Refine
Year of publication
- 2020 (13) (remove)
Document Type
- Part of a Book (13) (remove)
Language
- English (13) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- no (13) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (13)
Keywords
Institute
- Lehrstuhl für Öffentliches Recht, insbesondere deutsches und europäisches Verwaltungsrecht (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ulrich Stelkens) (4)
- Lehrstuhl für vergleichende Verwaltungswissenschaft und Policy-Analyse (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Michael Bauer) (2)
- Lehrstuhl für Verwaltungswissenschaft, Staatsrecht, Verwaltungsrecht und Europarecht (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Mario Martini) (1)
- Lehrstuhl für Volkswirtschaftslehre, insbesondere Wirtschafts- und Verkehrspolitik (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Andreas Knorr) (1)
- Lehrstuhl für Öffentliches Recht, insbesondere Europarecht und Völkerrecht (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Weiß) (1)
Each crisis is dreadful in its own special way, and so is the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond its lethal nature and truly global spread, one of its characteristics lies within the detachment of cause and effect. The cause, i.e. SARS-CoV-2, can clearly be attributed to health issues, though the COVID-19 pandemic challenges entire public administration (PA) systems well beyond the health sector. Both the lockdown as executed and the first careful exit-steps in their entire complexity increase scope and scale of PA’s tasks and responsibilities, challenging not only health authorities, but all parts of the administrative system, from security administration to public service delivery, with the entire world remaining in very turbulent water. Thus, the question arises how the PA should react to ensure high performance in times of crisis. Our findings underpin the relevance of trust in public administration (or “the government” in general), notably in times of crisis: the higher trust levels are, the more likely compliance of citizens and successful networking with non-state actors is. Even in the absence of many trust generating factors, trust levels are increasing in the current COVID-19 pandemic.
The introduction will describe the constant evolving global political context correlated to the events occurring, specifically, in the trade environment and the unprecedented challenges they pose for the EU Trade Policy. These identified and introduced challenges will be addressed in detail in the following book chapters. It will also introduce the reader to the individual contributions of the book and briefly present and anticipate the results attained.
The Covid-19 pandemic constitutes a veritable capacity test for local administrations in Germany and Austria. Based on a survey among systematically sampled Austrian (n=130) and German (n=517) employees of local public administrations, the article taps into the perceptions of how the bureaucracies in the two federal states coped with the challenges emerging at the early stage of the crisis. As it turns out, in the administratively well-equipped and—in comparison to disastrous situations elsewhere—mildly hit countries, local administrations did fine—even growing beyond themselves. Key to a higher probability of coping well with Covid-19 appears to be an intelligent administrative networking strategy. Five tentative lessons are drawn on what—at this early stage—can only constitute an incomplete picture taken from a fluid context.
This contribution examines how checks and balances can be organised so that individual freedoms of users in the digital space are protected from encroachment by platforms. Indeed, platforms are quasi-states which enjoy legislative, judiciary and executive powers. This merging of functions in the hands of one single entity illustrates the failure of the liberal attempt at setting up a cyberspace free of sovereign power: platforms are the new sovereign. Modern thinkers like Foucault and Habermas have examined how sovereigns in the past have seen their powers curtailed and the role that the birth of two distinct spheres, one public and one private, has played in this process. Traditional public economic law builds on this public-private dichotomy, leaving little room to conceptualize hybrids. Yet this paper shows that platforms are such hybrids. Building on an analysis of the activities taking places on platforms, as well as the rights at stake in platform governance, it finds that platforms’ immaterial locus is both political and economic, bundling public and private powers. Hence, this paper puts forward the idea that public economic law should seek to develop mirroring hybrid counter-powers: civil society especially should be conceptualized in the digital space, with its rights, duties and responsibilities, to foster balanced relationships between the various actors on platforms.
Algorithms have a profound and growing influence on our lives, but partially remain a black box to us. Keeping the risks that arise from rule-based and learning systems in check is a challenging task for both: society and the legal system. The essay undertakes the challenge to examine existing and adaptable legal solutions and to complement them with further proposals. It designs a regulatory model in four steps along the time axis: preventive regulation instruments, accompanying risk management, ex post facto protection and the vision of an algorithmic responsibility code. Together, they form a legislative blueprint to further regulate applications of artificial intelligence.