the symbolic accession to the GMO-free network, in which regional units mobilise against the EU’s regulatory approach, and hard GMO policies/regulations. Besides focussing on political parties and environmental interest groups, the article provides various additional theoretical explanations for the variation in outcomes. The research questions are the following: what conditions a state’s accession to the GMO-free network? What conditions a state’s adoption of GMO regulations? To assess these questions, the study employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. One finding is that the inclusion of the Green Party in government is not a predominant condition for the adoption of regulations, but ministers affiliated with the Greens are dominant drivers of symbolic policy-making. The study reveals differing regulatory action by CDU/CSU ministers in the western and eastern states, which can be explained by the differing interests of farmers. Other findings reveal that SPD ministers regulated GMOs to much the same extent as CDU/CSU or Green ministers. Environmental interest groups were also found to have positively conditioned symbolic policy-making, having no effect, however, on the adoption of concrete regulations.     

Organisational learning in NGOs: An example of an intervention based on the work of Chris Argyris

The research work of Harvard professor Chris Argyris gave rise to much of what is today called organisational learning, an approach subsequently promulgated by Peter Senge and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first section of this paper argues the relevance of organisational learning to NGOs, despite its origins in the study of the private sector. The second section describes a particular project intervention based on organisational learning theory which is currently underway in a Brazilian NGO.     

Das Protokoll von 2004 zum Pariser Übereinkommen—wesentliche Verbesserungen im internationalen Atomhaftungsrecht

Das im Jahr 1960 abgeschlossene Pariser Übereinkommen steht im Zentrum des Rechts der Haftung für nukleare Schäden. Trotz über die Jahrzehnte offenbar gewordener Lücken im internationalen System des Atomhaftungsrechts und gewandelter Vorstellungen von Nutzen und Risiken der friedlichen Nutzung von Kernenergie blieben die tragenden Prinzipien der einschlägigen Atomhaftungskonventionen im Wesentlichen unverändert. Nach mehrjährigen Vorarbeiten ist das Pariser Übereinkommen nunmehr einer grundlegenden Reform unterzogen worden. Der folgende Beitrag stellt die wesentlichen Neuerungen im Gesamtkontext des staatsvertraglichen Haftungsregimes vor und unterzieht sie einer ersten Würdigung.     

A banana republic? The effects of inconsistencies in the counting of votes on voting behavior

Public Choice - We examine whether local inconsistencies in the counting of votes influence voting behavior. We exploit the case of the second ballot of the 2016 presidential election in Austria....     

The myth of the local

Debates about the diffusion of international norms have increasingly focused on norm appropriation, highlighting the agency of local actors. The proliferation of international organizations in the Global South raises the question of whether and how they practice local norm appropriation. This article uses ethnographic methods to investigate the appropriation of development norms in an intergovernmental development organization located in Bangladesh. Established theories like localization and sociological institutionalism would expect local actors to allude to a global norm but not to adhere to it. On the contrary, this study finds that, while development organizations may allude to local development norms and dismiss UN-led initiatives as “Western,” their practices remain in line with global concepts such as the Millennium Development Goals and the Human Development Index. These actors perform to localize, but the rhetoric is not matched by their everyday practices. The local therefore functions as a myth.     

The Meaning of Students’ Personal Belief in a Just World for Positive and Negative Aspects of School-Specific Well-Being

In two cross-sectional questionnaire studies with N = 1792 German and Indian students, aged between 12 and 17 years, we investigated the relation between personal belief in a just world (BJW) and positive as well as negative dimensions of school-specific well-being. Furthermore, we considered students’ personal experience of teacher justice as possible mediator in this relation and controlled for confounding effects of gender, neuroticism, and locus of control. In Study 1, we used multilevel modeling to analyze the German data and to control for class-level effects. In accordance with our hypotheses, Study 1 showed that the more students believed in a personal just world, the better their positive attitudes toward school, their academic self-esteem, and their enjoyment in school were, and the less somatic complaints in school, social problems in school, and worries toward school they experienced. These associations partly differed between classes, but generally persisted when controlled for sex, neuroticism, and locus of control. Finally, the association between personal BJW and well-being was at least partly mediated by students’ personal experience of teacher justice. In Study 2, we focused on the generalizability of the pattern of results across different cultural contexts. However, we did not aim to carry out comparative research. Results from bootstrap mediation analyses were predominantly the same as in Study 1. The adaptive functions of BJW and implications for future school research are discussed.