This project investigates how individuals’ exposure to global competition influences their feeling of economic security and a wide range of policy preferences, and how the emergence of new conflict lines between beneficiaries and losers of globalization changes the constituencies of political parties.I argue that globalization has very heterogenous effects, which depend both on individuals' exposure to global competition and their factor-endowments. This suggests that even within the same industry, exposure to global competition can be harmful to some people, but not to others. In developed countries, high-skilled individuals in exposed industries or occupations can be characterized as “globalization winners,” because they can sell their skills to global markets. In contrast, low-skilled individuals working in an exposed sector face serious problems. The goods they produce are most likely to be substituted with imports from low-wage countries and their jobs are the most likely to be moved abroad, so that they can be classified as “globalization losers.” Individuals working in sheltered industries or occupations constitute an intermediate category. I use individual-level data to test the implications of these differentiated effects of globalization.
Eine angemessene Vertretung der Sprachgemeinschaften in der schweizerischen Bundesverwaltung gilt im politischen Diskurs als wichtiger Ausdruck der schweizerischen Mehrsprachigkeit. Verschiedene Gesetzesgrundlagen und Weisungen sind erlassen worden, um dieses Ziel zu erreichen. Es stellen sich jedoch Fragen bezüglich der Umsetzung und Wirkung dieser Massnahmen im Spannungsfeld zwischen beruflichen Qualifikationen und Sprachkenntnissen von StellenbewerberInnen sowie hinsichtlich der sprachregionalen Dynamiken des Arbeitsmarktes für Verwaltungsmitarbeitende. Statistiken zum Anteil der Bundesangestellten nach Erstsprachen verweisen auf ein Ungleichgewicht der Vertretung von Sprachminderheiten in gewissen Positionen und Ämtern. Ziel dieses Projektes ist es, sich eingehend mit diesem Phänomen auseinanderzusetzen und die Komplexität der Mechanismen und Prozesse zu verstehen, die den Zugang der sprachlichen Minderheiten zu gewissen Positionen in der Bundesverwaltung erleichtern oder erschweren. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf dem Personalrekrutierungsprozess, der als Schlüsselinstrument der Selektion und des Zugangs zur Anstellung verstanden wird. Das Projekt wird in Zusammenarbeit mit dem wissenschaftlichen Kompetenzzentrum für Mehrsprachigkeit der Universität Fribourg durchgeführt.
Multilateral development banks are facing a rapidly evolving world economic context that calls into question the assumptions upon which their financial model is built. As more and more middle-income developing countries reduce reliance on multilateral lending, MDBs may find themselves with not enough non-concessional lending to sustain themselves financially. The recent financial crisis relieved the pressure by rapidly increasing financial needs in the developing world, but long-term trends suggest that the respite is only temporary. The MDB model as originally conceived after World War II may be outliving its usefulness, and MDBs themselves may be scrambling to survive by undertaking activities more oriented toward institutional self-preservation rather than their stated goal of promoting development. It is thus essential to improve our knowledge about how different MDBs are impacted by and reacting to these changes. This research project is designed to contribute to that end. In broad terms, the research is intended to investigate two sets of issues: (i) how changing economic circumstances among developing countries are affecting MDB lending and financial stability; and (ii) how and why these impacts may vary among different MDBs. We compare three different “types” of MDBs, the operations of which overlap in several countries in Latin America: the World Bank (controlled by wealthy non-borrowing countries), the Inter-American Development Bank (more evenly split between borrowers and non-borrowers), and the Andean Development Corporation (entirely controlled by the same countries that borrow from it). These different shareholding arrangements, we believe, are one of the main causal factors explaining the behavior of different MDBs. The research will focus on three main questions: - How does lending by MDBs change over time in reaction to different economic conditions among borrowers, and what factors may lead countries to prefer borrowing money from one or another MDB, when they have a choice? - What implications does evolving loan demand have for the financial sustainability of different MDBs? - How are MDBs reacting to evolving loan demand by borrowing countries, and how might this impact their development effectiveness? To answer these questions, the project uses a combination of statistical techniques with data collected from publicly-available sources, as well as qualitative analysis utilizing documents and interviews. We focus on Latin America because it offers a strong contrast over time from very difficult circumstances in the 1980s to a much stronger economic and fiscal situation in recent years. Also, most countries in Latin America are non-concessional MDB borrowers, which more directly impacts MDB finances than concessional borrowing. Lastly, one member of the research team has considerable academic and professional experience in the region. In the aspects of the research that require information from borrowing countries, we will look more closely at the case of Peru, in which all three of the MDBs have operated for a number of years. Peru is useful not only because it allows for direct comparisons among these three MDBs, but it also offers a particularly strong variation over time, from the economic collapse of the late 1980s to the highest growth rates in Latin America over the past several years.
Dieses Gutachten erörtert mögliche Konsequenzen einer Annahme der Volksinitiative „Für die Stärkung der Volksrechte in der Aussenpolitik (Staatsverträge vors Volk!)“, welche im Jahre 2009 eingereicht wurde. Konkret werden folgende vier Fragen beantwortet: Das Gutachten soll folgende vier Fragen beantworten: 1. Welches sind die heute bestehenden Mitsprachemöglichkeiten von Volk und Ständen beim Abschluss von Staatsverträgen? Wie wurden die bestehenden direktdemokratischen Instrumente bisher genutzt und mit welchem Ergebnis? 2. In welchem Verhältnis stehen die in der Initiative vorgesehenen neuen Mitsprachemöglichkeiten zu den bereits bestehenden? Mit wie vielen zusätzlichen Abstimmungen ist zu rechnen? 3. Wie wirkt sich die Durchführung von zusätzlichen Abstimmungen auf die Stimmbürgerinnen und Stimmbürger aus? Führt eine Erhöhung der Anzahl Abstimmungen zu Abstimmungsmüdigkeit und somit zu einer sinkenden Stimmbeteiligung? Führen zusätzliche Abstimmungen zu einer Überforderung der Stimmbürgerinnen und Stimmbürger bei der Meinungsbildung und somit zu einer verminderten Qualität des Stimmentscheids? 4. Welcher Mehraufwand entsteht durch die Erhöhung der Anzahl Abstimmungen? Welche zusätzlichen administrativen Kosten entstehen für die Behörden? Wie wirken sich Mehrabstimmungen auf die Bereitschaft von Medien und politischen Parteien aus, sich in der öffentlichen Debatte zu engagieren? Die Resultate des Gutachtens sind publiziert worden (siehe Weblinks unten).
This project analyses the integration of European electorates and party systems, and the formation of a supra-national cleavage constellation in the European Union. It is an empirical research on the “Europeanization” of electorates and party systems convergence: (1) the ideological integration among parties of the same family in Europe, (2) the homogeneity of voting behaviour and common changes (uniform swings), (3) the location of sources for electoral behaviour (local, national or EU level), (4) the degree of distinctiveness of the EU party system with respect to national party systems and their alignments. The research covers 30 countries since the first direct election to the EP in 1979. The project is based on three types of data: (1) aggregate data, (2) survey data and (3) party manifestos.
This research project aims to assess the impact of various policy options in the primary education sector in the sub-Saharan country of Senegal. As Senegal faces similar problems as many other developing countries in the region and beyond, the results promise to be relevant on a broader scale. Typical features of sub-Saharan primary schools, especially in francophone Africa, are high repetition and drop-out rates, under-provision of material inputs like textbooks, badly educated teachers, widespread teacher absenteeism and very low performance of students in international student achievement tests. Nevertheless, numerous studies have consistently estimated high returns to primary education in developing countries. To improve quality and quantity of primary education in these countries, it is important to understand which factors influence the features mentioned and which policies in this area are most cost-effective. We will, therefore, focus on the following research questions: - What are the determinants of drop-out, in particular what role plays school quality for the decision to drop out? Which effects does drop-out have on human capital in the medium run? - What is the impact of the wide spread and expensive practice of grade repetition on later achievement and drop-out? What are the determinants of repetition? - Which material inputs, like textbooks, have a positive impact on student achievement and in which grades are they most effective? - What role does teacher education play for student achievement and is it a good idea to let better educated teachers only teach in higher grades or would it be more efficient to let them teach in lower grades as well? Analyses of the effectiveness of various inputs in the education system, especially in developing countries, often face the difficulty of not having any information on initial ability differences between students. Therefore, they cannot properly address the issue of selection bias which arises if initial ability (which affects achievement) is correlated with the other inputs. Time series cross section data can help to solve this problem as it allows controlling for earlier achievement as a proxy for schooling inputs earlier in time and ability differences. We have a panel data set for primary students from Senegal in which students were interviewed and tested from 1995 to 2000. In addition, teachers and directors were interviewed. The student data can be matched with additional information from complementary household surveys carried out by researchers from Cornell University (USA) and INRA (France). This makes our data set unique and allows us to address issues that could not be addressed in this way before. Especially the effects of drop-out and repetition in developing countries have not been studied much as longitudinal data is extremely scarce, especially for Africa. We will use quasi-experimental methods to match students who did and did not repeat/drop out on the basis of achievement before repetition/drop-out and further characteristics and then estimate treatment effects. Regarding inputs to primary education, like textbooks and teacher education, we will focus on the variation of effects over time, i.e., over grades, which allows us to give more precise policy advice on the optimal use of these inputs.
This projects funds an institutional partnership between the Institute of Political Science at the University of Zurich, and the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. The objective of the institutional partnership is to better understand, explain and address problems of governance and administration of megacities outside the OECD context. China is a privileged region to study this topic, as it hosts not less than three of the world’s twenty two megacities, i.e. urban regions with a population of at least 10 million. The activities include two three-day workshops, held in Zurich (in August 2011) and in Beijing (in August 2012), as well as a one month visit of a Chinese faculty member in Zurich (in May 2013). The immediate output of the partnership will be the publication of a joint book on the problems and prospects of effective megacity governance in Europe and China. Furthermore, we expect the institutional partnership to provide the opportunity for further cooperation in three fields, namely (1) the formulation of a joint research project on metropolitan transformations in China, (2) the setting up of a joint summer school on the topic of governance and administration of megacities, as well as (3) further faculty and staff exchange in the respective programmes of continuing education. The applicants, Proff. Dong Lisheng and Daniel Kübler, first met in 2003, in the framework of an international collaborative project supported by the French CNRS. They have maintained contact, and met several times since then. The institutional partnership suggested here would give the opportunity to further strengthen and deepen the dialogue between their respective research groups, and set the base for further collaboration in the future.
There have been few analyses of voting behavior in cantonal parliaments to date. Since 2007, however, the Zurich cantonal parliament has employed an electronic voting system. Though this makes it possible to examine the voting behavior of individual parliamentarians over time, such information has thus far not been used for political science analysis. The proposal here, therefore, is to systematically analyze this electronically recorded data during the 2011 - 2015 and 2015 - 2019 legislative sessions. Concepts and methods previously developed for analyzing parliamentary behavior will be used for evaluating the data. The primary focus is on analyzing the maintenance of party discipline (or ‘upholding the party line’) within parliamentary factions. In other words, the focus is on the ‘coherence’ of voting behavior among members of parliamentary party groupings. The key question is what can explain notable deviations or difficulties in maintaining the party line. The existing literature suggests divergence could be due to individual characteristics of the parliamentarians, aspects or characteristics of the particular issues at hand, or to factors inherent to the parliamentary party groups themselves. Other issues raised in previous research on parliaments will also be addressed.
Swiss municipalities are important actors in the policy domains of housing and elderly people. Hence the success of privately initiated housing project for elderly people depends essentially on the role, the decisions and the policies of municipalities. This study analyzes the role of municipalities in the development process of such projects. More precisely the research investigates 1) the policy instruments municipalities are relying on, 2) how municipalities behave confronted with housing projects initiated by citizens and 3) how municipalities perceive their role as regards such projects.
In face of the rapidly increasing amount of greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries, international transfer of low-carbon technologies to these countries is undoubtedly the key to combating global climate change. Focusing on private-sector transfer of wind energy technologies, this research aims to examine how the processes of international technology transfer can be made more effective. Guiding research questions are: 1) to what extent does the competitiveness of the wind energy industry in developing countries depend on the localized accumulation of innovation capacity and on the transfer of foreign sources of innovation?; 2) how do technology-push and demand-pull policies influence technology acquisition strategies of the wind energy industry in developing countries?; and 3) what is the impact of various technology acquisition strategies on the development of technological capability of the wind energy industry in the developing world? In answering these questions, this research draws on theories of organizational learning, innovation systems and public policies or technological change, and uses a combination of statistical analysis and interview-based case studies. The results of this research will contribute to an improved understanding of where to locate innovation activities for enhancing the competitiveness of the wind energy industry in developing countries, what policies are necessary for the effective acquisition of foreign technologies by these industries, and how to facilitate the development of local technological capability through technology acquisitions. A better understanding on these issues helps developing countries formulate strategies for pursuing more sustainable, low-carbon development paths.