Wechselnde Ansichten zu Wechselkursen: Über die Bedeutung der Verknüpfung politischer Lernprozesse und ökonomischer Mechanismen in der Geschichte der europäischen Währungskooperation

Ohne Zusammenfassung Rezension zu Kathleen R. McNamara: The Currency of Ideas: Monetary politics in the European Union. Ithaca, NY [u.a.]: Cornell University Press 1998     

The Sexual Trafficking of Juveniles: A Theoretical Model

Research on the sexual trafficking of juveniles has increased. However, there has been no theoretical model developed incorporating variables into a systemic, interactive analysis of the issue. Utilizing Parsonian functionalism as its foundation, the authors developed such a model. The model is based on sociological, criminological, and psychological theories and concepts with a particular emphasis on the role of environmental design in trafficking. Unique to this study, the authors propose that a symbiotic relationship exists between the adolescent brain and trafficker as psychopath as contextualized in the Stockholm syndrome. We offer research and policy implications based on the model.     

Institutional Characteristics and Regime Survival: Why Are Semi‐Democracies Less Durable Than Autocracies and Democracies?

Previous studies report that semi‐democratic regimes are less durable than both democracies and autocracies. Still, mixing democratic and autocratic characteristics need not destabilize regimes, as three highly plausible alternative explanations of this correlation remain unaccounted for: (a) semi‐democracies emerge under conditions of political instability and social turmoil; (b) other regime characteristics explain duration; and (c) extant democracy measures do not register all regime changes. We elaborate on and test for these explanations, but find strikingly robust evidence that semi‐democracies are inherently less durable than both democracies and autocracies. “Semi‐democracies are particularly unstable political regimes” should thus be considered a rare stylized fact of comparative politics. The analysis yields several other interesting results. For instance, autocracies and semi‐democracies are equally likely to experience “liberalizing” regime changes more specifically, and once accounting for differences in degree of democracy, there is no robust evidence of differences in duration between military and single‐party regimes.     

Class Power and Participatory Equality: Attitudes towards Economic Democracy in Denmark and Sweden*

Proposals for capital sharing (i.e. the spreading of ownership rights to productive assets), also known as 'economic democracy', have been advanced by the trade unions in both Denmark and Sweden. In view of their redistributive intent, these schemes have met surprisingly little enthusiastic response in traditional labor constituencies. The article makes an attempt to explain why . An examination of wage earner attitudes (which goes into greater detail for Denmark) shows that the presently entertained proposals appeal in a cross-cutting manner to conflictual notions of class power and participatory opportunity. The result is a fragmentation of wage earner support.     

Culture Governance: Governing Self‐Reflexive Modernity

Political and administrative analysis is today said to be taking a narrative turn: to learning by telling and listening to the different stories that constitute political life. However, this new approach to studying the decentring of politics and policy as multiple discursive practices carries a new grand narrative too. A new connection between political authority and political community is taking shape outside the spheres of modern government and representative democracy. Political authority is becoming increasingly both communicative and interactive in order for it to be able to meet complexity with complexity. It is employed for reforming institutions by opening them towards the culture and by tying them to the political attributes and capacities of self‐reflexive individuals and to the transformation and self‐transformation of their conduct. I call this development culture governance. Culture governance is about how political authority must increasingly operate through capacities for self‐and co‐governance and therefore needs to act upon, reform, and utilize individual and collective conduct so that it might be amenable to its rule (Bang 2003; Dean 2003). Culture governance represents a new kind of top‐down steering; it is neither hierarchical nor bureaucratic but empowering and self‐disciplining. It manifests itself as various forms of joined‐up government and network governance and proclaims itself to be genuinely democratic and dialogical. This I shall show by a study of local Danish politics and policy in Copenhagen. Culture governance, I shall argue, constitutes a formidable challenge and threat to democracy, in attempting to colonize the whole field of public reason, everyday political engagement, democratic deliberation, and so on, by its own systems logic of success, effectiveness or influence. It seeks to take charge of the working of the more spontaneous, less programmed and more lowly organized politics of the ordinary in political communities, thus undermining the very idea of a non‐strategic public reasoning as founding the practices of freedoms.     

Juvenile Waiver 2014: A Review of State Statutes

Juvenile waiver has received much attention from the public, practitioners, and scholars. Prior studies have documented the increased use and effects of waiver. In this study we examine the current state of the law regarding juvenile waiver. We replicate 1995 and 2003 studies that examined state waiver statutes and detail the changes in prosecutorial, judicial, and legislative waiver since 2003. While the juvenile crime rate has dropped dramatically, it is unclear why legislatures’ fascination with juvenile waiver has also decreased. In this study we determine that juvenile waiver remains popular with legislatures, although there are signs of change.     

When benefitting a patient increases the risk for harm for third persons — The case of treating pedophilic Parkinsonian patients with deep brain stimulation

This paper investigates the question whether it is ethically justified to treat Parkinsonian patients with known or suspected pedophilia with deep brain stimulation — given increasing evidence that this treatment might cause impulse control disorders, disinhibition, and hypersexuality. This specific question is not as exotic as it looks at a first glance. First, the same issue is raised for all other types of sexual orientation or behavior which imply a high risk for harming other persons, e.g. sexual sadism. Second, there are also several (psychotropic) drugs as well as legal and illegal leisure drugs which bear severe risks for other persons. We show that Beauchamp and Childress' biomedical ethics fails to derive a veto against medical interventions which produce risks for third persons by making the patients dangerous to others. Therefore, our case discussion reveals a blind spot of the ethics of principles. Although the first intuition might be to forbid the application of deep brain stimulation to pedophilic patients, we argue against such a simple way out, since in some patients the reduction of dopaminergic drugs allowed by deep brain stimulation of the nucleus subthalamicus improves impulsive control disorders, including hypersexuality. Therefore, we propose a strategy consisting of three steps: (1) risk assessment, (2) shared decision-making, and (3) risk management and safeguards.