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- Lehrstuhl für Politikwissenschaft (Univ.-Prof. Dr. Stephan Grohs) (3)
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Administrative sanctions can be said to dwell in the periphery of punishment because they do not require setting the wheels of criminal procedure in motion. This allows States to save public resources as well as helps them to escape closer scrutiny at the judicial level. At the same time, the imposition of administrative sanctions usually curtails individual guarantees. Against this background, this article examines where the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) draws the line between measures belonging to the ‘hard core of criminal law’ and the periphery. After a presentation of gradual broadening of the ‘criminal limb’ guarantees of Article 6 European Convention on Human Rights to administrative measure of a punitive nature, it explores where do these guarantees meet their limits by taking the approach adopted in the landmark Jussila judgment as a point of departure. Subsequently, a structured analysis of the selected ECtHR case law in which this approach has been applied or – at least – invoked is provided. The article is finished with a reflection on the current interpretation of the said penumbra of punishment, which, among other things, identifies the possible gaps of individual protection, and the outlook for the future.
National innovativeness is one key driver of economic development. The relation of national innovativeness and national culture has been firmly established by research. Cultural factors, however, influence national innovativeness via different mechanisms on the macro-, meso-, and micro-level of a country. In our paper, we build on existing research on the link between cultural dimensions and national innovativeness to develop a new model that classifies different cultural dimensions in groups according to their mechanism: political, social, or individual (PSI-model). Using a newly-established data set composed of world data, we test and find support for this model using a variety of regression models. The PSI-model provides a more structured theoretical background of the impact of different cultural dimensions on national innovativeness, especially with regard to social practices and social values. It can be used to generate policy recommendations on national innovativeness and offers further applications in fields related to the various impacts of national culture.
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.
Policymakers and transmission system operators frequently face problems when planning and constructing new high-voltage transmission lines because of opposition among local residents. Protest varies due to attributes of the transmission lines (e.g., length and size), site-specific characteristics, and the extent of consternation among local residents. The most controversially discussed grid expansion project in Germany is the SuedLink, which has been causing severe protest among groups of local residents. One driver of public opposition is the existence of local citizens’ initiatives. These groups play an important role, for example by influencing the public debate, taking legal action, or mobilizing their members and other citizens into protest. In doing so, they can cause delays due to confrontational planning and approval procedures. In order to deal with these risks, decision-makers need to know about the actual effects of citizens’ initiatives on public protest. So far, however, empirical research on these effects has been sparse. This study contributes to filling this gap by considering one specific aspect of the influence of citizens’ initiatives. It isolates the causal effects of citizens’ initiative membership on members’ individual protest behavior in the context of the SuedLink. Controlling for various potential confounders, our results clearly indicate that the probability of performing protest behavior and the intensity of protest are substantially larger for members of citizens’ initiatives than for non-members.
Governments and energy operators are frequently confronted with opposition to the construction of new highvoltage transmission lines. In this context, a recent experiment by Mueller et al. (2017) tested the so-called proximity hypothesis and found that spatial proximity to proposed transmission line corridor route alternatives significantly affected residents' likelihood of having negative risk expectations, showing low levels of support, and engaging in protest against the planned facility. Moreover, their findings suggest that the relationship between spatial proximity and the dependent variables is appropriately modeled by a distance decay function, showing that effects attenuate with increasing distance from the infrastructure site. Unfortunately, because of the fact that the study is the only one that has tested the proximity hypothesis in the context of planning new trans-mission lines so far, the existing evidence cannot be considered as a solid knowledge base. Therefore, to strengthen the reliability of the existing evidence, the natural experiment of Mueller et al. (2017) has to be replicated, which is the purpose of the present study. The findings of the replication clearly support the results provided by Mueller and colleagues and provide further empirical evidence that strengthens the proximity hypothesis in the context of power grid expansion.
Freedom of information (FOI) laws aim to improve the public’s opportunities to access official information from public authorities and hence to increase the level of transparency. Thus, it is important to know whether and to what degree the effects intended by establishing FOI laws are achieved and how their implementation could be improved. In order to answer these questions, FOI laws have to be evaluated. Unfortunately, attempts to evaluate FOI laws are still in their infancy. To promote sound evaluation, this article aims to provide guidance on how comprehensive FOI law evaluations might be designed and conducted.