Zwischen Kultur und Kalkül? Vertrauen und Sozialkapital im Kontext der neoinstitutionalistischen Wende

Trust and social capital work in social networks as informal institutions, favouring cooperation between the participants of such social interaction. However, the increasing use of both terms has been accompanied by vanishing conceptual and theoretical precision. In order to counterbalance this development this article tries to clarify some of the major puzzles connected with both terms. First, we embed trust and social capital within the institutionalist turn in political science. Second however, we demonstrate that trust and social capital have been modelled from at least two perspectives: sociological institutionalism and economic institutionalism. Furthermore, attempts of combining those approaches have lead to decreasing theoretical consistency. Finally, we propose that economic institutionalism is theoretically and empirically more fruitful to explain the creation and destruction of social capital.     

Trajectories in public administration reforms in European Continental countries

The aim of this article is to study key New Public Management (NPM) transformations undertaken at central level in the European Union public administrations of Germanic, Nordic and Southern European countries. Our study shows that there is no global tendency towards the same NPM model, although, within public administration models, there are strong similarities. Although some NPM initiatives have been taken as steps towards implementing these reforms, in other contexts they could have been adopted in order to ward off deeper reforms.     

Euroscepticism and Right-Wing Extremist Attitudes in Germany: A Result of the ‘Dialectic Nature of Progress’?

Euroscepticism is associated with a new cleavage between the ‘losers’ and the ‘winners’ of globalisation. Current research also indicates that right-wing extremist, racist, and anti-democratic attitudes are more prevalent in lower status groups, particularly those struggling with societal change. These findings are combined with a unique data set covering both topics and thus add to the growing literature on Euroscepticism while also exploring the divide between the ‘losers’ and ‘winners’ of modernisation processes. The article introduces categories of occupational status groups, namely the ‘engaged’, the ‘skilled workers’, and the ‘legworkers’, which represent different levels of involvement in modernisation processes. It explores the differences in attitudes between these groups and how those differences correlate with citizens' professional status. It is concluded that perceived subjective alienation, which manifests in racist and anti-democratic attitudes, best explains EU-scepticism.