2012

Katharina Füglister, Cantons as Policy Laboratories of the Federal State? The Diffusion of Health Insurance Subsidy Policies among the Swiss Cantons.

An often-stated advantage of federalist over unitarian states is that decentralized states serve as policy laboratories in which new policies are tested and -if successful- spread to the entire country. It implicitly assumes that federalism promotes policy learning. However, how do policies diffuse? Through which channels are policy relevant information disseminated? To address these questions, empirically, this thesis analyzes how interdependencies between policy-makers in the federal state of Switzerland influence health policy choices. More precisely, it focuses on governmental subsidies for health insurance premiums, the main social corrective to the otherwise strongly liberal system. Adapting a diffusion framework and using an innovative method, this thesis provides evidence that policy-makers learn from the experiences of others. However, successful policies do not just spread - rather, they need to be channeled. By facilitating the exchange among policy-makers, institutionalized intergovernmental cooperation is identified as one possible channel for policy diffusion and policy learning. Such institutions are therefore crucial for the states-as-laboratories metaphor to work.

Dominic Höglinger, Struggling with the Intricate Giant - The Politicization of European Integration in Western Europe.

What role does European integration play in domestic politics in Western Europe? While many scholars believe this political issue is about to fundamentally reshape domestic politics, others argue that the “sleeping giant” is, and will remain, fast asleep. Fusing two separate research strands – political communication and European integration politics – the thesis engages in this ongoing debate by arguing that the question of how best to deal with the multifaceted nature of the European integration issue poses a tough challenge for the political elite. Most politicians struggle constantly, sometimes desperately, with this intricate giant that is difficult to both domesticate and unleash for very long. Substantiated by fresh data from a quantitative media-content analysis, the thesis shows that the complex nature of this issue results in multiple, changing, and contradicting linkages with traditional lines of conflict and that the meaning of the issue is difficult to control. This leads to an enduring politicization of Europe which, at the same time, only has a limited magnitude.

Lisa Müller, Patterns of media performance: comparing the contribution of mass media to established democracies worldwide. 

The notion that mass media are an integral element of modern democracies is widely accepted, but there is a great deal of controversy regarding the question of how well media play their democratic role. However, neither of the positions within this debate rests on solid empirical and especially comparative evidence. Thus, this thesis aims to contribute to the cross-national research on democratic media performance. It argues that mass media have two normative functions in a democracy: vertically, they need to disseminate politically relevant information to as many citizens as possible; and horizontally, they need to provide a public forum that reflects the diversity of the society. The degree to which these two functions are fulfilled is analyzed on the level of media structures and media content, comparing ten to 47 countries. The results reveal that media performance on both levels varies considerably across countries. While the media in the younger democracies within the sample generally lag behind, different patterns of media performance can be observed with respect to the more mature democracies. In short, the vertical function seems to be better guaranteed in Anglo-Saxon countries, whereas central Western and Northern European countries are found to perform better with regard to the horizontal function.

Sophie Perrin, Explaining the Dynamics of International Legal Commitment in the Area of Air Pollution. 

In order to better understand the ratification behaviour of states in the field of international environmental cooperation, this dissertation combines current explanations of international commitment behaviour with insights from diffusion studies. Empirically, it focuses on the nine agreements of the regime on long-range transboundary air pollution (LRTAP). Overall the results confirm that interdependencies matter. This thesis provides qualitative as well as quantitative evidence for the effects of diffusion processes on ratification dynamics. It demonstrates that not only domestic factors such as capacity and costs associated with cooperation but international factors - in particular learning and emulation mechanisms - have an effect on the ratification behaviour of states. In contrast, competition and coercion mechanisms do not seem to have a similar impact. These findings show that it is important to take into account temporal dynamics and diffusion mechanisms in order to better understand the drivers of international cooperation.

Manuel Suter, The Governance of Cybersecurity: An Analysis of Public-Private Partnerships in a New Field of Security Policy.

Over the last decade cybersecurity emerged as new central topic in security policy. The increasing importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for modern societies has created new dependencies and entails serious risks. Governments are challenged by this new development as they can hardly mitigate such new risks without the help of the private sector. Confronted with this situation, governments started to establish Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) for cybersecurity. The dissertation aims to increase the knowledge on PPPs for cybersecurity. In particular, it examines the role of public actors in these partnerships. Building on the theory on network governance it analyzes which management strategies public actors apply in order to coordinate and steer the PPPs in the field of cybersecurity. By comparing and analyzing the activities of public actors in different partnerships, the dissertation contributes to a better understanding of the role of governments in the governance of cybersecurity.

Edina Szöcsik, Ethnic Minority Parties in Party Competition.

Do ethnic parties constitute a threat to democratic stability? The thesis questions the assumed “uniqueness” and the hostility toward sustaining democratic stability of ethnic parties in ethnically divided societies. To explain the flexibility of ethnic parties to choose between radical and moderate strategies, theoretical arguments and empirical methods used to study non-ethnic parties in the literature on party politics are applied. The core of thesis focuses on the cases of the Hungarian minority parties in Romania and Slovakia providing a most similar case design. On the hand, the results show that the causes and consequences of political party competition within ethnic groups can be widely explained by conventional explanations from the party politics literature. On the other hand, the findings of quantitative within-case studies highlight the influence of the local ethnic context on the electoral entry of new ethnic parties and the formation of inter-ethnic coalitions in elections.

Bruno Wueest, Mapping economic liberalization debates: How institutions and discursive coalitions reinforce economic orthodoxy in Western Europe.

The thesis consists of a study of the public debate on economic liberalization in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the U.K., and Switzerland at the beginning of the new millennium. Following a discursive institutionalist perspective, the study integrates political-economic varieties among countries, media system characteristics, as well as actor-specific preferences and discursive strategies into a single research design. The findings point to the prevalence of discursive coalitions that advocate economic orthodoxy. Yet, the strength of these coalitions depends on the institutional context. Most notably in France and in the arenas of the input side of politics in all countries, the debate is heavily polarized. Here, oppositional coalitions of traditional leftists and protectionists have a rather strong influence.