Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (205) (remove)
Language
- English (205) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (205)
Keywords
- Europäische Union (3)
- Covid-19 (2)
- Public Administration (2)
- higher education (2)
- ACCC (1)
- Aarhus convention (1)
- Aarhus regulation (1)
- Abgeordneter (1)
- Anonymity Assessment (1)
- Artt. 290 & 291 AEUV (1)
Institute
- Lehrstuhl für vergleichende Verwaltungswissenschaft und Policy-Analyse (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Michael Bauer) (35)
- Lehrstuhl für Öffentliches Recht, insbesondere Europarecht und Völkerrecht (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Weiß) (27)
- Lehrstuhl für Politikwissenschaft (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Stephan Grohs) (19)
- Lehrstuhl für Volkswirtschaftslehre, insbesondere Wirtschafts- und Verkehrspolitik (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Andreas Knorr) (13)
- Lehrstuhl für Hochschul- und Wissenschaftsmanagement (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Michael Hölscher) (10)
- Lehrstuhl für Öffentliches Recht, insbesondere deutsches und europäisches Verwaltungsrecht (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ulrich Stelkens) (8)
- Lehrstuhl für Öffentliches Recht, Staatslehre und Rechtsvergleichung (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Karl-Peter Sommermann) (6)
- Lehrstuhl für Verwaltungswissenschaft, Staatsrecht, Verwaltungsrecht und Europarecht (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Mario Martini) (5)
- Seniorprofessur für Verwaltungswissenschaft, Politik und Recht im Bereich von Umwelt und Energie (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Eberhard Bohne) (5)
- Lehrstuhl für Öffentliches Recht, Finanz- und Steuerrecht (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Joachim Wieland) (3)
From a comparative perspective the Covid-19 pandemic provides a unique grand-scale life experience: nearly all countries have been confronted with a similar issue, that of quickly fighting the pandemic, balancing individual health with the sustainability of the national health system, and juggling economic imperatives with the duty to care for the most vulnerable individuals in society. Access and use of data are key to this difficult balancing exercise. One question arises: is the Covid-19 pandemic conducive to developing shared legal strategies or does it reinforce cultural legal features when it comes to data protection?
Blogdroiteuropeen asked experts in data protection to reflect on key developments in their national systems. No definitive answer is possible as Covid-19 is not over yet. However, this preliminary information leads to the identification of six trends underlying the Covid-19 crisis and its impact on data protection. First, all countries were not equal before the pandemic due to differences in their factual and legal backgrounds. Secondly, constitutional techniques proved resilient to a large extent in general and in particular when it comes to data protection. Thirdly, the effectiveness of data protection legislation is connected to its embeddedness in the wider legal context. Fourthly, tracking the spread of Covid-19 through tracing apps may turn out to be a unicorn defeated by data protection even though different technologies have been attempted. Fifthly, aggregation of data or collective harvesting of data in some form has been implemented to very different extents, provided some data protection requirements are met. This leads to the final trend: the ever more articulated pressure on the European Union to decide how far it wants to reclaim its digital sovereignty, and what this would entail concretely. As legal systems may have to cope with the long-term consequences of Covid-19 all over the world it may be useful to take stock of these emerging trends before designing any grand scheme for post-Covid-19 society.
The Covid-19 pandemic affects societies worldwide, challenging not only health sectors but also public administration systems in general. Understanding why public administrations perform well in the current situation—and in times of crisis more generally—is theoretically of great importance; and identifying concrete factors driving successful administrative performance under today‘s extraordinary circumstances could still improve current crisis responses.
This article studies patterns of sound administrative performance with a focus on networks and knowledge management within and between crises. Subsequently, it draws on empirical evidence from two recent public administration surveys conducted in Germany in order to test derived hypotheses. The results of tests for group differences and regression analyses demonstrate that administrations that were structurally prepared, learned during preceding crises, and that displayed a high quality in their network cooperation with other administrations and with the civil society, on average, performed significantly better in the respective crises.
Governments and energy operators are often confronted with local residents’ protest against the construction of new high-voltage overhead transmission lines, negative risk expectations, and a lack of public support. A frequently discussed strategy for dealing with these issues is to build underground cables instead of overhead lines. So far, however, there is not much empirical evidence of whether substituting overhead lines by underground cables actually reduces protest or affects public risk expectations and attitudes. This study contributes to filling this gap by comparing residents’ risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior observed at two grid expansion sites in Germany by means of a quasi-experiment. At the time when the data were collected, both grid expansion projects–an overhead line project in Lower Saxony and an underground cable project in Hesse–were at the same stage of the legally defined planning and approval procedure. After controlling for various potential confounders, we obtained results revealing that there are no differences in the risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior of residents interviewed at the two project sites, or only marginal ones. Hence, our findings do not support the assumption that building underground cables necessarily improves the situation with regard to risk expectations, attitudes, and protest behavior.
Twinning peaks
(2012)
The number of public–private partnerships (PPP) is on the rise. The authors analyse empirical evidence (including outcomes from interviews and a survey of civil servants in Germany), about the importance of transaction costs and trust in PPP implementation and perfor-mance. The paper makes an important contribution to the literature by reflecting on trust relations in PPPs, as well as providing empirical evidence for higher transaction costs in PPPs, compared to entirely public sector provision.
PURPOSE: The management of cross-border natural resources has been the focus of re-search in different disciplines. Nonetheless, beyond theoretical insights, empirical evidence of successful cross-border management or governance of natural resources is still limited, even in the European Union (EU), where a range of instruments are provided to foster cross-border cooperation between its Member States. This is where our paper departs, providing evidence from an example of cross-border cooperation between two Member States of the EU, Austria, and Slovenia, adding to the analytical framework to identify the drivers of successful cross-border cooperation.
METHODOLOGY: Drawing from the example of the European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC) Geopark Karawanken we evaluate the success factors and limits for transboundary cooperation encompassing different forms of cooperation. Furthermore, based on empirical evidence of workshops with local, regional, and national stakeholders, we investigate the potential of the EGTC organizational framework to provide for the successful cross-border management of water resources within the Geopark area.
From today's viewpoint it seems almost inconceivable that there once was a time where academia functioned without peer review processes, which are now so much part and parcel of the academic environment. Peer review is mainly taken for granted and we assume that it generally works well in estimating the worth of academic outputs of differents kinds (publications, grant proposals etc.) However, the process itself is not free of criticism and much can still be done to improve review quality. In this paper I explore and question the purpose and function of peer review, engage with various problems that can occur in the process, and make suggestions for ways in which peer review might be improved. It is based on empirical research, participation in various peer review forms and observation of accreditation practice.
In this paper, the 2015/16 budgetary effects of refugee immigration in Germany are analyzed. The Public sector spends billions of Euros to accommodate and supply refugees and to integrate those into the labor markets who have a perspective for a permanent or even medium-term residence permit. In case of a successful integration, we can expect flow backs in the form of income tax revenues and social security contributions. The costs and financial benefits of several types of refugees are modelled and – weighted with the number of cases – added to a public sector ‘financial balance’. Financial ‘profitability’ depends on labor market integration, the volume of labor participation and the future income earned, which depends on qualification, education and training. The levels of government will experience diverging cost-benefit balances. They will only receive future flow backs in the form of their share in the income tax revenues if refugees find jobs within their territories. Administrative efforts should concentrate on a successful labor market integration of refugees and no longer continue the policy of preventing them from entering the labor market for many years and thereby making them heavily dependent on public transfer payments.
The European Commission presented, in its White Paper on the Future of Europe, scenarios on the future of the EU in 2025, which prompt the question as to their meaning for the future of EU administrative law. This article explores the implications of the scenarios for the future of EU executive rulemaking and its constitutional consequences. As some scenarios imply a more powerful political role of the Commission, and almost all expand the scope and usage of executive rulemaking, the executive power gains induce the need for more distinct constitutional guidelines for executive rulemaking and for strengthened parliamentary control, to preserve the institutional power balance between legislative and executive rulemaking. The analysis develops proposals insofar and demands respect for constitutional barriers already enshrined in EU primary law but not sufficiently addressed yet in institutional practice.
The Covid-19 pandemic is a multi-faceted crisis that challenges not only the health systems and other policy sub-systems in the single Member States, but also the European Union’s ability to provide policy responses that address the transnational nature of pandemic control as a union-wide ‘public good’ that affects health and social policies, border control and security as well as topics related to the single market. Thus, the pandemic constitutes a veritable capacity test for the EU integration project.
This article attempts to take stock of the Union’s early reaction to the first wave of the Covid-19 outbreak. After an introduction and a short note on the scope and methodology of the analysis a theoretical framework is developed. Scrutinising the pertinent literature on crisis management, we reflect the traditional hypothesis that in times of crisis the centre becomes more relevant against the background of the EU crisis management system, and discuss the role of informality in particular during the time of crisis. Against this backdrop, empirical evidence from interviews with EU officials and documents in selected policy fields (health and emergency management, digitalisation, and economic recovery) are analysed, before a discussion and conclusion complete the study.
Trade relations face unprecedented challenges, which has led to an increased politicisation and contestation of trade rules. In response, the EU has changed its trade policy under the motto ‘Open Strategic Autonomy’ towards a more as-sertive policy. The EU seeks to signifi-cantly expand its room of manoeuvre and to gain more autonomy by strengthening the en-forcement of its trade rights and by ensuring more effectively, including unilaterally, a level playing field. This re-orientation engenders several new or amended trade policy instru-ments, but meets with reservations as the renewed politicisation of EU trade policy will have internal consequences and raise demands for more democratic accountability of the Euro-pean Commission. The new policy instruments will enlarge its leeway in trade policy. The future of the EU's multilateral, rule- instead of power-oriented political stance becomes unclear, which might undermine its negotiation posi-tion in WTO reform and collide with the EU's respect for international law. The tensions of the EU's new hybrid approach with its international commitments even more fuel demands for increased accountability of the Commission as a safeguard against employing the new powers for protectionism and disrespect to international law. The contribution analyses the need for increased Commis-sion accountability in the redirected trade policy.
The TCA (EU-UK Trade and Copperation Agreement) establishes a very comprehensive institutional framework with Partnership Council and diverse Committees having partly substantial decision-making powers for the development of the TCA. These considerable public functions prompt legitimacy concerns as to their democratic control, which this article explores in detail. It will be shown that the exercise of public powers by TCA treaty bodies meets with a sobering legal situation regarding democratic control mechanisms over treaty body decision-making at different levels. Thus, from a constitutional perspective, the legal and legitimate transfer of powers requires additional safeguards as to their democratic legitimacy. Solutions for better control of treaty body decisions by parliaments must be developed at several levels simultaneously.
Considering the new focus of the European Union (EU) trade policy on strengthening the enforcement of trade rules, the article presents the proposed amendments to the EU Trade Enforcement Regulation 654/2014. It analyzes the EU Commission proposal and the amendments suggested by the European Parliament Committee on International Trade (INTA), in particular with regard to uncooperative third parties and the provision of immediate countermeasures. The amendments will be assessed in view of their legality under World Trade Organization (WTO), Free Trade Agreement (FTA), and general international law and in view of their political implications for the EU’s multilateralist stance. Finally, the opportunity to amend Regulation 654/2014 to use it for the enforcement of FTA trade and sustainable development chapters will be explored. The analysis shows that the shift towards more effective enforcement should be pursued with due care for respecting existing international legal commitments and with more caution to multilateralism.
The study of the processes and effects of internationalization has become a major field of inquiry in the social sciences. This article takes stock of corresponding research efforts in the field of public administration (PA) to understand the internationalization phenomenon by analyzing studies that were systematically sampled from major PA journals over recent decades. After 10 delineating, sampling, categorizing, and subsequently examining the scholarly production of PA regarding what can be understood as the internationalization of domestic PA, three major themes of PA-related debates are identified: diffusion, resistance, and the transformation of bureaucratic power. The article concludes that PA has developed neither genuine research questions nor a coherent theoretical framework able to come to grips with the internationalization challenge. It 15 ends with an appeal for PA to become aware of this deficit and recommends PA scholars liaise Q3 more intensively with other social sciences to overcome the current state of affairs.
The Union legislator has recently amended the Aarhus Regulation with the aim of bringing it more in line with the requirements the Aarhus Convention lays down. EU State aid decisions, however, remain excluded from its scope. This exclusion raises questions that form the object of this contribution. The article argues that the arguments presented to justify the continued exclusion of State aid review are not convincing. By not complying with the re-commendations of the ACCC, the EU is in clear violation of international law. Therefore, the article deliberates over the necessary changes and possible exemptions for a sound im-plementation of the Aarhus Convention against the procedural specificities of State aid review, considering also the Commission´s recently presented options, which contain a number of problematic aspects.
Electoral disinformation has become one of the most challenging problems for democratic states. All of them are facing the phenomenon of - both online and offline - dissemination of false information during pre-electoral period, which is harmful for individual and collective rights. As a consequence, some European countries adopted special measures, including summary judicial proceedings in order to declare that information or materials used in elec-tioneering are false and to prohibit its further dissemination. There are already three rulings of the ECtHR concerning this expeditious judicial examination provided in the Polish law. In December 2018 France passed complex regulation against manipulation of information that include similar mechanisms. This article, basing on the ECtHR’s case law and some national experiences, attempts to define the minimal European standard for measures targeted at electoral disinformation, especially judicial summary proceeding. It contains the analysis of the notion of electoral disinformation, defines the state’s positive obligations in this sphere, and indicates mayor challenges for the legal framework. The principal argument is that summary judicial proceedings – if adequately designed – cannot be questioned from the Convention standpoint and provide a partial solution to the problem of electoral dis-information.
Searching for Order. Exploring the use of delegated and implementing acts in the EU customs code
(2017)
Artikel über Unterschiede in der gesetzgeberischen Ermächtigung der Kommission unter Art. 290 AEUV gegenüber Art. 291 AEUV anhand des EU Zollkode. Der Artikel findet empirische Unterschiede insofern als Art. 290 AEUV für die Ermächtigung der Festsetzung von 'Bedingungen' verwendet wird, und Art. 291 AEUV für die Ermächtigung zur Festsetzung von Verfahrensregeln.
Against a background of extensive literature examining how digital platforms are regulated through ‘soft’ mechanisms, this paper analyses the ‘hard law’ techniques, such as sanctions, which are also very much used on digital platforms to police undesirable behaviours.
It illustrates the use of these sanctions, suggesting that it is possible to find three different categories of sanctions: sanctions that find their source in hard (international and domestic) law, sanctions that find their source in digital platforms’ own normative production, and sanctions used in the course of disputes. Platform operators can have an intense power of norm-setting and sanctions, with a tendency to concentrate power within themselves or with unclear arrangements for dividing it across different entities. This can deeply affect individual freedoms. This paper suggests that the ways in which the power to set, decide and enforce sanctions is exercised in the digital space transform the public–private divide: the allocation of roles between sovereign public bodies and free private actors is reshaped to become ‘hybrid’ when it comes to enforcing rules and monitoring compliance through a wide range of sanctions on digital platforms. This paper frames the legitimacy questions arising from sanctions and suggests that the public–private divide may have to be bridged in order to locate a possible source of legitimacy. A future framework for assessing how platform operators set norms and ensure compliance through sanctions needs to start from individual users to see how best to protect their freedom when checks and balances around platforms’ powers and sanctions are developed. These individual users are the ones who suffer from the economic, social and reputational consequences of sanctions in both the digital world and the physical world.
This paper asks which legal tools digital operators could use to manage colliding rights on their platforms in a digitalised and transnational space such as the Internet. This space can be understood as a “modern public square”, bringing together actions in the digitalised world and their interactions with actual events in the physical world. It is then useful to provide this space with a discursive framework allowing for discussing and contesting actions happening on it. In particular, this paper suggests that two well-known legal concepts, proportionality and sanctions, can be helpfully articulated within that discursive framework. In a first step, proportionality, a justificatory tool, is often used to suggest a way for managing colliding rights. This paper argues that for proportionality to be useful in managing colliding rights on digital platforms, its role, scope and limits need to be better framed and supplemented by an overall digital environment which can feed into the proportionality test in an appropriate way. This can be provided, thanks to a second step, namely labelling in law the actions digital operators take as sanctions. Sanctions are the reactions organised by digital operators to bring back social order on the platforms. The labelling of these reactions under the legal category of “sanctions” offers a meaningful tool for thinking about what digital operators do when they manage colliding rights by blocking or withdrawing contents and/or accounts. As different types of sanctions can be distinguished, differentiated legal consequences, especially in relation to managing colliding rights, can be identified. Here the role played by the proportionality test can be distinguished depending on the type of sanctions.
In any case, for sanctions and proportionality to help address colliding rights on the modern public square, a discursive framework needs to be developed, which depends on the existence of relevant meaningful communities engaging in reflecting on the use of sanctions and proportionality.
The Council of Europe (CoE) has a long-standing record of promoting standards of good administration in the European legal space. Today, these standards encapsulate the entire range of general organisational, procedural and substantive legal institutions meant to ensure a democratically legitimised, open and transparent administration respecting the rule of law. Therefore, these standards are about the ‘limiting function’ of administrative law, that is, its function to protect individuals from arbitrary power, to legitimise administrative action and to combat corruption and nepotism and other ‘diseases’ with which even a democratic polity willing to be governed by the rule of law may be infected. These CoE standards can be described as ‘pan-European principles of good administration.
Globally, there are challenges and threats that cannot be targeted by a single actor, even if it may be a national state, legitimized and willing to act. Hence, new collaboration regimes were created: international organizations, but also – formal or informal – cooperations with the private sector. Our paper discusses organization forms of these cooperations or ‘global public private partnerships’ (GPPP) theoretically and outlines framework conditions for the use of these global partnerships. Additionally, the health sector will be tackled exemplarily to delineate in how far GPPP are largely depending on the nature of the good provided.
Social media platforms are increasingly used in the public administration context. Against this background, this study not only derives and tests the impact of determinants that explain citizens’ intention to use social media channels of public services, but also examines to what extent their intention to use influences their intention to recommend these services to others (word of mouth). An expanded technology acceptance model (TAM) was tested based on data from a survey of 164 citizens. The model provides insight into the creation of social media applications of public authorities, for example, by providing four determinants that significantly influence citizens’ intention to use Facebook pages of public institutions as well as their intention to recommend the page to other citizens.
This study explores public leaders’ organizational learning orientation in the wake of a crisis. More precisely, we study the association between public leaders’ public service motivation and their learning orientation (instrumental versus political). This research addresses the lack of systematic empirical data on crisis-induced learning and provides a first systematic operationalization of this important concept. We analyze survey data collected from 209 Dutch mayors on their learning priorities in responding to a hypothetical crisis situation in their municipality. The mayors’ response patterns reveal (1) “cognitive”, (2) “behavioral”, (3) “accountability”, and (4) “external communication” dimensions of crisis-induced learning. We find that mayors with a stronger public service motivation put more effort into instrumental learning (dimensions 1 and 2), and surprisingly, also into political learning (dimensions 3 and 4). Mayoral experience in previous crises is positively associated with accountability-related learning after a crisis. However, mayoral tenure is negatively associated with crisis-induced behavioral learning.
It is an open question what impact public governance reforms have had in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, which is challenged by domestic transformative societal developments as well as by transformational pressures from abroad. To assess their differential impact, the article first revisits the legacies that characterize the public administrative systems of the MENA region. Then, using data from the newly-developed Arab Administrative Elites Survey, it taps into the images and aspirations of public governance insiders as regards crucial public sector values. According to this data, the reforms aim to increase efficiency and to bring public administrations closer to the people. Arguably, reforms in MENA public governance converge, though from a relatively low level, with the direction of global standards of public management.
Proportionality in English Administrative Law: Resistance and Strategy in Relational Dynamics
(2021)
Proportionality is at the centre of heated debates in English administrative law. It has been adopted for matters pertaining to European law and the European Convention on Human Rights, but its use in other areas parts of English administrative law is highly contentious. While some arguments in favour or against applying proportionality in England are similar to those exchanged in relation to other legal systems (such as tensions between increased objectivity in judicial control over administrative action vs. the desirability of more limited control), other arguments are more specific to English administrative law. To understand the challenges encountered by proportionality in English administrative law, this paper adopts a contextual analysis, putting the emphasis on the relational dynamics framing the interactions between the main actors involved in the proportionality test. Paradoxically, this perspective rehabilitates the analysis of the legal techniques behind transplants such as proportionality: indeed, transplants are vehicles for legal changes in ways that go beyond the circulation of ideas across the world. Instead of being merely superficial and rhetorical, transplants engage deeply with the whole gamut of institutions and actors in a legal system, calling on them to rearticulate their implied and explicit relationships.
Problem of Fiscal Federalism
(2000)
Policy Dismantling
(2013)
This article takes the proliferation of EU soft law instruments in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to analyse their effects and challenges to democracy and rule of law in the EU posed by the use of EU soft law in the implementation of EU law. A proposal will be made for a general legal framework on the adoption of administrative EU soft law in order to address them. Enhancing the legitimacy of EU governance requires a general legal framework that introduces minimum procedural, transparency and participa-tory safeguards and foresees looser rules for urgent soft measures. The article thus makes an original contribution by reconsidering the debate about EU soft law in the context of COVID-19 soft law with a view to its salience for domestic implementation of EU law and by developing core elements of a general legal framework.
The contribution investigates the impact of COVID-19 on long overdue reforms of German healthcare. The pandemic revealed some major shortcomings in patient care and elicited calls for new legislative solutions, more effective use of resources and a reduction of hospital expenditure.
The proposals discussed here clash with the “stability” which is a major feature of the German legal system.