2017
Marco Martini, The Logic of Escalation: Investigating the Role of Stakes in Trade Disputes as a Lens to Conflict Processes
The study investigates how government preferences (i.e., stakes) affect strategic bargaining and dispute behavior in international trade relations.
While disputes and disagreements over trade policy are of substantial economic and political significance, their investigation has faced serious observational difficulties. For instance, reliable data on industry-level trade barriers is unavailable. This prevents assessments of countries’ stakes in their industry-level trade relationships and therefore masks the ultimate motivations of trade disputes. Moreover, systematic data on the dispute events themselves is only available for few highly-escalated cases. Consequently, dispute and bargaining events are unobserved for the vast majority of cases. The same holds for the associated outcomes of these disputes (i.e., the eventual terms of agreement). This lack of information has restricted the study of trade disputes to identifying aggregate, country- or dyad-level factors, such as relative GDP or aid dependence, that make involvement in high-level trade disputes more likely.
To overcome these empirical challenges, I employ statistical, text mining, and mathematical simulation techniques. Based on the extensive data I compile, I am able to move beyond aggregate structural conditions and investigate the detailed within-dyad variation in dispute behavior across different industries. Expanding on theoretical work on costly bargaining processes in the context of strikes, litigation, and armed conflict, I propose and test a theoretical mechanism that links initial bilateral stakes constellations to dispute escalation and eventual dispute outcomes. I find that (i) the degree of dispute escalation is limited by the lower of the two parties’ stakes; (ii) the exporter, as the typical initiator of a dispute, on average (mean) secures more favorable terms of agreement than the importer at higher escalation levels due to strategic pre-selection; and (iii) the variability (variance) of the terms of agreements decreases with the escalation level due to a higher share of compromise agreements in high-level disputes.
My results, for the first time, allow to systematically predict in which industries a given country pair is most likely to experience a trade dispute. This has immediate policy implications, not only because it can entail a more predictable environment for firms and governments alike, but also because it allows targeted dispute resolution or may inform institutional design. My results also have wider implications for our understanding of escalation processes in conflicts more generally.
Micha Germann, Pax Populi or Casus Belli? On the Conflict Resolution Potential of Self-Determination Referendums
As demonstrated by the recent referendums in Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia, direct democracy plays an increasingly prominent role in the context of conflicts over self-determination. Self-determination referendums are also increasingly advocated by the international community, with further votes on the agenda in New Caledonia, Bougainville, and Cyprus, among others. However, very little is known about the ability of referendums to resolve self-determination conflicts peacefully. Few systematic empirical studies have been conducted and the existing literature remains sharply divided between those who fervently believe in the power of direct democracy to create peace, and the referendum skeptics, who see referendums as prone to incite societal polarization and even violence. This dissertation goes beyond much of the existing literature and develops a new, conditional framework suggesting that self-determination referendums may both enhance the prospects for peace or contribute to conflict escalation, depending on whether there is prior agreement among the key stakeholders on the terms of such referendums. I find broad support for the notion that prior agreement on the terms shapes the effect of self-determination referendums on conflict dynamics in a cross-national analysis of all self-determination referendums held in European and Asian countries between 1945 and 2012.
Lea Heyne, Support for which kind of democracy? What European citizens want from their democracies, and why they are (dis)satisfied
This thesis wants to find out how democracies should address dissatisfaction, by asking what European citizens want from their democracies, what they are satisfied with, and what they want improved. It contributes to existing research on democratic support by (a) disentangling the attitudes that form democratic support and comprehending the linkages between them, (b) taking into account different dimensions of democracy, and (c) understanding the effect of the macro and micro-level context on support. I focus on established European democracies, and use individual-level data for 26 countries from the ESS 2012 as well as country-level data from the Democracy Barometer. I show that support for democracy is not unidimensional: Citizens' attitudes are structured by two dimensions, liberal and social democracy, and individuals differ in their position on these scales. I develop a spatial model of democratic support based on three elements: Expectations from democracy, evaluations of the democratic reality, and satisfaction with democracy, to understand what actually causes (dis)satisfaction. I find that satisfaction is affected by both the size and the direction of the distance between expectations and evaluations. Democracy cannot only be too little, but also of the wrong type. I further use literature on political socialisation and democratic learning, democratization and modernization theory, models of democracy, political participation as well as relative deprivation and social dominance theory to understand the factors that explain varying levels of support. Both the democratic regime on the macro-level and the social status and political behaviour on the micro-level systematically affect the way citizens understand, perceive, and evaluate their democratic system, directly as well as in macro-micro interactions.
Reini Schrama, Rooted Implementation - The practical implementation of EU policy through cooperative society
Despite an abundant literature on policy implementation, there has hardly been any systematic cross-national and cross-sectional research focussing on implementation of supranational policies in both law and practice. The first part of this dissertation is a first attempt to analyse the relationship between legal and practical implementation and the causes for decoupling implementation of EU directives in practice in 27 member states across four policy areas. To study how EU policy can take root in society, further analysis focuses on the conditions under which a cooperative and engaged civil society can improve implementation on the ground. The findings show that civil society strength can positively affect practical implementation if civil society organisations are regularly consulted and states have the bureaucratic capacity to cope with societal demands. The second part of the dissertation takes a network approach to analyse the role of civil society as a watchdog and its capacity to monitor the implementation process. The comparative case study on networks of women’s groups across EU members states in monitoring the implementation of EU directives on gender equality reveals that civil society in western member states tend to be better equipped, while in CEE member states the direct links with the EU Commission compensate this lack of resources. Finally, using inferential social network analysis in a case study on the monitoring network of women groups in the Netherlands, the findings of this dissertation demonstrate that effective information exchange for monitoring purposes benefits from a diverse and inclusive network.
Pirmin Bundi, Seeking Power with Truth – The Role of Evaluation in Parliaments
Against all the previous research on evaluation that has been done in the last fifty years, this thesis argues that the main question is not whether and how members of parliament use evaluations, but why they demand evaluations. The role of evaluation in the posttruth era is not to speak truth to power; instead it is seeking power with truth, as the parliamentarians demand evaluations in order to gain power towards the government. The thesis thus considers the questions of why parliamentarians demand evaluations with parliamentary requests, why they demand evaluations more often in some policy fields than others and which strategic intention they pursue. Building on the literature of delegation, I use a principal-agent framework to explain the origins of evaluation demand. In doing so, it is argued that parliamentarians demand evaluations in order to oversee the government and to ensure accountability. In order to answer these questions, the thesis contains several data collections. I conducted a survey amongst the Swiss parliamentarians at the federal and cantonal level. In addition, case studies have been done in order to strengthen the empirical findings. The quantitative analyses show that Swiss parliamentarians demand more evaluations if they have the impression that the administration is not implementing the policies within their meaning. Furthermore, they are also more likely to demand an evaluation in those policy fields where cooperative forms of governance are more present, since those policies are more difficult to assess and have a higher need of legitimation. In addition, the case studies illustrate that parliamentarians of legislative committees submit parliamentary requests to oppose a policy, but they do not seek an evaluation to support a certain policy. In contrast, parliamentarians of oversight committees submit parliamentary requests to obtain information on specific policies. The findings suggest that members of parliament seek evaluations in order to control the agencies and indicates that they demand evaluations in order to fulfill their oversight function towards the government. The findings are relevant in order to understand what the members of parliament seek in scientific evidence and what role policy evaluation can play for parliamentary oversight.