Conceptualizing and evaluating (new) forms of citizenship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism

In an age of transnational flows and interdependencies, democratic citizenship can no longer be conceptualized exclusively within national boundaries. This paper presents a conceptual map that allows tracing emerging and proposed forms of citizenship within and beyond the nation state in a comprehensive and differentiated way. We disentangle two anchor points: membership in a political community as the fundament of citizenship and the arena of political decision-making as the focal point of citizenship rights, identities and practices. For the former we differentiate between a single national community, the universal community of humankind and multiple (national) communities. For the latter we distinguish the national, supra-national and transnational arena. Our typology thus consists of nine different forms of democratic citizenship. It is used to provide a brief overview over normative proposals and empirical findings leading to the following insights: while membership in a particular national community still dominates the reality in all three political arenas, in the normative discourse it is perceived as deficient. Membership in the universal community of humankind is widely endorsed in the normative discourse, but almost nonexistent. In contrast, membership in multiple communities is not only a growing reality but also normatively promising for democratizing a transnationalizing world.     

In Search of Co‐variance,Causal Mechanisms or Congruence? Towards a Plural Understanding of Case Studies

Methodological reflections about case study research have increased within recent years. According to our account, there are three distinct approaches to case studies: co‐variational, causal process tracing, and congruence analysis. The main goals of this article are to lay out the distinct ways in which causal inferences are drawn for the cases under study and to scrutinize the different understandings and directions of generalization within these three approaches. By doing so we highlight two aspects: First, causal process tracing and congruence analysis should be seen as two distinct alternatives to the dominant co‐variational template. Second, the main characteristics of case studies, their thickness, provides only an unavoidable dilemma if we aim to generalize the findings towards a wider population of similar cases as in the co‐variational template. If we would like to get deeper insights â‐“ as the causal process tracing approach does â‐“ or if we would like to use the empirical evidence for a broader theoretical discourse â‐“ as the congruence analysis does â‐“ case studies do not face a trade‐off.     

Die Institutionalisierung Indischer Parteien

Party systems are considered as institutionalized, when they have strong roots in the society, when they are stable (= moderate electoral volatility, fragmentation and polarisation of the party system), are regarded as legitimate vehicles of political competition and organizationally strong. Compared to these criteria, the Indian party system fares better, than quite a few critical survey indicate. Indian parties have strong, but specific roots in the society, party polarization is moderate and high fragmentation is only a consequence of unsuccessful aggregation of different subnational party systems in the Lower House. On the other hand Indian parties reflect specific social cleavages, more exactly, they are themselves prime actors in the social construction of cleavages. They also suffer from lack of internal democracy and cohesion. These deficits are related to the patronage character of Indian democracy and decisions of rational voter groups and parties in an extremely plural, and politically increasingly mobilized society. On the other hand, institutional shortcomings of parties have some positive effects on the political participation and on social emancipation of underprivileged groups. This seems to indicate, that institutionalization criteria won by the observation of Western parties, might be only partly helpful in the Indian context.     

Delimitation of the time of death by immunohistochemical detection of insulin in pancreatic beta-cells

To improve the possibilities to delimitate the time of death after longer laytime, it was examined if this is possible by immunohistochemical insulin detection. The results show that in our examination material, the pancreatic beta-cells of up to 12-day-old corpses produce a positive immunoreaction towards insulin in all cases, whereas none of the corpses older than 30 days show such a reaction. This means that in case of a negative immunoreaction, the time of death can be assumed to lie more than 12 days before the autopsy. The fact that a negative immunoreaction occurs consistently after 30 days leads to the conclusion that when insulin has been stained in a specimen, the death of the respective person must lie a maximum of 29 days earlier, whereby these time-limits may change in considerably different surrounding conditions.     

Lassen sich Signifikanztests auf Vollerhebungen anwenden? Einige essayistische Anmerkungen

The question whether it is allowed to use methods of statistical inference in the study of entire populations is disputed in the scientific community. Such a procedure can be justified only if the generation of the data of the population can be regarded as the realisation of a stochastic data generating process, analogously to drawing a sample out of a population by random. This article specifies under which circumstances these conditions can be regarded as given. Furthermore, it shows under which circumstances we should be at least careful, if not reluctant, to interpret the results of significance tests in the usual manner.     

Discussion Law & Society Review at Fifty: A Debate on the Future of Publishing by the Law & Society Association

This contribution presents a series of statements on the future of publishing by the Law & Society Review and the Law & Society Association generally. Framed by the first author's introductory and concluding comments are contributions by Halliday, Liu, Morrill, Seron, and Silbey. This debate, based on a LSR 50th anniversary panel held at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the LSA, is intended to open up a broader conversation among members of the Association. Positions by individual contributors can only be linked to them and not to the group of contributors.