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This review article deals with the topic of sustainability in the German healthcare system and presents an overview of how the six articles of our research relate to one another. After introducing to the context of the research, its internal principles, and the methods applied, three perspectives are presented, each also discussed in terms of the respective literature in sustainability science and political science. The review concludes by presenting a circular model and by discussing the general limitations as well as the practical implications of our research.
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.
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.