2014
Nils-Christian Bormann, The Causes and Consequences of Ethnic Power-Sharing
What are the causes and what are the consequences of ethnic power-sharing? Existing research generally agrees that ethnic coalitions decrease the likelihood of civil war. However, most scholars of power-sharing claim that political elites from different ethnic groups rarely form coalitions and that these coalitions are inherently unstable unless so-called power-sharing institutions provide incentives for cooperation. Since most studies of power-sharing do not measure coalitions directly, it remains unclear how accurate these claims are. My thesis complements existing research by adopting a theoretical and empirical approach that explicitly centers on elite behavior. My theoretical argument predicts that ethnic elites frequently form oversized coalitions because they fear future defections by their co-ethnics and violent revolutions by members of excluded ethnic groups. Accordingly, ethnic coalitions are less stable than mono-ethnic governments. Since ethnic coalitions are usually unstable and elites face higher risks when they lose power in dictatorships, large elite coalitions are more likely to embrace democratization in order to lower their personal risks. Finally, ethnic coalitions should mainly reduce the risk of territorial rather than governmental civil war because large coalitions are likely to result in infighting over government power. Using data on the ethnic composition of governments around the world between 1946 and 2009 I find support for my hypotheses.
Robert Gampfer, Determinants of Individual Preferences for Global Climate Politics: Burden Sharing, Civil Society Involvement, and Governance Architecture
Robert’s dissertation investigates how different aspects of global environmental governance influence individual preferences for international climate politics. In particular it focuses on international burden sharing of climate mitigation costs, involvement of civil society organizations, and institutional architectures such as climate clubs. A theoretical core concept is political legitimacy, which in the case of global environmental governance derives from properties of the governance process and from its effectiveness in solving international environmental problems. Burden sharing, involvement of civil society, and governance architecture all impact on the procedural as well as the outcome legitimacy of global climate governance. The thesis concentrates on popular legitimacy, i.e. in how far societal actors, for example citizens, perceive a system of rules or the process of its establishment as justified and appropriate. Popular legitimacy is commonly considered an essential criterion for public policy support. Empirical results suggest that more differentiated burden sharing and effective civil society involvement improve public support and hence political feasibility of international climate agreements. Moreover, provided that they contain the right design elements, climate clubs command sufficient political legitimacy to form an effective component of global climate governance.
Dominik Geering, Right-wing populist parties and labor market policies
How do right-wing populist parties change welfare state politics? In my cumulative dissertation, I analyze specific aspects of this question in three papers. Starting on the voter-level, paper 1 shows that today economic insecurity leads to increased anti-immigrant attitudes and electoral support for right-wing populist parties. Paper 2 focuses on the party-level, analyzing the labor market policies of right-wing populist parties. The paper shows that as right-wing populist parties cooperate with the moderate right, they support market-liberal policies despite their working class electorate. Finally, paper 3 focuses on policy impact, and shows that right-wing populist parties polarize labor market policy making and facilitate retrenchment by strengthening the political right bloc. By tracing the link from voters to parties to policies, the three papers provide insights into how right-wing populist parties influence welfare state politics.
Selin Bengi Gümrükçü, Reconstructing a Cycle of Protest: Protest and Politics in Turkey, 1971-1985
The dissertation analyzes the protest events that took place in Turkey in 1970s, more specifically from March 1971 until 1985. The main argument of the study is the need to consider the 1970s as a cycle of protest and a period of politicization, instead of a chaotic period that should be avoided. Based theoretically on the political process approach and the concept of political opportunity structures, the dissertation tested seven hypotheses, out of which, five were supported. The first main part of the dissertation, based on the data collected for this study, dealt with the components of protest events, respectively the actors, repertoires of actions and the issues raised during the protests, while the second part analyzed the dynamics of institutionalization and radicalization in Turkey, two processed that are argued to emerge hand to hand at the end of cycles of protest. The result was that, unlike most of the cases discussed in the literature on social movements, the cycle of protest of 1970s in Turkey revealed dynamics of radicalization from the very start of it, but revealed little attempts towards institutionalization. The impacts of the military interventions on the street politics are also clearly demonstrated. Methodologically, my dissertation employed protest event analysis based on the archives of Turkish daily Milliyet, by reviewing every issue from March 1971 until 1985, and coding every other article.
Philipp Hunziker, Civil Conflict in Petroleum Producing Regions
Does oil- and gas-production cause the outbreak of civil violence? And if so, under what conditions is oil- and gas-extraction particularly risky? Existing research suggests that petroleum producing states are more likely to witness the outbreak of intrastate conflict than other countries. However, it is unclear whether this relationship represents a causal effect, or reflects the fact that the location and intensity of petroleum production is endogenous to political violence. Moreover, current research is unable to identify those areas where petroleum production is most likely to trigger civil conflict. My thesis addresses these gaps in an integrated fashion. The issue of endogeneity is tackled by relying on an instrumental variable design that employs data on the geological determinants of petroleum deposits to predict the occurrence of petroleum production. Further, a collection of newly available spatially disaggregated data is employed to identify the local demographic and political conditions under which the conflict-inducing effect of petroleum production is largest. The conducted empirical analyses yield strong evidence for a local, causal effect of petroleum production on the onset of violent separatist conflict. Moreover, this thesis shows that petroleum is most likely to trigger separatist violence if it is extracted in the settlement areas of local ethnic communities that lack representation in the central government, and are weakly penetrated by state institutions.
Mark Daniel Jaeger, Coercion, Risk, and Danger: The Construction of Sanctions and Securitization of International Conflict
The most notorious question raised on coercive international sanctions is: “Do sanctions work?” Unsurprisingly, answers to such a sweeping question remain inconclusive. However, in crucial cases even coercive sanctions’ widely presumed logic of economic impact translating into political pressure is not the primary driver of conflict development. Furthermore, one of the most striking differences across sanctions conflicts is broadly neglected: The increasing occurrence and combination of positive sanctions with negative sanctions. Instead of asking whether sanctions work, this study addresses a more basic question: How do coercive international sanctions work, and more substantially, what are the social conditions within sanctions conflicts that are conducive to either cooperation or non-cooperation?
The study argues that coercive sanctions and international conflicts are socially constructed facts; their meaning is not pre-given. It develops a constructivist theory of coercive sanctions, positing them in a dynamically evolving international conflict environment. To this end, it fuses elements of modern systems theory with the notion of securitization as causal mechanism in conflict transformation. The study presents an empirical analysis of the construction of sanctions in the conflict between China and Taiwan, illustrating how negative sanctions, positive sanctions, and their combination contribute distinctly to conflict development and cooperation prospects.
Sabine Jenni, The Last Gallic Village? An Empirical Analysis of Switzerland’s Differentiated European Integration 1990-2010
Switzerland has not become a member of the European Union (EU), but the instruments of Swiss European policies show similarities to the European integration of the EU member states. Is it thus justified to call Switzerland the last Gallic village in Western Europe? The thesis examined this question based on an empirical dataset, which measures the integration quality of Switzerland’s European policies between 1990 and 2010. The dataset focuses on legal rules originating in the EU, which are extended to Switzerland by the means of sectoral agreements and the unilateral adaptation of domestic law. The analyses showed that extensions of EU rules to Switzerland appeared throughout the whole research period, but the legal links to the EU became stronger and more frequent in relation to the Bilaterals I and Bilaterals II. The thesis drew on supranationalist and intergovernmentalist theories of European integration and showed that domestic and international negotiations, as well as the institutional quality of the different integration instruments explain these developments.
Wilhelm Mirow, Strategic culture, securitisation and the use of force by liberal democracies - comparing the security policies and practices of Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the UK after 11 September 2001
This dissertation analysed whether differences in the extent to which Western liberal democracies resorted to the use of force within the two year period after the terrorist events of 11 September 2001 can be explained on the basis of differences in societies' identity-derived norms on the legitimate use of force by the state against perceived existential threats. It thereby sought to improve our understanding of how a strategic culture has an impact on concrete state actions. To this end, the dissertation proposes a theoretical framework which combines the concept of strategic culture with the concept of securitisation within a morphogenetic macro-theoretical framework based on Critical Realism as well as on a pragmatist methodology and conception of causation. The dissertation examines these theoretical assumptions through in-depth case studies involving state decisions concerning domestic anti terrorism legislation as well as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Jonathan van Eerd, The Quality of Democracy in Africa: The Significance of Legacies of Cleavages and Opposition Competitiveness
The thesis makes two original contributions to the literature on democratization and political parties in sub-Saharan Africa: First, it shows that democratization in sub-Saharan Africa can be successful, even if the government remains dominated by one major political party: If an institutionalized and relatively strong opposition party – even if it is too weak to take power – challenges the dominant government party, the quality of democracy improves substantially. This finding stands in contrast to the grain of recent literature on democratization in Africa, which generally views dominant government parties as incompatible with democratic consolidation, considers opposition parties in dominant party systems homogeneously weak and champions electoral turnovers as the single most effective route towards democratic consolidation. Second, the thesis shows that contemporary competitive opposition parties in African party systems with a dominant party are rooted in the historical legacy of cleavages that precede the third wave of democratization and have survived the instability of post-independence political developments in Africa to the present day. The book identifies the center-periphery cleavage, i.e., the cleavage between the urban, secular nationalist elites and the traditional, rural ruling elites, as the decisive cleavage.