Bonding in Pursuit of Policy Goals: How MPs Choose Political Parties in the Legislative State of Nature

How do MPs in nascent legislatures choose a political party? We argue that MPs self‐select into groups of like‐minded colleagues to achieve favored policy outputs. MPs identify colleagues with similar preferences based on observed behavior and informative signals such as socioeconomic status, cultural background, and previous political experience. We test this explanation in the first democratically elected German parliament, the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848, that developed a differentiated party system in the absence of electoral and career incentives. Our statistical analysis shows that MPs were significantly more likely to join parties that were similar to them with regard to ideology, age, regional provenance, confession, noble status, and previous parliamentary experience. Qualitative evidence suggests that major changes in the party system were driven by disputes over policy. Our findings are particularly important for countries with more turbulent paths towards parliamentarization than those witnessed by archetypical cases like Britain or the United States.     

Mapping and Explaining Parliamentary Rule Changes in Europe: A Research Program

We outline a comprehensive research program on institutional reforms in European parliaments. Original data show that parliamentary rules in Western European parliaments have been changed frequently and massively during the period from 1945 to 2010 suggesting that actors use institutional reforms as a distinct strategy to pursue their substantive goals. We discuss how institutional instability affects existing theoretical and empirical arguments about institutional effects. Furthermore, we present four ideal‐typical approaches to analyzing rule changes, present new software tools for identifying and coding changes in large text corpora, and demonstrate their usefulness for valid measurement of the overall change between subsequent text versions.     

Only When We Agree! How Value Congruence Moderates the Impact of Goal‐Oriented Leadership on Public Service Motivation

Questions of how and when managers can motivate the workforce of public organizations are fundamental for scholars and practitioners alike. A dominant assertion is that goal‐oriented leadership strategies, such as transformational leadership, foster public service motivation (PSM). However, existing studies rely on designs that are vulnerable to endogeneity and rarely investigate the scope conditions of the leadership‐PSM relationship. Combining a field experiment with 364 managers and surveys of their 3,470 employees, the authors show that transformational leadership and transactional leadership, when induced experimentally, do not have the claimed positive effect on PSM. In fact, the results indicate that goal‐oriented leadership can have demotivating effects when employee and organizational values are incongruent. Public managers should therefore carefully assess existing levels of value (in)congruence before implementing goal‐oriented leadership strategies, and—in case of value conflicts—seek to align perceptions of the desirable among members of the organization.     

Das Janusgesicht der Unionsbürgerschaft

Zwar sind die Bürgerschaftsnormen (Art. 17 ff. EGV) überwiegend kritisch aufgenommen worden. Dennoch knüpft sich an den Topos der Unionsbürgerschaft ein hoffnungsgeladener Fortschrittsdiskurs. In einer Union, die den Markt als Integrationsziel überwunden hat, verspricht die Unionsbürgerschaft Werte mit Zukunftsperspektive. Sie überwindet die geistige Absenz, die im Herzen der Integration liegt, und stellt in Gestalt einer Grundrechtsfundierung ein auf das Individuum zugeschnittenes ethisches Fundament zur Verfügung. Dieser Fortschrittsdiskurs findet sich insbesondere in den emphatischen Schlussanträgen der Luxemburger Generalanwälte, die die Unionsbürgerschaft als “Grundrecht persönlicher Freiheit“ und als “Gipfel der Individualrechte“ bezeichnen. Der Europäische Gerichtshof hingegen bleibt einerseits sprachlich subtiler, verbindet die Unionsbürgerschaft aber andererseits mit dem Diskriminierungsverbot und setzt durch die Betonung von Gleichheitsrechten statt von Freiheitsrechten eine transnationale Gleichheit voraus, die der Unionsbürgerschaft vorausliegt und große Sprengkraft beinhaltet. Damit gerät die affektive Dimension von Bürgerschaft in den Blick. Wer sich als Bürger eines Gemeinwesens definiert, nimmt die kollektive Identität politischer Gemeinschaft in seine individuelle Identität auf. Dies ist einerseits erwünscht, weil so das soziale Legitimationsdefizit der Union überwunden werden kann. Andererseits birgt es all jene Gefahren, die aus den Hypertrophien und Katastrophen des letzten Jahrhunderts bekannt sind. Dies wiederum erlaubt einen Blick auf die Natur des Rechts, dem eine emanzipatorische und liberale Integrationskraft zugetraut wird. Eine kulturtheoretisch informierte Analyse hingegen zeigt, dass das Recht unter seiner liberalen Oberfläche eine Tiefenstruktur besitzt, die nach wie vor viel Atavistisches transportiert. Auch die Unionsbürgerschaft teilt diese Ambivalenz. Wer auf sie baut, um Europa vom Bürger her zu integrieren, muss sich dieser gefahrvollen Zweischneidigkeit bewusst sein.     

Enhancing the effectiveness of international development: a systems approach

Every day 25,000 people die of hunger and hunger-related causes. While it is recognised that the international development system is not as effective as it should be, years of endeavours to achieve greater harmonisation of international aid and to create an effective architecture pass by without adequate results. The article introduces a framework for enhancing the effectiveness of the international development system, based on fundamental concepts of Systems Thinking. It discusses the complex systemic challenges to development and suggests that more effective control is a key precondition for greater effectiveness in development as a whole.