Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Habilitation (13) (remove)
Keywords
- Biodiversity (1)
- Biodiversität (1)
- Computer Science (1)
- Cultural production (1)
- Forest (1)
- Informatik (1)
- Kunstproduktion (1)
- Lebensnaher Unterricht (1)
- Luftverschmutzung (1)
- Neue Medien (1)
- Nordatlantik (1)
- Ostsee (1)
- Pierre Bourdieu (1)
- Schulentwicklung (1)
- Soziale Bewegung (1)
- Umweltschutz (1)
- Wald (1)
- digital media (1)
- school improvement (1)
- social movements (1)
Institute
- Institut für Kultur und Ästhetik Digitaler Medien (ICAM) (2)
- Institut für Soziologie und Kulturorganisation (ISKO) (2)
- Fakultät Bildung (1)
- Fakultät Nachhaltigkeit (1)
- Institut für Bildungswissenschaft (IBIWI) (1)
- Institut für Management und Organisation (IMO) (1)
- Institut für Nachhaltige Chemie und Umweltchemie (INUC) (1)
- Institut für Politikwissenschaft (IPW) (1)
- Institut für Ökologie (IE) (1)
- Kulturwissenschaften (1)
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.
This study summarizes more than 15 years of scientific support for the United Nations-Economic Commission Europe (UN-ECE) Convention on Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) and other European environmental protection conventions such as the Commission for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR) and the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission (HELCOM) by means of development and application of numerical simulation models for the atmospheric long-range transport of heavy metals. The work is mainly based on results and conclusions described in the nine papers of the appendix but some more recent investigations which have not yet been published in the scientific literature are also presented. An introductory overview and synthesis of current knowledge and understanding pertaining to all major aspects of heavy metals in the atmosphere is presented from a viewpoint that numerical modelling of their atmospheric processes is necessary and feasible to support the conventions mentioned above. The models discussed in this study have capabilities to quantify transboundary fluxes of lead, cadmium and mercury as the priority metals of concern and have a potential to identify sources as well as to predict the impact of emission reductions on the load of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in Europe. Advantages and limitations of relatively simple Lagrangian models are outlined within the context of issues currently facing the environmental scientific and policy making communities. However, a focus of this study is a comprehensive model system for atmospheric mercury species using a fully three-dimensional Eulerian reference frame and incorporating a state-of-science mercury chemistry scheme, which has been adopted by various scientific institutions for their modelling purposes.
This thesis makes an important contribution to better understanding biodiversity and ecosystem function relationships across trophic levels in forests - aspects that are still underrepresented in BEF research. Ongoing biodiversity loss can be expected to change important trophic interaction pathways in these ecosystems, making increased efforts in exploring the mechanisms underlying, and the drivers determining, the impact of trophic complexity on the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning a crucial objective for holistic approaches to BEF research.