Two Views about Socialism: Why Karl Marx Shunned an Academic Debate with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The object of this essay is to show that Marx, in his polemic Misere de la Philosophie against Proudhon's Philosophie de la Misere , in effect, shunned an academic debate with Proudhon and resorted to a denunciation of him as a petit bourgeois , in order to establish his own position at the top of the international labour movement. However, with his furious attack on Proudhon, Marx succeeded in destroying the existing links between the different socialist trends. In the light of this catastrophic split between the driving forces of radical change, at the beginning of the capitalist industrialisation, the article pleads for a tolerant culture of discussion, within which the debate on different methods and means towards an alternative society and the end of capitalism, is possible.     

The Structure of the Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha

Journal of Indian Philosophy - This article shows in detail that the widely held view according to which the Sarvadar?anasa?graha has a hierarchical structure is mistaken. It further...     

NGO monitoring and the legitimacy of international cooperation: A strategic analysis

States often invite NGOs to monitor international cooperation. Under what circumstances are states likely to take this step? We argue that NGO monitoring allows states to provide domestic publics with credible evidence regarding successful cooperation, but that this credibility carries a cost: if states fail to cooperate, a participating NGO will expose this failure and thus delegitimize the cooperation effort. Our formal analysis indicates that states obtain a dual benefit from NGO participation: in addition to enhanced legitimacy, NGO scrutiny helps states credibly commit to high cooperation levels vis-á-vis each other. The increased costs of failure, however, may deter state use of NGO monitoring. Surprisingly, we find that NGO monitoring is the most useful for states when the cooperation cost is relatively low. We explore the empirical relevance of our theoretical argument in NGO monitoring of World Bank development projects and compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. We also explain why NGO monitoring has been disallowed in the Global Environment Facility. Our analysis provides a firm strategic foundation for the idea that NGO participation sometimes confers benefits to states, and our theory has several empirically falsifiable implications.     

Capacity, not constraints: A theory of North-South regulatory cooperation

While neoliberal institutionalists argue that treaties facilitate collective action, many North-South regulatory treaties focus on largely national problems in developing countries. As such, these treaties present a puzzle: why a global treaty to address national regulatory problems? We argue that while activists in industrialized countries often promote regulatory treaties, these treaties garner political support among developing countries because they allow governments to enhance their national regulatory capacity. Developing countries are often not interested in banning practices such as trade in hazardous waste. Instead, developing countries want to increase their ability to control them. We test the argument against data on the global regime for hazardous waste trade. Contravening the conventional wisdom, we find that weak regulatory capacity is a powerful predictor of ratification of the Basel Convention, a treaty that does not ban hazardous waste trade but allows regulatory enhancement. By contrast, other treaties in the regime that do aim at banning hazardous waste trade receive little support among developing countries.     

Beyond the public and private divide: remapping transnational climate governance in the 21st century

This article provides a first step towards a better theoretical and empirical knowledge of the emerging arena of transnational climate governance. The need for such a re-conceptualization emerges from the increasing relevance of non-state and transnational approaches towards climate change mitigation at a time when the intergovernmental negotiation process has to overcome substantial stalemate and the international arena becomes increasingly fragmented. Based on a brief discussion of the increasing trend towards transnationalization and functional segmentation of the global climate governance arena, we argue that a remapping of climate governance is necessary and needs to take into account different spheres of authority beyond the public and international. Hence, we provide a brief analysis of how the public/private divide has been conceptualized in Political Science and International Relations. Subsequently, we analyse the emerging transnational climate governance arena. Analytically, we distinguish between different manifestations of transnational climate governance on a continuum ranging from delegated and shared public–private authority to fully non-state and private responses to the climate problem. We suggest that our remapping exercise presented in this article can be a useful starting point for future research on the role and relevance of transnational approaches to the global climate crisis.

Wohnrecht und ABGB – Integration oder optimierte Verschränkung?

Am 29. und 30. November 2007 veranstaltete das BMJ gemeinsam mit dem Institut für Zivilrecht der Universit?t Wien ein rechtswissenschaftliches Symposium unter dem Titel "ABGB 2011". Mit dieser Tagung sollte ausgelotet werden, welcher Reformbedarf am ABGB heute zu erkennen ist und welche Erneuerungsschritte sich dafür empfehlen. Die Veranstaltung sollte den Auftakt für ein systematisch angelegtes, weit greifendes Projekt zur Modernisierung des ABGB bilden, durch das unser ehrwürdiges Gesetzbuch an die Bedürfnisse der Gegenwart angepasst und anl?sslich des 200j?hrigen Jubil?ums seines Bestehens unter grundlegender Beibehaltung seines Aufbaus und seiner Wertungen erneuert werden soll. Freilich soll dies nicht durch eine umfassende Neukodifikation (die sich bei diesem gro?en Gesetzeswerk nicht als notwendig erweist), sondern durch abschnittsweise und sukzessive überarbeitung des Regelungsbestandes geschehen. Bei diesem Reformprozess soll es darum gehen, die Sprache, die Begriffswelt, die Einzelregelungen und die Probleml?sungskapazit?t des ABGB auf die H?he der Zeit zu bringen, freilich mit Behutsamkeit und sorgf?ltigem Blick auf die Abw?gungen, von denen sich der historische Gesetzgeber hatte leiten lassen. Dabei sollten überholte Regelungen beseitigt, aktuelle Vertragstypen – soweit erforderlich – im Gesetzesrecht erfasst und Rechtsfragen, die sich im jeweiligen Kontext heute typischerweise stellen, gel?st werden, dies alles unter Bedachtnahme auf die dazu in der Rechtsprechung und in der Rechtswissenschaft erarbeiteten überlegungen. Besonders w?re darauf zu achten, m?glichst einfache und für die Bürgerinnen und Bürger verst?ndliche Bestimmungen zu schaffen. Beim Symposium wurde auch die Frage behandelt, ob zivilrechtliche Sondernormen wieder in das ABGB als Stammgesetz zurückgeführt werden sollten. Für den Bereich des Wohnrechts war diese Fragestellung dem Autor anvertraut, der seine Analyse dazu im folgenden Beitrag dem wohnrechtlichen Publikum vorlegt. Der Vortragsstil wurde beibehalten. Alle beim Symposium gehaltenen Referate sind in dem von Fischer-Czermak/Hopf/Kathrein/Schauer herausgegebenen, bei Manz erschienenen Tagungsband zu dieser Veranstaltung nachzulesen.     

Removing fuel subsidies: How can international organizations support national policy reforms?

This article investigates how international organizations can support fuel subsidy reform. Departing from earlier studies, we focus on the ability of international organizations to assist national governments directly in the enactment and implementation of national reforms. While international organizations lack the capacity to directly enforce policy or force countries to abolish subsidies, they can increase the cost of reform reversal by governments that have a preference for reform but worry about the credibility and durability of their reforms. Moreover, international organizations can support learning from peers. In practice, governments interested in subsidy reform can announce a public commitment and submit progress reports to peer review by other countries under the auspices of an international organization. We characterize the institutional design of international organizations for success, discuss the role of the civil society in the process, and offer short illustrations from recent efforts by international organizations to promote fuel subsidy reform.     

When is a Reminder Enough? Text Message Voter Mobilization in a European Context

Sending text messages reminding people to vote has only been examined as a mobilization tool in three studies, two of them done in the United States. The results from these studies are mixed. We investigate this tool’s effectiveness using a field experiment in a different context, municipal elections in Norway. We find strong mobilization effects among groups traditionally low in participation (immigrants and youth voters). Young native Norwegians show an intent-to-treat (ITT) effect of 4.58% points, foreign nationals who have recently established Norwegian residency show an ITT effect of 2.93% points, and among immigrants who have lived in Norway for 7 years or more the treatment effect is 2.7% points. Even among native Norwegian voters over 30, with a baseline turnout of 73%, text messages generate a 0.96% points increase in turnout.

     

The Polarization of American Environmental Policy: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Senate and House Votes, 1971–2013

The partisan polarization of environmental policy is an important development in American politics, but it remains unclear how much such polarization reflects voter preferences, as opposed to disagreements between partisan elites. We conduct a regression discontinuity analysis of all major environmental and energy votes in the Senate and the House, 1971–2013. In total, we have 368,974 individual roll call votes by senators and House Representatives. The causal effect of electing a Democrat instead of a Republican in close elections on pro‐environmental voting is large: when a Democrat wins, pro‐environmental voting increases by over 40 percentage points. Because of the quasi‐experimental research design, this difference cannot be attributed to the median voter's preferences. Next, we test hypotheses concerning possible explanations for the elite partisan conflict. The Democrat–Republican gap is the widest when fossil fuel interests make contributions exclusively to Republicans and when state‐level public opinion is polarized.     

Incumbency Dominance in Letters to the Editor: Field Experimental Evidence

This article reports the results of a randomized field experiment conducted three weeks before the 2017 federal election in Germany. Four different versions of a letter to the editor were sent to all the German daily newspapers that handle letters to the editor independently. The versions differed in the subject matter of the letter, the chancellor Angela Merkel versus the main challenger Martin Schulz, and in the evaluation of this subject, positive versus negative. The experiment was designed to test for three different types of media bias: political bias, negativity bias, and incumbency dominance. We find no political bias in the decisions to print letters, and no statistically significant negativity bias. We do observe incumbency dominance: letters about the chancellor were 40% more likely to be printed.