Hertie School Research Repository
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EU Police Cooperation (1976 - 2016). State Preferences in the Context of Differentiated Integration
Get PDFEuropean internal security has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Various incidents across EU Member States have demonstrated the transnationalisation of terrorism and organised crime as well as the need to work together to safeguard security in a progressively borderless Europe. Governments and citizens have consistently called for a growing role of the EU and coordinating at this level. In this light, it appears striking that different cooperation initiatives continue to mushroom inside and outside the EU framework. Their parallel emergence duplicates efforts at best but can also obstruct information exchange and produce security failures. This dissertation sets out to investigate why Member States acknowledge the benefits of integration, yet advance differentiation as well.
Concretely, it studies the formation of state preferences in the still largely intergovernmental field of EU police cooperation. It asks which factors shape government positions and how they drive Member States to favour integration. In particular, the influence of cross-country interdependencies, politicisation and policy entrepreneurship might help explain processes of integration and differentiation in this policy area. Their relative importance as drivers of state preferences is studied across the institutional development of EU police cooperation between 1976 and 2016. The analysis is organised around four ‘milestones’ in the integration of this field: 1) the 1976 intergovernmental Trevi Group; 2) the 1995 Europol Convention establishing the European Police Office (Europol); (3) the 2009 Europol Council Decision establishing Europol as official EU agency; and (4) the 2016 Europol Regulation.
This dissertation finds that interdependencies in the fight against common threats mattered most as driver of state integration preferences in the early stages of European police cooperation. More recently, supranational policy entrepreneurship has emerged as key influence of pro-integration attitudes among Member States and can be expected to grow in importance. Politicisation, against it, provides windows of opportunity to this end and acts rather as amplifier of integration pressure from interdependencies and policy entrepreneurs. In sum, the asymmetrical effects of all three drivers explains the formation of diverging governmental attitudes towards integration and can thus help account for the persistence of parallel processes of differentiation and integration
Understanding Public Health
No full textThis book develops a new model of the genesis of health, on the basis of the interplay between genetic and environmental factors. Hurrelmann and Richter build upon the basic theories of health and the popular model of salutogenesis to offer a comprehensive interdisciplinary theory of health genesis and success: Productive Processing of Reality (PPR).
The authors show that health is the lifelong dynamic process of dealing with the internal reality of physical and psychological impulses and the external reality of social and material impulses. To demonstrate this, the book is split into three interconnected parts. Part A analyses the determinants of health, providing an overview of the insights of current research and the impact of socioeconomic influences and gender on health. Part B covers public health, social, learning and coping theories, all of which understand health as an interaction between people and their environment. Part C draws on these four theories to outline PPR, stressing the interrelation between physical and mental constitution and the demands of the social and mental environment, and suggesting strategies for coping with these demands during the life course.
Understanding Public Health: Productive Processing of Internal and External Reality will be valuable reading for students and researchers in psychology, sociology, educational science, public health and medical science, and for policymakers in public health
Politicians as Bankers. The Mechanisms and Consequences of Politically Influenced Banking
No full textLinkages between politics and banks are prevalent in developing and advanced countries and take various shapes. Among the more overt forms of political interference is direct political control over individual banks. Yet, the channels through which politicians exert control over banks and how they benefit from ties to banks is not entirely clear. This dissertation uses granular panel data from politically influenced and publicly owned banks in Germany and Spain and conducts a systematic, quantitatively rigorous analysis of the mechanisms and political consequences of political control over banks.
The cumulative dissertation addresses three related questions: chapter 2 asks whether appointments to banks are politically motivated and considers its potential implications for bank managers’ career incentives. It looks at appointment patterns of bank managers in formally independent Spanish savings banks and finds that banks’ managers face an increased turnover risk shortly after elections and under new governments.
Coalition partners and banks’ institutional architecture, however, constrain politicians’ ability to replace bank managers. The findings reveal political patronage in independent banks and show that politicians wield considerable influence even in banks that are not publicly owned.
In chapter 3, the dissertation examines how politics within banks’ boards influences banks’ loan provision before elections and focuses on the role of politicians in boards of German savings banks. Using detailed information about political representation in bank boards and loan data, I show that election-induced lending is pronounced (i) when the chairperson of the bank holds a political office, (ii) when the board consists of many politicians, and (iii) when political board members come from the same party. The effect is driven by savings banks with political chairpersons from counties and from the conservative party.
Finally, chapter 4 is concerned with the electoral consequences of politics-bank linkages and asks whether politicians benefit from those ties. I consider the case of German savings banks to assess whether board seats in banks give local politicians a leg up in elections. I find that mayors with a savings bank seat have higher odds of winning reelection than mayors without a seat and show that, in particular, conservative mayors benefit from bank connections.
The dissertation, hence, presents empirical evidence about the politics of politically influenced banking unveiling the channels through which politicians control banks and how they benefit electorally from it
National parliaments in Europe’s post-crisis economic governance
Get PDFThis dissertation provides a comprehensive account of the role of national parliaments in Europe’s post-crisis economic governance. It examines national parliaments in the European Semester, in relation to the European Stability Mechanism and the Interparliamentary Conference on Stability, Economic Coordination and Governance and challenges the view that the Euro crisis has only reduced the influence of national parliaments.
The analysis moves beyond prerogatives and institutional capacities to
actual parliamentary involvement. Scrutinising the different stages of the European Semester remains a challenge for many national parliaments that have been marginalised by this multilevel coordination and surveillance process. In case of the third rescue package for Greece, the overall involvement by national parliaments exceeded what legal provisions would have demanded. But both economic governance domains suffer from asymmetries between those national parliaments that are willing and able to become actually involved and those that are not. One possible remedy against these asymmetries would be to involve national parliaments into economic governance collectively. The provision of Article 13 TSCG and the Interparliamentary Conference established on this basis, however, fall short of collective involvement or joint scrutiny and the experience of negotiating the institutional design of the new Conference even suggests that any kind of joint parliamentary body for the Euro area would be very difficult to realise.
As a general overhaul of the Economic and Monetary Union seems indispensable to make the common currency weather-proof, a more symmetric involvement of national parliaments is necessary to strengthen the legitimacy that they supply. In the European Semester this could be achieved via minimum standards for parliamentary involvement, but the tangled web of procedures for ESM rescue packages is likely to persist and interparliamentary cooperation can only be developed incrementally
How to scale coded text units without bias: A response to Gemenis
Get PDFCoding non-manifesto documents as if they were genuine policy platforms produced at election time clearly raises serious issues with error when these codings are used in the standard manner to estimate left-right policy positions. In addition to the long term solution of improving the document base of the Manifesto Project identified by Gemenis (2012), we argue that immediate gains in manifesto-based estimates of policy positions can be realised by using the confrontational logit scales from Lowe et al. (2011), which addresses the problems of scale content and scale construction that are exacerbated by but not unique to the problems found in proxy documents
Detecting Policy Preferences and Dynamics in the UN General Debate with Neural Word Embeddings
No full textForeign policy analysis has been struggling to find ways to measure policy preferences and paradigm shifts in international political systems. This paper presents a novel, potential solution to this challenge, through the application of a neural word embedding (Word2vec) model on a dataset featuring speeches by heads of state or government in the United Nations General Debate. The paper provides three key contributions based on the output of the Word2vec model. First, it presents a set of policy attention indices, synthesizing the semantic proximity of political speeches to specific policy themes. Second, it introduces country-specific semantic centrality indices, based on topological analyses of countries’ semantic positions with respect to each other. Third, it tests the hypothesis that there exists a statistical relation between the semantic content of political speeches and UN voting behavior, falsifying it and suggesting that political speeches contain information of different nature then the one behind voting outcomes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the practical use of its results and consequences for foreign policy analysis, public accountability, and transparency
Big Data & AI – A Transformational Shift for Government: So, What Next for Research?
No full textBig Data and Artificial Intelligence will have a profound transformational impact on governments around the world. Thus, it is important for scholars to provide a useful analysis on the topic to public managers and policymakers. This study offers an in-depth review of the Policy and Administration literature on the role of Big Data and advanced analytics in the public sector. It provides an overview of the key themes in the research field, namely the application and benefits of Big Data throughout the policy process, and challenges to its adoption and the resulting implications for the public sector. It is argued that research on the subject is still nascent and more should be done to ensure that the theory adds real value to practitioners. A critical assessment of the strengths and limitations of the existing literature is developed, and a future research agenda to address these gaps and enrich our understanding on the topic is proposed
Artificial intelligence for the public sector: opportunities and challenges of cross-sector collaboration
No full textPublic sector organizations are increasingly interested in using data science and artificial intelligence capabilities to deliver policy and generate efficiencies in high uncertainty environments. The long-term success of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) in the public sector relies on effectively embedding it into delivery solutions for policy implementation. However, governments cannot do this integration of AI into public service delivery on their own. The UK Government Industrial Strategy is clear that delivering on the AI grand challenge requires collaboration between universities and public and private sectors. This cross-sectoral collaborative approach is the norm in applied AI centres of excellence around the world. Despite their popularity, cross-sector collaborations entail serious management challenges that hinder their success. In this article we discuss the opportunities and challenges from AI for public sector. Finally, we propose a series of strategies to successfully manage these cross-sectoral collaborations
Performance Measurement in Philanthropic Foundations
No full textThe growth of philanthropic foundations in numbers and significance raises two immediate questions. First, what makes for success and failure of foundations’ projects and activities? Second, what yardsticks or benchmarks are used to measure performance and track goal attainment? The purpose of this book is to delve deeper into the complex set of issues that lie behind the performance and wider impact of philanthropy.
Performance Measurement in Philanthropic Foundations looks at the strengths and weaknesses of philanthropic foundations, which are independent of both the market and ballot box and yet open to signal and incentive deficiencies. The authors use in-depth case studies from different countries to illustrate the problems and challenge much of the conventional wisdom on foundation "success" and "failure." The book also outlines the main contours of a proactive governance and management style to address those problems