Bureaucratic Migration Politics: German Support for Common EU Policies on Labour Migration

As a macrostructure, this article uses a bureaucratic politics framework to understand the preference formation of the German federal government on liberalising economic migration policies. This allows unpacking the process of preference formation and linking it to a number of causal factors, which, by influencing the costs and benefits distribution of the relevant actors, shape the position of the government. The article argues that the misfit between the existing national regulations for economic migration and European-level policies has to be zero – otherwise the economic and political adaptation costs for the actors involved are too high. A heated national debate on immigration is negatively related to governmental support for such measures, as the political costs of support skyrocket. Conversely, if the decision-making process happens bureaucratically, this helps to attain governmental support, as the political costs of doing so are kept minimal.     

Identification of group affinity from cross-sectional contours of the human midfacial skeleton using digital morphometrics and 3D laser scanning technology

Identifying group affinity from human crania is a long-standing problem in forensic and physical anthropology. Many craniofacial differences used in forensic skeletal identification are difficult to quantify, although certain measurements of the midfacial skeleton have shown high predictive value for group classifications. This study presents a new method for analyzing midfacial shape variation between different geographic groups. Three-dimensional laser scan models of 90 crania from three populations were used to obtain cross-sectional midfacial contours defined by three standard craniometric landmarks. Elliptic Fourier transforms of the contours were used to extract Fourier coefficients for statistical analysis. After cross-validation, discriminant functions based on the Fourier coefficients provided an average of 86% correct classifications for crania from the three groups. The high rate of accuracy of this method indicates its usefulness for identifying group affinities among human skeletal remains and demonstrates the advantages of digital 3D model-based analysis in forensic research.