Effects of funding mechanisms on participation in multilateral environmental agreements

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - The “rational design approach” to studying international agreements holds that policy-makers evaluate costs and...     

Promises and Pitfalls of Veto Player Analysis

Veto player approaches have come to occupy a central role in comparative politics. This article critically reviews the literature, focussing especially on veto player explanations of policy outputs and outcomes. The review highlights three problems empirical veto player studies have to face: 1) identifying the relevant veto players, 2) establishing equivalence between veto players, and 3) specifying (theoretically or empirically) veto players' policy preferences. The article concludes that empirical veto player analyses advance our understanding of political institutions and their effects, but that they should deal more systematically with the three above mentioned problems.     

Could the Florida Election Disaster have been Avoided by Competition Among Polling Stations?

We study a model of competition among polling stations wherepolling stations have to invest in counting precision toattract voters. The benchmark is the (current) monopolisticcase in which there is no incentive to provide particularlygood counting technologies. Unsurprisingly, we find thatcompetition enhances precision when compared to a monopoly.The somewhat surprising part of our result is that the optimalnumber of polling stations is two.     

Die Politik der Grenze

The article deals with processes of demarcation as part of the process of Europeanization. It starts with a concept of borders and border control as central function of political systems and raises the question to which extent the European integration brings about a redrawing of territorial boundaries. First, it will be shown that the European integration is associated with a de-institutionalization of borders between the member states. Subsequently, it is argued that the removal of boundaries between the member states necessarily increases the importance of the external borders of the EU. The article describes and documents the role of the European Union in organising and coordinating a new emerging border regime. The last part discusses whether the macro-territorial borders of the EU resemble the borders of nation states. It is suggested that despite the tendencies to ?harden“ the external borders of the EU, these borders remain fuzzy and changeable, because the EU has developed a large number of forms of association and cooperation with neighbouring countries of the EU. In addition, due to the ?moving borders“ of the EU it seems rather unlikely that the EU-borders will ever become as rigid as nation state borders. The conclusion discusses the issue whether Europe can be seen as a forerunner of a new relationship between territory, demarcation and political order.     

Explaining the political use of evaluation in international organizations

Policy Sciences - Despite a growing literature on the politics of evaluation in international organizations (IOs) and beyond, little is known about whether political or administrative stakeholders...     

Four worlds of morality politics: the impact of institutional venues and party cleavages

The most prominent theory accounting for variation of morality politics across Western Europe is the so-called Two Worlds framework. According to this approach, the presence or absence of a secular?religious cleavage in national party systems strongly affects the degree of conflict intensity and the framing of morality policy issues. This article shows that the explanatory power of the Two Worlds model could be enhanced significantly by introducing a second analytical dimension that captures the institutional venue (party politics vs. parliamentary politics), in which moral conflicts take place. This is useful because there are instances in which a religious cleavage is lacking, but moral conflicts are nonetheless highly intense and party-based (the traditionalist world), and there are cases in which the religious cleavage formally exists, but moral conflicts are nonetheless resolved in the parliamentary arena (the unsecular world).     

Teaching Students to Engage with Evidence: An Evaluation of Structured Writing and Classroom Discussion Strategies

In their transition to college, students often struggle to identify and make connections between the main arguments, evidence, and empirical findings of articles from academic journals commonly assigned on political science syllabi. Which active learning techniques are most effective for teaching students to recognize and evaluate social science evidence? To address this question, we conducted an experiment with students from two first-year writing seminars in political science. Students were randomly assigned to either an in-class writing activity or a group discussion, both of which required them to summarize an article’s use of evidence. We find limited evidence that group discussions are more effective for teaching students to engage with evidence.     

Income and Asset Poverty among Pastoralists in Northern Kenya

In this study we use household panel data collected in Marsabit district of Northern Kenya, to analyse the patterns of livelihood sources and poverty among pastoralists in that area. We estimate income poverty using imputed household income relative to the adjusted poverty line and asset poverty using a regression-based asset index and tropical livestock units (TLU) per capita. Our results indicate that keeping livestock is still the pastoralists’ main source of livelihood, although there is a notable trend of increasing livelihood diversification, especially among livestock-poor households. The majority of households (over 70%) are both income and livestock-poor with few having escaped poverty within the five-year study period. Disaggregating income and asset poverty also reveals an increasing trend of both structurally poor and stochastically nonpoor households. The findings show that the TLU-based asset poverty is a more appropriate measure of asset poverty in a pastoral setting.     

Why fascists took over the Reichstag but have not captured the Kremlin: a comparison of Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia

Like Weimar Germany, contemporary Russia is home to fascist actors and widespread nationalism. But unlike interwar Germany, the party system in post-Soviet Russia is heavily manipulated and civil society remains underdeveloped. This means that fascists have not had a chance to use elections or to penetrate civil society in order to build up political support. The continuing presence of a resolutely authoritarian, yet non-fascist “national leader” (Vladimir Putin) keeps the country from becoming a liberal democracy but it also, for now, makes it less likely that the regime will become fascist.