Die Zukunft der Verfassung

Aus Anlass des 90. Geburtstages des B-VG unternimmt es der Beitrag, in mittel- und langfristiger Perspektive zukünftige Herausforderungen für die ?sterreichische Bundesverfassung zu identifizieren. Ausgangspunkt ist eine Gegenüberstellung der ?nderungsh?ufigkeit und detailreichen Regelungsdichte der Bundesverfassung im Vergleich zu einer insbesondere in der Rechtsprechung immer bedeutender werdenden, im Verfassungstext selbst aber kaum verankerten verfassungsrechtlichen Grundordnung. Mittelfristig identifiziert der Verfasser die Bundesstaatsreform als unverzichtbare Herausforderung; weniger Gewicht wird demgegenüber der Notwendigkeit einer Grundrechtsreform beigemessen. L?ngerfristig sind insbesondere überwachungsstaat, Gentechnologie und Migration und Multikulturalismus die zentralen Herausforderungen an die Verfassung. Freilich nicht nur an die nationale sondern an die ?sterreichische Verfassung im europ?ischen Verfassungsverbund.     

Institutional Characteristics and Regime Survival: Why Are Semi‐Democracies Less Durable Than Autocracies and Democracies?

Previous studies report that semi‐democratic regimes are less durable than both democracies and autocracies. Still, mixing democratic and autocratic characteristics need not destabilize regimes, as three highly plausible alternative explanations of this correlation remain unaccounted for: (a) semi‐democracies emerge under conditions of political instability and social turmoil; (b) other regime characteristics explain duration; and (c) extant democracy measures do not register all regime changes. We elaborate on and test for these explanations, but find strikingly robust evidence that semi‐democracies are inherently less durable than both democracies and autocracies. “Semi‐democracies are particularly unstable political regimes” should thus be considered a rare stylized fact of comparative politics. The analysis yields several other interesting results. For instance, autocracies and semi‐democracies are equally likely to experience “liberalizing” regime changes more specifically, and once accounting for differences in degree of democracy, there is no robust evidence of differences in duration between military and single‐party regimes.     

Class Power and Participatory Equality: Attitudes towards Economic Democracy in Denmark and Sweden*

Proposals for capital sharing (i.e. the spreading of ownership rights to productive assets), also known as 'economic democracy', have been advanced by the trade unions in both Denmark and Sweden. In view of their redistributive intent, these schemes have met surprisingly little enthusiastic response in traditional labor constituencies. The article makes an attempt to explain why . An examination of wage earner attitudes (which goes into greater detail for Denmark) shows that the presently entertained proposals appeal in a cross-cutting manner to conflictual notions of class power and participatory opportunity. The result is a fragmentation of wage earner support.     

Culture Governance: Governing Self‐Reflexive Modernity

Political and administrative analysis is today said to be taking a narrative turn: to learning by telling and listening to the different stories that constitute political life. However, this new approach to studying the decentring of politics and policy as multiple discursive practices carries a new grand narrative too. A new connection between political authority and political community is taking shape outside the spheres of modern government and representative democracy. Political authority is becoming increasingly both communicative and interactive in order for it to be able to meet complexity with complexity. It is employed for reforming institutions by opening them towards the culture and by tying them to the political attributes and capacities of self‐reflexive individuals and to the transformation and self‐transformation of their conduct. I call this development culture governance. Culture governance is about how political authority must increasingly operate through capacities for self‐and co‐governance and therefore needs to act upon, reform, and utilize individual and collective conduct so that it might be amenable to its rule (Bang 2003; Dean 2003). Culture governance represents a new kind of top‐down steering; it is neither hierarchical nor bureaucratic but empowering and self‐disciplining. It manifests itself as various forms of joined‐up government and network governance and proclaims itself to be genuinely democratic and dialogical. This I shall show by a study of local Danish politics and policy in Copenhagen. Culture governance, I shall argue, constitutes a formidable challenge and threat to democracy, in attempting to colonize the whole field of public reason, everyday political engagement, democratic deliberation, and so on, by its own systems logic of success, effectiveness or influence. It seeks to take charge of the working of the more spontaneous, less programmed and more lowly organized politics of the ordinary in political communities, thus undermining the very idea of a non‐strategic public reasoning as founding the practices of freedoms.     

When benefitting a patient increases the risk for harm for third persons — The case of treating pedophilic Parkinsonian patients with deep brain stimulation

This paper investigates the question whether it is ethically justified to treat Parkinsonian patients with known or suspected pedophilia with deep brain stimulation — given increasing evidence that this treatment might cause impulse control disorders, disinhibition, and hypersexuality. This specific question is not as exotic as it looks at a first glance. First, the same issue is raised for all other types of sexual orientation or behavior which imply a high risk for harming other persons, e.g. sexual sadism. Second, there are also several (psychotropic) drugs as well as legal and illegal leisure drugs which bear severe risks for other persons. We show that Beauchamp and Childress' biomedical ethics fails to derive a veto against medical interventions which produce risks for third persons by making the patients dangerous to others. Therefore, our case discussion reveals a blind spot of the ethics of principles. Although the first intuition might be to forbid the application of deep brain stimulation to pedophilic patients, we argue against such a simple way out, since in some patients the reduction of dopaminergic drugs allowed by deep brain stimulation of the nucleus subthalamicus improves impulsive control disorders, including hypersexuality. Therefore, we propose a strategy consisting of three steps: (1) risk assessment, (2) shared decision-making, and (3) risk management and safeguards.     

Patronage,Service Delivery,and Social Justice in Indonesia

This article examines how patronage networks operate in subnational governments in Indonesia paying particular attention to how they have affected human resource management (HRM) practices in education and health services. Corrupt practices were found in varying degrees in all the provincial public services studied. They were associated with patronage systems and involved illegal payments for entrance exam results, recruitment and selection, placement, promotion, and transfer. These practices had an adverse effect on the quantity and quality of service delivery and represented a challenge to social justice.

This article is related to the special issue “Contemporary Challenges for Public Sector Human Resource Management” of the International Journal of Public Administration, Volume 35, Issue 8, 2012.     

The Generational Effect in Turnout in the Swedish General Elections, 1960–2010

Recent analyses have reported a generational pattern in electoral participation both in national and the European Parliament elections which suggests that a lower voting propensity among the younger cohorts remains relatively stable over time. Based on the Swedish national election studies 1960–2010, this article examines the magnitude of generational differences in a high‐turnout context. It contributes to earlier studies by using multilevel modeling to estimate the impacts of life cycle, generation and period on turnout and by aiming to account for the generational effect with institutional‐ and individual‐level factors. The results show a fairly modest generational effect. When controlling for the proportion of party members in the electorate and the effective number of parties, the differences between generations in their propensities to vote are substantially reduced.     

Swedish rape offenders — a latent class analysis

Sweden has witnessed an increase in the rates of sexual crimes including rape. Knowledge of who the offenders of these crimes are is therefore of importance for prevention. We aimed to study characteristics of individuals convicted of rape, aggravated rape, attempted rape or attempted aggravated rape (abbreviated rape+), against a woman ≥18 years of age, in Sweden. By using information from the Swedish Crime Register, offenders between 15 and 60 years old convicted of rape+ between 2000 and 2015 were included. Information on substance use disorders, previous criminality and psychiatric disorders were retrieved from Swedish population-based registers, and Latent Class Analysis (LCA) was used to identify classes of rape+ offenders. A total of 3 039 offenders were included in the analysis. A majority of them were immigrants (n = 1 800; 59.2%) of which a majority (n = 1 451; 47.7%) were born outside of Sweden. The LCA identified two classes: Class A — low offending class (LOC), and Class B — high offending class (HOC). While offenders in the LOC had low rates of previous criminality, psychiatric disorders and substance use disorders, those included in the HOC had high rates of previous criminality, psychiatric disorders and substance use disorders. While HOC may be composed by more “traditional” criminals probably known by the police, the LOC may represent individuals not previously known by the police. These two separated classes, as well as our finding in regard to a majority of the offenders being immigrants, warrants further studies that take into account the contextual characteristics among these offenders.

Key points

• Rape, aggravated rape, attempted rape or attempted aggravated rape (rape+) are increasing in Sweden.
• The majority of those convicted of rape+ are immigrants.
• LCA identifies two classes of rape+ offenders: LOC and HOC.