Amsterdam as a Global City: Restructuring,Identity Rearticulation,and Resistance in the Service Sector

This article explores the interconnections between political‐economic transformations of Amsterdam into a second‐tier global city and the rearticulation of (gender) identities and resistance practices in the service sector. The research focuses on both the high and low ends of the service sector, i.e., banking and cleaning. Given different positionalities of employees in respective sectors, the article shows that their responses to changes in their work environment take on different modalities. Women managers in the banking sector resort to a strategy of “hiding” their gender identity and individualized responses, while Moroccan (male) cleaners tend to underscore the masculine nature of their work and are joining labor unions in greater numbers than before.     

“State ineffectiveness in deterring organized crime style homicide in Mexico: a vicious cycle”

Institutional weaknesses in the criminal justice system (limited court capacity and the increasingly sophisticated armament of splintering drug trafficking organizations) limit the effectivity of Mexican states to deter organized crime style homicide. Court capacity, expressed by increasing sentencing rates in states where the oral court system was institutionalized, remains insufficient against the post-2006 organized crime related homicide epidemic. The illegal arms market, combined with long-standing deficits in firepower between organized crime and municipal police forces, limit the state’s capacity to alter the arms balance toward policing forces. Taken together, limited court capacity and the tactical imbalance of weapons held by drug trafficking organizations create a vicious cycle which continually perpetuates state ineffectiveness to deter and punish organized crime style homicide.

     

Estimating damages from price-fixing: the value of transaction data

We use a unique private data set of about 340,000 invoice positions from 36 smaller and larger customers of German cement producers to study the value of such transaction data for an estimation of cartel damages. In particular, we investigate, first, how structural break analysis can be used to identify the exact end of the cartel agreement and, second, how an application of before-and-after approaches to estimate the price overcharge can benefit from such rich data sets. We conclude that transaction data allows such a detailed assessment of the cartel and its impact on direct customers that its regular application in private antitrust cases is desired as long as data collection and preparation procedures are not prohibitively expensive.     

Governing complex societal problems: The impact of private on public regulation through technological change

When addressing complex societal problems, public regulation is increasingly complemented by private regulation. Extant literature has provided valuable insights into the effectiveness of such complex governance structures, with most empirical studies focusing on how public regulation influences private regulation. Conversely, the impact of private on public regulation is less well studied. Here, we investigate this impact with a focus on technological change as possible mechanism. Based on a case study of energy efficiency in buildings in Switzerland, we find evidence of a symbiotic interaction between public and private regulation that leads to ratcheting-up of regulatory stringency. We identify technological change as the mechanism linking private and public regulation. We discuss the relevance of our findings for governance literature and regulators.     

Majority shareholder protection by variable qualified majority rules

In this paper, we analyze judicial review according to the German Stock Corporation Act (Aktiengesetz, §§ 243 et seqq.) and its blocking effect with the help of concepts of cooperative game theory. In particular, we suggest variable qualified majority rules as ingredients of arrangements which balance the interests of a majority shareholder and of the minority shareholders.

Democratic legitimacy in regional economic organizations: the European Union in comparative perspective

Regional organizations have been widely criticized for lacking democratic legitimacy, but these criticisms have been rather ad hoc, concerned with single case studies and reliant on unclear standards or metrics. Are all organizations similarly deficient? And how does the European Union (EU), the target par excellence of the criticisms, fare in comparative perspective? In this paper, we take a first step towards answering these questions by leveraging the rich debate on the EU to identify several institutional dimensions of democratic legitimacy and operationalizing them for comparative analysis. We then investigate the most important regional economic organizations (REOs) in the world. Our findings are three-fold: (i) there is systematic variation across REOs, with a group doing rather well, one mixed, and one poorly; (ii) procedural dimensions fare better than those related to representation or local self-determination; (iii) no organization exhibits or lacks legitimacy in all dimensions. These results qualify the perception that democratic legitimacy deficits are indiscriminately pervasive and indicate that the EU belongs to the most democratically legitimate group.     

The “Crisis” of Gender Equality: The Norwegian Newspaper Debate on Female Genital Cutting

This article examines how tensions between feminism and multiculturalism conflate in a media debate on female genital cutting. The following questions are addressed: how is gender equality problematized, in what ways is the gender equality approach challenged, and what are the main solutions to prevent female genital cutting. The empirical analysis is based on the newspaper debate that followed the Norwegian Broadcasting Company's (NRK) documentary on female genital cutting in June 2007. The findings of our study do not support a claim that gender equality would be challenged by accommodations to multiculturalism. Our conclusion is that it is difficult to disconnect policy-making aimed at combating female genital cutting from the processes of stigmatization. Rather, by advocating the type of measure that is the most contested by the actors of ethnic minority organizations, the proponents for adopting routines of genital examination ultimately contribute to a problematic pattern, where the political debate about the situation within ethnic minority groups is run and dominated by the majority.