The Democratic Costs of Constitutionalisation: The European Case

There is little doubt that the European Union suffers from a legitimacy deficit. However, the causes of this deficit and, as a consequence, the remedies are contested. This article wants to show that an important, but often overlooked, cause for the legitimacy deficit lies in the overconstitutionalization of the EU. The European Treaties have been constitutionalized by the ECJ, but are full of provisions that would be ordinary law in states. Constitutionalization means de‐politicization. What has been regulated on the constitutional level is no longer open for political decision‐making. Thus, in the EU political decisions of high salience are not only withdrawn from the democratically legitimized institutions, but also immunized against political correction. Therefore, the consequences from the constitutionalization have to be drawn: The Treaties should be reduced to those norms that reflect the functions of a constitution, whereas all the other parts have to be downgraded to the level of secondary law.     

Developing a short scale to assess public leadership

Tummers and Knies (2016) have recently introduced a 21-item scale for the measurement of public leadership to the burgeoning field of leadership research in public administration. However, due to restrictions in survey length and response time, scholars often face practical difficulties when adopting measurement scales of such length. In many subfields of public administration, this results in a proliferation of ad hoc measures of unknown validity, which impedes scholarly progress. The goal of the present study is to develop a short form of the public leadership scale. We build on data from a two-wave study in the German public sector and follow a step-by-step scale reduction procedure. The result is a reliable and valid 11-item scale of public leadership for utilization in public administration research. Since a short scale allows researchers to include additional measures of other constructs, it facilitates the exploration of the nomological network of public leadership.     

Visegrad: Fit for purpose?

Visegrad inter-state cooperation among the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia has faced numerous near-death experiences since its official birth in 1991. Furthermore, it has faced two challenges since the four member-countries’ accession to the EU in 2004. Then Visegrad was eulogized, considered deceased by many precisely for having achieved the apparently ultimate aim of EU membership. Second, having purposefully stated rumours of its death, Visegrad has since 2008 been confronted by issues from outside and ones well beyond its size – the Obama presidency and its apparent abandonment of Central and Eastern Europe in its “reset” strategy towards Moscow; a post-Lisbon EU agenda; strategic reorientations in NATO; and both the general, that is, global, financial crisis and particularly within the EU and regarding the Euro.This article, by contrast, contends that the fundamental changes and challenges that Visegrad has faced enhanced the Group's clear and successful strategy. It identifies and elaborates that strategy, drawing also selectively and thematically on the Group's historical experience since 1991. These strategies include targeted rather than broad selection of aims; retaining an exclusive membership while also inventing variable and flexible mechanisms for adding non-member countries to help them pursue specific initiatives. Through a study of annual Group Presidency agendas and reports, high-level and ministerial meeting declarations and media and secondary source analysis and interviews with National Coordinators, the article contends that the Group continues to promote realistic aims, and provides a unique platform for exercising them. This study concludes that Visegrad, despite the outside challenges remains effective in raising awareness, advancing smaller-scale policies and influencing EU policy towards the Western Balkans and European Partnership (EaP) countries, as well as achieving specific Visegrad initiatives with those states.     

A complicity continuum of state crime∗

State crime scholars and radical criminologists have struggled to draw distinctions between state-initiated and statefacilitated state crimes and state-corporate crimes. The first of these, a less contentious concept, denotes an explicit and distinct action by a state for the furtherance of its organizational goals which violates law or produces social injury. State-facilitated and state-corporate crimes have been defined as implicit actions or inactions by the state which facilitate social injury, harm, or violations of law. Here we seek to establish more clearly the parameters of the phenomenon of state crime by creating a multidimensional continuum of state crime complicity. A sample of cases found in the radical-state and state-corporate crime literature are placed on or between the two extremes of the continuum: commission-omission behavior and implicit-explicit policy.     

A New Deal on the Cards?

<正>Economic cooperation between China and the U.S.is of paramount importance As a candidate for president of the United States,Donald Trump’s criticism of China was frequent and often incendiary.The then real estate mogul and reality television host accused the world’s second-largest economy of"cheating"American businesses and"raping"the U.S.economy with unfair trade practices and currency manipulation—charges dismissed as false by Chinese offi cials.Undeterred,Trump threatened to slap a 45 percent retaliatory tariff on Chinese goods entering the U.S.     

Cumulative Neighborhood Risk and Subsequent Internalizing Behavior among Asian American Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Neighborhood disadvantage is a developmental context that may contribute to Asian American adolescent internalizing problems, yet there is a dearth of...     

Democracy promotion in EU enlargement negotiations: more interaction,less hierarchy

ABSTRACT

In the integration literature, the relationship of the European Union (EU) as a donor and the (potential) candidates for EU membership as recipients of democracy promotion is described as asymmetrical. The donor is portrayed to have full whereas recipients have moderate or even no leverage over democratic reform what brings a hierarchical notion of active donors versus passive recipients into the analysis. Taking the local turn into consideration, however, this contribution argues that democracy promotion, is better conceptualized as a dynamic interplay between external and domestic actors. It reveals the toolbox of instruments that both sides dispose of, traces the dynamic use of these instruments, and systematizes the structural and behavioural factors that constrain the negotiation interplay. A case study of negotiations over public administration reform in Croatia in the context of EU enlargement shows that domestic actors dispose of leverage that counterweights external leverage and mitigates the implied hierarchy.