Satisfaction with and Success of Employee Training from a Public Service Motivation Perspective

New public management requires modernization processes, including modern human resource practices, to enhance public sector performance. According to human capital theory, well-qualified and highly motivated public sector employees improve institutional performance; this study investigates the extent to which employee training as human resource practice can enhance one component of employees’ public service motivation (PSM), namely public interest, and their competencies as employee outcome. We examine public interest as a mediator or a moderator of the relationship between satisfaction with employee training and the resulting competence gain. The findings indicate a positive direct effect of satisfaction with employee training on competence gains and a mediating effect of public interest.     

The Policy of Strategic Demobilisation: The Social Policy of the Christian Democratic–Liberal Coalition, 2009–13

This article addresses two research questions: which course did the CDU, CSU–FDP coalition government choose to follow in social policy from 2009 to 2013? And what relationships exist between social policy in this period and the Bundestag election in 2013? The analysis of primary and secondary data reveals both continuity and discontinuity in social policy in the 17th legislative period of the Bundestag. The decisions and non-decisions on social protection and labour market regulation in this period mirror a wide variety of determinants. These include partisan effects, electoral cycles, co-governing judges and anonymous social policy of market forces. The data also suggest that the CDU/CSU has been relatively successful in its strategy of ‘asymmetric demobilisation’, the strategy of changing its social policy profile to one more similar to that of its social democratic opponent, in order to demobilise the SPD's voters rather than mobilising them. More ambivalent has been the electoral outcome of the FDP's role in social policy. The FDP's first foray into leading a large welfare state ministry, the Federal Ministry of Health, in 2009 to 2013 did not prove to be a winning proposition for the Liberals electorally. Social policy in general and welfare state recalibration in particular thus seem to be an electorally especially risky project for a liberal party such as the FDP.     

Learning to Be Postmodern in an All Too Modern World: “Whatever Action” in International Climate Change Imaginaries

Recent contributions in International Relations focus either on a shift from modernity towards postmodernity in approaches to address climate change, or underline the permanencies and continuities of modern thought and power hierarchies. In contrast, we suggest that there is a contradictory simultaneity of both of these framings through which the world is continuously decomposed and recomposed. Today climate change programmes seem to be driven by a key contradiction, which lies at the heart of the Anthropocene: the environment is ours to manipulate and yet is out of reach. Based on this framing, and thinking through Timothy Morton and Bruno Latour’s writings on political ecology, we argue that “whatever action” best captures current policy thinking: multiple initiatives are taken without a telos; rather they are designed to avoid that opportunities for adaptation and climate mitigation are foreclosed.     

Cooperation in PD Games: Fear, Greed, and History of Play

The impact of the cardinal relationships amongpecuniary payoffs, and of social history and reputation, on thechoice of strategies in four one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma games isexperimentally examined. The results suggest that normalized payoffvalues linked to ``fear'' and ``greed'' are important as predictorsof behavior in the PD games. Success in coordinating on the payoffdominant equilibrium in previous plays of coordination games alsoincreases the probability of cooperative play in the PD games. Theeffect of past play is strongest when individuals are matchedrepeatedly with the same person in previous play, as contrasted tobeing matched randomly with another player.     

Rethinking the ‘open functional’ approach: Ideas,problem pressure and reform in the contemporary welfare state

Recognition that welfare states continue to change has fostered debate about the relationship between ideas and policy problems in driving governments towards reform. To move the debate forward, this article proposes a modification of Barbara Vis and Kees van Kersbergen's ‘open functional approach’. It first argues that while policy problems may provide ‘functional pressure’ to reform, this pressure is significant only in so far as inaction would risk electoral punishment. Reform pressure is hence best evaluated with reference to contemporaneous expert advice, public opinion data and the timing of elite and media attention. Second, it suggests that ideas may also lead parties to act as reform seekers, using policy problems as justification for cherished solutions or long‐held programmatic goals. The modified approach is demonstrated through comparative application to two case studies, attempts at pension reform in Sweden and the United States.     

Publication bias as a threat to the validity of meta-analytic results

This paper reviews the evidence in support of the contention that publication bias is a potential threat to the validity of meta-analytic results in criminology and similar fields. It then provides a critique of the traditional file drawer or failsafe N method for examining publication bias, and an overview of four newer methods that can be used to detect publication bias. These include two (trim and fill and cumulative meta-analysis) that enable the researcher to estimate the magnitude of the influence of publication bias on the overall mean effect size. Advantages and limitations of both traditional and newer methods are examined. The methods reviewed are illustrated through their application to a meta-analysis of the effects of drug courts on recidivism by Wilson et al. (Journal of Experimental Criminology, 2, 459–487, 2006).

Laudatio: Verleihung des Theodor Eschenburg-Preises an Prof. Dr. Gerhard Lehmbruch am 25. September 2003 auf dem Kongress der Deutschen Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft in Mainz

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