2016
Marian Bohl, The Choice for Personalization as a Campaign Strategy: A Comparative Study of Parties in Electoral Contexts
The personalization of election campaigns has to date been analyzed mostly in single-country case studies based on modernist macro-approaches. Comparatively, however, personalization not only caters to modern media or works as a replacement for ideological guidance in a complex political world, but also can enhance a candidacy’s unique selling point and depends on party professionalization. Thus, this study complements modernization arguments with institutional, competition patterns’ and party resources’ explanations to parties’ general and leadership personalization strategies.
With a new dataset of TV and newspaper advertising in national, regional, and supranational elections of Canada, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland, the influence of macro- and partisan factors on the choice for personalization as a campaign strategy was tested comparatively with Bayesian beta-regression models.
Contrary to modernist expectations, mediatization does not systematically explain personalization, yet political complexity does. The strongest predictor is an interaction of presidentialization with a party’s choice to run an executive candidate. Electoral systems, competition patterns, professionalization and incumbency show mixed results, whereas populism cannot be empirically linked to more personalization.
Regarding this empirical non-link and personalization’s heuristic benefits, normative claims that personalization is harmful for democratic decision making cannot be upheld.
Cansarp Kaya, Representing Interests after Decision-Making: An Analysis of Interest Group Activities during Transposition and Application of EU Law
Quantitative research on member-state compliance with EU law has explored numerous independent variables in order to explain different aspects of compliance. However, the role of interest groups in policy implementation and their potential impact on member-state compliance are yet to be analyzed. The dissertation provides an analysis of interest groups during policy implementation and consists of two parts. The first half of the dissertation focuses on mobilization of interest groups. The results show that interest groups are not totally absent when EU policies are transposed and applied in member states. Instead, they take action when they observe a legal or practical problem and they frequently exchange information with political actors about the application process. The results also show a business bias that is present at the EU level. The second half of the dissertation studies the impact of interest group mobilization on legal and practical compliance. While diversity of interest groups complicates the transposition process, their independence from political authorities and additional expertise they provide during the application of law improve the quality of practical implementation in EU member states.
Bernhard Reinsberg, The rise of multi-bi aid
Over the past two decades, foreign aid donors have increasingly used trust funds to earmarked their contributions to international development organizations for specific purposes, such as regions, countries, sectors, or themes. Earmarked funding has raised concerns because it enables donors to circumvent the established governance mechanisms at international organizations. This project is the first to systematically study this so-called 'multi-bi aid'--its historical origins, its descriptive patterns, its underlying determinants, and its consequences for the effectiveness of the multilateral system. To approach these issues, this thesis uses various original data sources, including a project-level database compiled during the project and original datasets on trust funds from the World Bank. Complementary evidence is drawn from a large number of semi-structured interviews with officials at the World Bank, the United Nations, and bilateral donor agencies. The analysis combines mathematical modeling, qualitative analysis of staff interviews, and multivariate regression analysis to establish three key findings. First, multi-bi aid tends to be governed by different factors than traditional flows of aid, consistent with official donor rhetoric. Second, donor choices among different types of trust funds are governed by a tradeoff between increased burden-sharing in funds with more donors and increased control in funds with fewer donors. Third, trust funds have been facilitated by the entrepreneurial behavior of individual units inside the multilateral bureaucracy. However, the fundraising activities of individual units may jeopardize organizational effectiveness and overall policy coherence. These findings provide the basis for policy recommendations toward smarter multi-bi aid.