Expert hearings in mini-publics: How does the field of expertise influence deliberation and its outcomes?

Policy Sciences - One of key goals of deliberative mini-publics is to counteract expert domination in policymaking. Mini-publics can be expected to democratize expertise by providing citizens with...     

The Policy Influence of Sustainability Indicators: Examining Use and Influence of Indicators in German Sustainability Policy Making

In 2002 Germany adopted an ambitious national sustainability strategy, covering all three sustainability spheres and circling around 21 key indicators. The strategy stands out because of its relative stability over five consecutive government constellations, its high status and increasingly coercive nature. This article analyses the strategy's role in the policy process, focusing on the use and influence of indicators as a central steering tool. Contrasting rationalist and constructivist perspectives on the role of knowledge in policy, two factors, namely the level of consensus about policy goals and the institutional setting of the indicators, are found to explain differences in use and influence both across indicators and over time. Moreover, the study argues that the indicators have been part of a continuous process of ‘structuring’ in which conceptual and instrumental use together help structure the sustainability challenge in such a way that it becomes more manageable for government policy.     

Partisanship as information

Intuitively, we associate different political parties with different types of policy. In contrast, this paper shows that in the absence of differential costs of membership among parties (that is, if party membership ischeap talk), party labels cannot perfectly signal the ideologies of candidates. However, under certain conditions parties can signal candidate types imperfectly. The paper therefore also provides an example of how costless communication can be effective in games of partial conflict.     

Crisis Accountability: Ministerial Resignations in Sweden

Accountability processes after crisis events sometimes entail harsh criticism from public and political players alike, forcing cabinet ministers to be on top of the political game and sometimes even resign. However, harsh accountability processes are just as likely to leave ministers undamaged. This article combines two existing theories that propose different factors to account for variation in outcomes: ministerial resignations as a consequence of cabinet formation and individual positions; or resignations as a result of blame management strategies involving individual actors within the cabinet and beyond. Ten crisis episodes in Sweden are analysed and compared. The findings suggest that individual political power bases and experience matter to how well blame management strategies can be employed, while the composition of the government gives structural constraints. The dynamic interplay and framing battle between incumbent decision makers, and external arenas and the skill with which individual ministers engage and frame responsibility, play a key role in determining their post‐crisis careers.     

Death from Nitrous Oxide

Nitrous oxide is an inflammable gas that gives no smell or taste. It has a history of abuse as long as its clinical use, and deaths, although rare, have been reported. We describe two cases of accidental deaths related to voluntary inhalation of nitrous oxide, both found dead with a gas mask covering the face. In an attempt to find an explanation to why the victims did not react properly to oncoming hypoxia, we performed experiments where a test person was allowed to breath in a closed system, with or without nitrous oxide added. Vital signs and gas concentrations as well as subjective symptoms were recorded. The experiments indicated that the explanation to the fact that neither of the descendents had reacted to oncoming hypoxia and hypercapnia was due to the inhalation of nitrous oxide. This study raises the question whether nitrous oxide really should be easily, commercially available.     

Managed Floating as a Monetary Policy Strategy

Although there seems to be a broad consensus among economists that purely floating or completely fixed exchange rates (the so-called corner solutions) are the only viable alternatives of exchange rate management, many countries do not behave according to this paradigm and adopt a strategy within the broad spectrum of exchange rate regimes that is limited by the two corner solutions. Many of these intermediate regimes are characterized by significant foreign exchange market interventions and a certain degree of exchange rate flexibility with non-preannounced exchange rate targets. While academic research in this area usually concentrates on some specific aspects of intermediate regimes (such as the effectiveness of interventions or institutional aspects), managed floating has rarely been analyzed as a comprehensive monetary policy strategy. In this paper, we present a monetary policy framework in which central banks simultaneously use the exchange rate and the interest rate as operating targets of monetary policy. We explain the mechanics of foreign exchange market interventions and sterilization and we explain why a central bank has an interest of controlling simultaneously the two operating targets. We derive the monetary policy rules for the two operating targets from a simple open economy macro model in which the uncovered interest parity condition and the monetary conditions index play a central role.