Institut für Politikwissenschaft (IPW)
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Increased international compliance with human rights and democracy standards is a core issue for both human rights and democratizing actors as well as for victims of human rights abuse. International human rights organizations (IHROs) are expected to make positive contributions to this end, even though they possess low levels of authority. This authority has been renegotiated multiple times in various reform processes. An oversimplified expectation would have us assume that democracies would want to strengthen IHROs, and that autocracies would seek to weaken them. As the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) was reformed in 2006, 2007, 2010, and 2011, some autocracies strived to abolish parts of the UNHRC. Other autocracies aimed "merely" to weaken them. Democracies displayed an even larger variance. The question that drives this research work is how we can explain the broad variety of state preferences for strengthening or weakening IHROs. Previous research has mostly concentrated on democracies, leaving autocracies understudied. It also treated countries as black boxes. To account for such shortcomings, first, the author systematically tests the relationship between the UNHRC and its authoritarian and democratic members by means of inferential statistics. Second, he analyzes a bottom-up process inherent to New Liberalism. It scrutinizes the role of domestic societal actors, domestic institutions, as well as pressures on the international stage. The results reveal that societal actors, along with the interplay of wealth and regime type in the international realm, figure as the most important predictors of delegation preferences voiced by autocracies and democracies during the reform of the monitoring bureaucracy Special Procedures of the UNHRC. Societal actors play a more important role in democracies than in autocracies. Institutionalized domestic oversight mechanisms help societal actors to conduct effective lobbying at the domestic level. Oversight mechanisms are more important than the rule of law and electoral institutions. Regarding international coalition building, authoritarian regimes turn out to be better organized than democracies. The author concludes that supporters of strong IHROs shall 1. empower domestic societal actors; 2. disrupt cohesive delegation preferences of authoritarian regimes; and 3. invest in independent domestic oversight mechanisms.oversight mechanisms.
Contemporary liberal-democracies are under stress and traditional political parties have become detached from their electorates. Since the 1980s, parties have been experiencing a crisis of legitimation, whose effects have become intensive especially in the early twenty-first century. New populist challengers have tried to fill the representative void left by mainstream parties; at the same time, technocracy has become one of the most prominent form of representation. Political responsibility and responsiveness appear often incompatible in the eyes of voters. Moreover, political personalization and processes of presidentialization have led to a situation where single political leaders have become the crucial political actors, to the detriment of party organizations. This Habilitation thesis investigates the linkage between representative democratic institutions in parliamentary and semi-presidential systems and political elites, trying to understand how this linkage has been affected by the change of party democracy. In particular, the thesis analyzes political institutions’ functioning in democratic contexts as well as parties’ responses and elites’ paths to power as indicators of a process of adaptation. Four main research questions inform the analysis: what structural opportunities and constraints do political elites meet when it comes to exercising political power?; how have the decline of party government and political personalization modified opportunity structures?; how do parties and elites cope with democratic change?; has democratic change produced new criteria for successful political careers? The institutional focus is on political executives and representative assemblies at different levels of government. Findings highlight that political elites adopts strategies of resistance and respond to democratic change through incremental steps. In other words, rather than anticipatory, political elites appear reactive, when they are confronted with substantial modifications of the political opportunity structure. Overall, the study contributes to the debate about the changing role of parties and political elites as connectors between the state and the society and provides insights about future developments.
The literature on term bids by presidents tends to focus on the institutional arrangements to hinder such term bids in the first place, on presidential strategies to circumvent the constitutional law, or on counteractions of political elites. Mobilizations against such attempts by presidents to run for office again, after reaching the end of their last allowed term, are often solely included as "pressures from below". To address these shortcomings, this dissertation explores the issue of term amendment struggles through the lenses of contentious politics systematically combined with insights of revolution theories and democratization studies. Its conceptual perspective therefore lies on the interactions of actors and their constellations to each other as well as to institutions. The author deduces three diverse pathways to promote institutional change and prevent democratic backslidings – through political elites, (political) allies, and security forces. By selecting two cases that are most similar in terms of institutions and youth movements at the forefront, Senegal (2011-12) and Burkina Faso (2013-14), this analysis offers insight in the divergence of the struggles and their outcome. Because in both cases, the announcement of the presidents to run for another term in office led to broad mobilization led by youth movements against such tenure amendments, the political system in general and socioeconomic inequalities - but with diverging results. In Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaoré eventually resigned while Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal candidated again, legitimized by the Constitutional Court. Based on extensive fieldwork, including interviews with movement leaders and their allies, as well as a comprehensive media analysis and the SCAD databank for the analysis of protest events, the author differentiates and reconstructs the various phases of the conflict. The results of the dissertation point at two dimensions most relevant to comprehend the dissimilar pathways the struggles took – the reach of mobilization and, closely interlinked to the first, the refusal of soldiers to obey orders. It shows further that these differences go back to the respective history of each country, its former protest waves, and political culture. Although both presidents faced mass mobilization against their unconstitutional candidature, only in Burkina Faso it eventually led to an ungovernable situation. The dissertation concludes by reflecting on lessons learned for future democratic backslidings by presidents to come and avenues for future research – and thus offers fruitful insights.
Corruption as “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain” (Transparency International, 2013) is detrimental to economic, social and political development. It intensively violates the fundamental principles of democracy such as equality, fairness, transparency and accountability (Sandholtz and Taagepera, 2005). Europe exhibits a wide spectrum of corrupt activities and is characterized by large differences as to the extent and dynamics of corruption. Thus, it is astonishing that there is still little knowledge about the region-specific factors that determine corruption. Considering corruption as a multilevel phenomenon that takes place at the country level and is often measured by certain aggregated indices, this project examines corruption also at the individual level with data from the World Values Survey. The study includes 37 European countries at the macro level and 20 countries at the micro level (1995-2010). For comparative purposes and in order to uncover specific European determinants of corruption, all statistical calculations are run with an additional sample (“non-European country sample”), including countries world-wide. The results of the panel and multilevel analysis indicate that a country’s rate of inflation, international integration, the degree and duration of democracy, anti-corruption policy, the percentage of women in parliaments, religion, society’s history of corruption strongly influence the extent and dynamics of corruption at the country-level. At the individual level, an individual’s employment status, satisfaction with the financial situation, emancipative values, interpersonal trust and the justification of bribery are significant causes of corruption across and within European countries. A comparison of these results with the findings of the “world sample” clearly demonstrates that there are regional differences.
This doctoral thesis contains four empirical studies analysing the personal accountability of prime ministers and the electoral presidentialisation of parliamentary elections in European democracies. It develops the concept of presidentialised prime ministerial accountability as a behavioural element in the chain of accountability in parliamentary systems. The ongoing presidentialisation of parliamentary elections, driven by changes in mass communication and erosion of societal cleavages, that fosters an increasing influence of prime ministers' and other leading candidates' personalities on vote choices, has called performance voting – and the resulting accountability mechanism of electoral punishment and reward of governing parties – into question. This thesis analyses whether performance voting can be extended to the personal level of parliamentary governments and asks whether voters hold prime ministers personally accountable for the performance of their government. Furthermore, it explores how voters change their opinion of prime ministers and how differences in party system stability and media freedom between Western and Central Eastern Europe contribute to higher electoral presidentialization in Central Eastern European parliamentary elections. This thesis relies on several national data sources: the "British Election Study", the "German Longitudinal Election Study" and other German election surveys, the "Danish Election Study", as well as, data from the "Forschungsgruppe Wahlen". In addition, it utilises cross-national data from the "Comparative Study of Electoral Systems".
Seit über 25 Jahren wird der Einsatz von Bürgerbeteiligungsverfahren zu Fragen der Technikentwicklung und -implementierung von unterschiedlichsten Erwartungen auf verschiedenen Seiten begleitet und führt regelmäßig zu Ernüchterungen bei Beobachtern und Beteiligten. Ausgehend von dieser Beobachtung untersucht diese Arbeit, welche Zuschreibungen an die Rolle des Bürgers in der Governance neuer Technologien durch Bürgerbeteiligungsverfahren erzeugt bzw. zum Ausdruck gebracht werden. Die Untersuchung geht der Annahme nach, dass in organisierten Bürgerbeteiligungsverfahren sich jeweils eine bestimmte Form der Bürgerrolle manifestiert, die sich jeweils auf ein bestimmtes Verständnis der Wissenschafts- und Technikkultur sowie der Wissenschafts- und Technikgovernance der Sponsoren und/oder Organisatoren des Verfahrens zurückführen lässt. So lassen sich über die Analyse von Bürgerbeteiligungsverfahren dominante oder sich wandelnde Verständnisse von der Rolle der Bürger in der Technikkultur und Technikgovernance ablesen. Danach müsste sich im Ländervergleich zeigen, dass die Rolle der Bürger in Beteiligungsverfahren zu vergleichbaren soziotechnischen Fragestellungen jeweils durch den länderspezifischen Kontext geprägt wird. Empirisch wird diese Annahme in einem Vergleich von gut dokumentierten Beteiligungsverfahren zur Nanotechnologie aus Großbritannien, Frankreich und Deutschland überprüft. Der Untersuchungsansatz geht dabei über den vieler Fallstudien zur Bürgerbeteiligung in der Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung hinaus und analysiert nicht nur einzelne Beteiligungsverfahren nach normativen Kriterien im Hinblick auf ihre Qualität und Performance. Bürgerbeteiligungsverfahren sollen vielmehr als ein Phänomen betrachtet werden, an welchem sich die Sichtweisen und Einstellungen ihrer Auftraggeber, Organisatoren und Adressaten über das Verhältnis zwischen den Bürgern auf der einen und Politik, Forschung und sonstigen in der Technologieentwicklung und -governance involvierten Akteuren auf der anderen Seite ablesen lassen. Im Vordergrund der Untersuchung steht die Fragestellung, wie in Bezug auf die Beteiligungspraxis Bedeutungen von der Rolle des Bürgers in der Technologiegovernance hergestellt, kommuniziert und interpretiert werden. Beteiligungsverfahren und die durch sie konstituierte Bürgerrolle werden dabei auch als Bestandteile von Diskursen betrachtet. Damit verfolgt diese Arbeit ein Erkenntnisinteresse, welches dem interpretativ-hermeneutischen Ansatz der Policyanalyse nahesteht.
Does grass-roots civic engagement improve the quality of public services in countries in which formal oversight institutions are weak? It is obvious that formal oversight institutions are weak in developing countries, which causes low-quality public services. This weakness is particularly critical in the health sector - a service domain of crucial relevance for development. This observation has led practitioners to believe that the direct engagement of the beneficiaries of public services is a means to compensate the weakness of oversight institutions and to improve the quality of these services. Given that beneficiaries have incentives to demand good quality services, it is indeed logical to assume that their participation in the monitoring of public services helps to improve the quality of these very services. This positive view of grass-roots civic engagement resonates with the idea that an active civil society helps a political system to build up and sustain a high institutional performance In the eyes of the donors of development aid, this idea nurtures the expectation that strengthening civic engagement contributes to increased aid effectiveness. Accordingly, donor countries have increased their efforts to strengthen beneficiary participation since the 1990s, which moved the concepts of voice and accountability center-stage in the international development discourse. However, whether citizens' capacity to exercise pressure on service providers and public officials really improves the effectiveness of development aid remains an unresolved question. Building upon recent experimental and comparative case study evidence, the thesis examines the role of citizens' engagement in the effectiveness of development interventions. The focus is on such interventions in the health sector because population health is particularly critical for prosperity and development, and ultimately for democratization. The key question addressed is if and under what conditions ordinary people's engagement in collective action and their inclination to raise their voice improves the effectiveness of development assistance for health (DAH). I analyze this question from an interactionist viewpoint, unraveling the complex interplay of civic engagement and health aid with three key institutional variables: (i) state capacity, (ii) liberal democracy and (iii) decentralized government. Drawing upon social capital theory, principal-agent theory, and selectorate theory, I provide compelling evidence that health aid effectiveness depends on (a) bottom-up processes of demand from service users as well as (b) formal processes of top-down monitoring and horizontal oversight arrangements. In other words, the very interaction of behavioral and institutional factors drives the accountability in public service provision and thus the effectiveness of development assistance for health in recipient countries.
This thesis aims to provide a quantitative, cross-nationally comparative, longitudinal and multilevel study of the drivers and hindrances of national governments' anti-trafficking measures. In this research, both macro-level determinants of anti-trafficking enforcement and micro-level foundations of human trafficking are explored. In the manuscript, large-N comparative research examines how characteristics of countries interact with people's attitudes towards violence to better understand what creates environments that are more or less supportive of governments' anti-trafficking efforts. The results presented in the thesis speak not only in favor of studying this topic systematically and cross-nationally, addressing existing gaps in the literature but also in favor of combining macro- and micro-level evidence for developing more effective policy responses against human trafficking.
Die Frage nach einer gerechten, möglichst von allen Mitgliedern eines Gemeinwesens als legitim erachteten, Verteilung verfügbarer Ressourcen stellt sich unweigerlich in jedem kollektiv finanzierten Gesundheitssystem. Sie ist nicht beschränkt auf monetäre oder materielle Ressourcen, sondern betrifft zum Beispiel auch die Arbeitszeit von Fachkräften oder die Allokation von Spenderorganen. In Deutschland wurden solche Verteilungsfragen in der medizinischen Versorgung bisher erstens häufig einzelfallbezogen und ohne eine vorhergehende systematische Klärung der gesellschaftlichen Prioritäten behandelt; zweitens wurden sie vorwiegend von Leistungserbringern und Experten innerhalb von Fachöffentlichkeiten thematisiert. Eine in einigen inner- und außereuropäischen Ländern bereits erprobte Möglichkeit zur Vorbereitung der konsistenten Klärung von Verteilungsfragen in der Gesundheitsversorgung ist die systematische Priorisierung auf Basis einer gesellschaftlich geklärten Axiologie und Methodik. Die gestiegene Patienten- und Bürgerorientierung in der Gesundheitspolitik legt es nahe, Bürger auch in den regelmäßig umstrittenen Fragen nach den Werten, Kriterien und Verfahrensregeln für die Klärung von Priorisierungsfragen frühzeitig in die politische Meinungs- und Willensbildung mit einzubeziehen. Als besonders vielversprechend für die partizipative Bearbeitung komplexer Probleme gelten deliberative Formate, die im Anschluss an die sog. ´Konsensuskonferenzen´ in der Medizin entwickelt wurden. Allerdings ist die Frage, ob und in welcher Weise sich solche deliberativen Beteiligungsformate tatsächlich zur Anregung und Förderung von Prozessen der Meinungs- und Willensbildung zu normativ anspruchsvollen und zukunftsorientierten Problemen eignen, immer noch umstritten. Die vorliegende Arbeit bearbeitet diese politisch-praktisch motivierte Frage im Rahmen einer in der Theorie der deliberativen Demokratie fundierten Mixed-Methods Analyse eines deliberativen Modellprojekts – der ´Lübecker Bürgerkonferenz zur Priorisierung in der medizinischen Versorgung´. Im Rahmen dieses Verfahrens sind im Frühsommer 2010 in Lübeck 20 zufällig ausgewählte Bürgerinnen und Bürger an insgesamt vier Wochenenden zusammengekommen. Sie haben sich intensiv in die Frage nach Werten, Kriterien und Verfahrensregeln für die Priorisierung in der medizinischen Versorgung eingearbeitet, Experten hierzu befragt und zum Abschluss die Ergebnisse ihrer Diskussionen in einem gemeinsamen Bürgervotum festgehalten und der Öffentlichkeit übergeben. Die Bearbeitung der oben genannten Fragestellung erfolgt in drei Analyseschritten: Im Rahmen einer Potenzialanalyse wird zuerst untersucht, ob und in welchem Maß sich die Potenziale, die in der einschlägigen Literatur solchen Bürgerbeteiligungsverfahren zugeschrieben werden, im vorliegenden Fall der Lübecker Bürgerkonferenz tatsächlich entfaltet haben. In einem zweiten Schritt wird im Sinne einer Evaluation untersucht, ob die Anforderungen an die Qualität deliberativer Bürgerbeteiligungsverfahren, die in der einschlägigen Literatur formuliert werden, im und vom Lübecker Projekt erfüllt worden sind. Im dritten Schritt geht es im Sinne einer Kontextanalyse um die Frage, wie sich die spezifischen Bedingungen, die mit dem Thema, dem Design und den Verfahrensentscheidungen gesetzt wurden, auf den Verlauf der Bürgerkonferenz und ihre Ergebnisse sowie auf ihre Bedeutung für die öffentliche und politische Meinungs- und Willensbildung außerhalb der Bürgerkonferenz ausgewirkt haben Auf Grundlage der Analyse der Lübecker Bürgerkonferenz zeigen sich verschiedene in der Literatur bereits beschriebene Wirkungen deliberativer Verfahren auf die verfahrensinterne und öffentliche Meinungs- und Willensbildung. Aus der Analyse von Qualität und Kontexteffekten des Verfahrens werden hinderliche und förderliche Faktoren für die Entfaltung dieser Wirkungen identifiziert worden. Hieraus können 1.) einige Schlussfolgerungen für das analysierte Modellprojekt selbst gezogen, 2.) Empfehlungen für zukünftige ähnliche Beteiligungsverfahren zu zukunftsorientierten, komplexen Fragestellungen abgeleitet und 3.) einige Perspektiven für die Partizipations- und Deliberationsforschung entwickelt werden. So wird die Bürgerkonferenz explizit als Teil eines sie umgebenden deliberativen Systems verstanden. Diese Perspektive hat sich in verschiedener Hinsicht als vorteilhaft für die Analyse eines einzelnen deliberativen Beteiligungsprojekts erwiesen. Die Tauglichkeit dieses Ansatzes ist im Rahmen zukünftiger empirischer Studien zu überprüfen. Die in der vorliegenden Arbeit präsentierten detaillierten Ergebnisse zur Lübecker Bürgerkonferenz können hierfür als Vergleichsmaterialien dienen.