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The refugee crisis has developed as one of the major challenges for EU governance in recent years. From 2013 onwards, the crisis determined the political agenda and public discourse within European politics. During that time, the numbers of asylum seekers reaching Europe increased dramatically, with more than one million people applying for asylum at the crisis peak in 2015. This paper deals with the efforts taken by the EU and its member states to mitigate and overcome the refugee crisis. How exactly has the EU reacted to the refugee crisis and how and to what extend have the EU and its governance changed throughout the crisis? These research questions are approached through a reconstructive analysis of the whole period of crisis. This approach provides for a comprehensive examination of the refugee crisis that includes all issues, measures and processes of the EU’s policy reaction at the same time.
It will be argued that due to severe shortcomings of the Dublin regulation and the Common European Asylum System, a crisis in the EU’s refugee policy was already predestined. This was the case from 2013 onwards. The EU approached the crisis in three stages – neglect and non-solidarity leading to unilateral approaches by affected states, supranational short-term emergency measures during the peak of crisis and enhanced cooperation with third countries, especially with Turkey, the Western Balkans states and African states – until the crisis lost traction in 2017. Yet, the asylum system’s shortcomings are still not eliminated as the lasting measures of the EU’s crisis management between 2013 and 2018 mainly focused on border security and externalisation. EU governance changed towards more intergovernmental, informal and regional action. Further, the crisis led to serious rows between member states, leading to the fragmentation of the EU into two blocs. With decreasing numbers of asylum seeker in the last few years, what remains is an incomplete asylum system and a political crisis among member states.
Exploring and explaining diversity and patterns of stateness is crucial for understanding causes of efficiency, duration, or the collapse of a state. The new Stateness Index (StIx) contributes to the conceptual and analytical debate on stateness and state fragility. StIx is a tool for measuring stateness and state quality since 1950 that includes country-ranking through aggregated and disaggregated data to advance performance comparison and policy analysis. This article first sums up the main theoretical aspects, followed by descriptive results.
The aim of this paper is to illuminate the interdependent relation and connectivity between state and regime known as the state-regime-nexus. To conceptualize the reciprocal institutional relation between state and regime and to deepen the understanding of the state-regime-nexus, I focus on law and legal order as one mutual linkage between state and regime in both democratic and autocratic regimes. To do so, this conceptual paper addresses two points that are part of the same topic: the relation between state, regime and law and different variants of legal order in democratic and autocratic regimes. This creates a theoretical basis to gain more conceptual and analytical clarity in the complex realm of the state-regime-nexus.
The article presents a proposal for the assessment of the quality of democracy. After elaborating on the methodological strategy, a definition of democracy is proposed, which entails the construction of the matrix of democracy based on three dimensions (political freedom, political equality, and political and judicial control) and five institutions. The methodological application of this measuring tool is then explained. This conception guarantees an appropriate measurement in different cultural contexts, enables the characterization of democratic profiles, and allows for the identification of deficiencies in democracies. Before the conclusion, three examples of the measurement (USA, Russia, and Italy) illustrate how the matrix works.
The notions self-organisation and self-regulation are at least implicitly loaded with a positive democratic connotation. The main corresponding debates on social movements, governance and civil society mostly refer to the Global North with a well-functioning state and democratic political systems. One consequence is that the less democratic and less liberal hidden side of self-organisation, seen by some critics, does not gain much attention.
After a short discussion of the main theoretical approaches, the paper presents a selection of self-organised groups depicting their different values, norms, and structural features. These examples reach from democratic groups marked by solidarity to racist violent groups that are a threat to differently minded people. The analysis of these examples leads to a set of criteria for the comparative analysis of the internal structure of self-organised groups including potential membership, in- and outward orientation, underlying basic principles of social order and types of trust with related types of decision-making. These basic elements help to understand the constitution and functioning of self-organisation, which are open to a wide range of value orientation.
Previous research has shown that female doctoral graduates earn less than male doctoral graduates; how-ever, the determinants of this gender pay gap remain largely unexplored. Therefore, this paper investigates the determinants of the early career gender pay gap among doctoral graduates in Germany. By relying on effects on the supply and demand sides and feedback between them, I theoretically derive determinants of the gender pay gap that comprise doctoral and occupational characteristics. Using data from a representative German panel study of the 2014 doctoral graduation cohort, I analyse the gender pay gap two years after graduation. I apply linear regression on the logarithmic gross monthly earnings and Oaxaca-Blinder de-composition to examine the explanatory contribution of the determinants to the gender pay gap. The anal-yses reveal that female graduates earn 27.2 % less than male graduates two years after graduation. Male graduates being paid a premium outside academia partly drives this gender pay gap. The considered deter-minants largely explain the overall gender pay gap, the most important determinants being working hours, doctoral subject, industry, professional experience gained after graduation, company size, and academic employment. The results offer new insights on the determinants of the early career gender pay gap among doctoral graduates and thereby shed light on one dimension of gender inequalities in post-doctoral careers.
Current crises have highlighted the importance of integrating research, politics and practice to work on solutions for complex social problems. In recent years, policy deliberation fora, policy pilots and policy labs have increasingly been deployed to mobilise science to produce solutions, help create popular support and guide implementation of policies addressing major public policy problems. Yet, we know little about how these approaches manage to transcend the boundaries between research, politics and practice. By systematically comparing policy deliberation fora, policy pilots and policy labs, this paper explores their mechanisms of boundary spanning including relationship and trust building, knowledge translation and developing solutions. We situate our analysis in healthcare policy and climate change policy in Germany, two contrasting policy fields that share a perpetual and escalating sense of crisis. Our findings suggest that deliberation fora, policy pilots and policy labs address different dilemmas of policymaking, namely the idea dilemma, the implementation dilemma and the legitimacy dilemma. All three approaches reduce wicked problems to a manageable scale, by grounding them in local decision-making, reducing their scope or reducing the problem analytically. We argue that despite their ambition to modernise democratic practices, unless they are institutionally well embedded, their effects are likely to be small scale, local and temporary.
The investigation of trade-offs in political science receives only limited attention, although many scholars acknowledge the importance of trade-offs across a variety of different areas. A systematic and comprehensive examination of the topic is missing. This thematic issue of Politics and Governance sheds light on this research deficit by providing a holistic but also an integrative view on trade-offs in the political realm for the first time. Researchers of trade-offs from different political areas present and discuss their findings, and promote a fruitful exchange, which overcomes the current isolation of the approaches. They consider the theoretical and methodological questions as well as the identification of empirical tradeoffs. Furthermore, they provide insights into the possibility to balance trade-offs and strategies, which could help actors to find such compromises.
As opposed to general expectation and perception, doctoral graduates do not necessarily strive for or realize the ideal-typical academic career. In many Western countries, career opportunities and paths for doctoral graduates have diversified, and academia is not their only occupational destination, with a large proportion leaving academia to work in public service, in companies’ research and development departments, or in non-profit organizations. Against this background, this thesis examines postdoctoral careers by means of the midterm occupational destinations and professional success among doctoral graduates in the academic and non-academic labour markets in Germany. With regard to occupational destinations, I investigate where doctoral graduates are employed following graduation and how their occupational destinations can be explained. With regard to professional success, I investigate various objective and subjective success indicators related to the returns to doctoral degrees — such as earnings, management positions, and job satisfaction — and systematically include the graduates’ occupational destinations in the analyses. I also consider social inequalities regarding both research topics.
Whereas the measurement of the quality of democracy focused on the rough differentiation of democracies and autocracies in the beginning (e.g. Vanhanen, Polity, Freedom House), the focal point of newer instruments is the assessment of the quality of established democracies. In this context, tensions resp. trade-offs between dimensions of democracy are discussed as well (e.g. Democracy Barometer, Varieties of Democracy). However, these approaches lack a systematic discussion of trade-offs and they are not able to show trade-offs empirically. We address this research desideratum in a three-step process: Firstly, we propose a new conceptual approach, which distinguishes between two different modes of relationships between dimensions: mutual reinforcing effects and a give-and-take relationship (trade-offs) between dimensions. By introducing our measurement tool, Democracy Matrix, we finally locate mutually reinforcing effects as well as trade-offs. Secondly, we provide a new methodological approach to measure trade-offs. While one measuring strategy captures the mutual reinforcing effects, the other strategy employs indicators, which serve to gauge trade-offs. Thirdly, we demonstrate empirical findings of our measurement drawing on the Varieties of Democracy dataset. Incorporating trade-offs into the measurement enables us to identify various profiles of democracy (libertarian, egalitarian and control-focused democracy) via the quality of its dimensions.