Political Science

On 26–29 June 1997, the Austrian Institute for Advanced Studies (Vienna) and the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies (Washington, DC) cosponsored the Third Vienna Dialogue on Democracy on “Institutionalizing Horizontal Accountability: How Democracies Can Fight Corruption and the Abuse of Power.” The conference sought to address one of the most pressing concerns in young democracies, namely how state agencies can prevent other parts of the government from abusing their power or, more broadly stated, from becoming unaccountable. After an initial session of exploring the historical roots of the concept of horizontal accountability and its theoretical status within the comparative study of democratization, four sessions focused on the following institutional fields: judicial systems, electoral administration, central banks, and corruption control agencies. This report summarizes the presentations and comments made during the conference. Every effort has been made to include the most important points made during the discussions, but space and organizational considerations did not allow the reporting of every single argument or nuance.

Low voter turnout has become a serious problem in most democracies, not only in the United States but also in many West European countries – and even in a traditionally high-turnout country like Austria where turnout has also been declining in recent years. There are five reasons why we should be concerned about this problem: 1. Low turnout means low participation by less privileged citizens, who are already at a disadvantage in terms of other forms of political participation. 2. Unequal participation means unequal influence. 3. Actual turnout tends to be lower than the official turnout figures suggest. 4. Turnout in elections other than those at the national level tends to be particularly low. 5. Turnout is declining in most countries. The problem of low and unequal turnout can be solved by a number of institutional mechanisms such as proportional representation, concurrent and infrequent elections, weekend instead of weekday voting, and compulsory voting. The last of these – mandatory voting – is especially strong and effective, and also morally justified.

This paper pleas for adopting a differentiated perspective on the current controversy over “Asian Values” and democracy. It presents a comparative analysis of the political systems of Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, and depicts these polities as structurally similar cooptative systems which are undemocratic since they keep the given power structure in place by preventing opposition parties from ever being elected. In the light of their particular context, however, a more ambivalent picture emerges. Considering the contingent set of historic, ethnic and socioeconomic circumstances at work in the evolution of these systems, their performance in safeguarding public order and in providing economic prosperity has to be recognized. While an institutional analysis of the “Asian values” discourse can demonstrate the political character of cultural definition and distinction and can likewise avoid an essentialist interpretation, a tentative discussion of the prospects for democratization with emphasis on the emerging middle-classes draws a pessimistic picture for future democratization.

The paper analyses the negotiations that took place in the framework of the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) 1996/97 leading to the modification and amendment of the founding treaties of the European communities. Taking the Austrian case as an example the interaction between the various actors at the national and the international level is reconstructed. The author criticises the “intergovernmental approach” to the analysis of decision making mechanisms in the EU showing that the negotiations did not follow the logic of state power and multilateral bargaining but a “logic of mutual adaptation of expectations and positions”. The IGC 1996/97 exemplifies the ongoing institutionalisation of peculiar decision making procedures and the proliferation of working methods that were developed in the various arenas of European negotiations. A key element of these methods is the importance of mediating roles like the role played by the Council presidency during the IGC. It is argued that the Amsterdam Treaty represents some sort of a “common will” rather than a diplomatic bargain between sovereign states. This is due to the particular setting of the IGC 1996/97 and organisational arrangements that undermine the boundaries between the intergovernmental and the supranational, the national and the international arena, between international and domestic negotiations, and between the national and the European interest.

As a political doctrine nationalism has four distinctive features which make it unattractive from a liberal perspective. It promotes revisions of external state borders by secession and unification in order to create homogeneous nation-states; it militates against national and ethnic diversity within the given borders of a state; it regards national obligations as overriding other interests and identities of the nation's members; and it attributes a moral priority to compatriots which overrides obligations towards foreigners or foreign countries. The paper briefly examines each of these 'four ugly faces' of nationalism. Although liberal political theory may claim to have most consistently opposed these nationalist propositions, I argue that traditional liberalism is ill-equipped to reply to questions which involve the legitimacy of boundaries of political communities. This claim is substantiated by a more thorough examination of the question how state borders ought to be drawn. Consequentialist, deontological and liberal nationalist approaches are each divided against themselves on the question about whether and how to defend or reject a right to secession. The paper derives an alternative response from linking the legitimacy of secession to a theory of federation. In this view, secession may not only be justified in cases of persistent discrimination and inequality of individual citizenship, but also when fair terms of federation are violated. In multinational states, the claims of territorially concentrated groups to self-government can be generally satisfied by guaranteeing them collective rights to regional autonomy and special representation at the federal level. If, and as long as, the terms of federation are fair, minorities incur an obligation to maintain the unity of the federation in which they participate both as individual citizens and as distinct political communities within the larger polity.

The paper starts with a probabilistic definition of democratic consolidation. A democratic regime is consolidated, it claims, when it has acquired a high probability of survival. The article discusses some implications and complications of this definition: its probabilistic foundations and its continuous, cognitive, and subjective nature. This descriptive concept of democratic consolidation, the text argues in continuation, helps avoiding two common methodological pitfalls: etiological definitions (that fail to distinguish between defining features and causal variables) and operational definitions (that fail to distinguish between concepts and operational indicators). The essay concludes with some reflections on the observation and measurement of democratic consolidation.

Is Jörg Haider a »Nazi« as his praise for employment policies in the Third Reich as well as for the Waffen-SS suggests? Do such statements come out of his socialization in a political subculture which has close affinities to the NSDAP? The present papers does not pretend to answer these questions. It analyzes Jörg Haider’s public disourse on the Nazi regime and Austria’s Nazi past in terms of strategic choice. The conclusions it reaches are threefold. First, Jörg Haiders usual handling of this sensitive theme appears as perfectly rational and strategic. Second, Haider’s strategy focuses primarily on the group of potential voters, while at the same time it neglects the hard-core german-national camp. Third, Haider’s statements are in harmony with much of the general population’s attitude towards National Socialism: They are unclear, unsensitive, euphemistic, and ambivalent.

In this country study of Germany the patterns and policies of academic research as well as the evaluation of academic research are analyzed, through applying the following approach: first of all, a bibliometric survey is carried out that investigates the publication output and publication efficiency of Germany’s academic research within international journals; we further investigate whether the results of a bibliometric survey appear compatible with the performance of other indicators. Secondly, discourse and policies of the evaluation of Germany’s university research are investigated by addressing issues such as: the current situation; the structural and cultural constraints against evaluations; the general reasons why evaluations of university research will play an increasingly important role in the future; and an overview of specific evaluation initiatives. Thirdly and finally, also the discourse and policies of the evaluation of Germany’s university-related research are examined.

Independent central banks, because of their purported ability to restrain government officials from manipulating their economies in pursuit of short-term political goals, have been championed by scholars and policy makers alike as guarantors of macroeconomic stability for emerging post-communist democracies. However, Russia's experience in the 1990s calls this argument into question. Although the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) was able to develop a significant degree of freedom from political interference during its early years, its monetary policies at that time were anything but conservative and anti-inflationary. Then, when the CBR's political autonomy began to erode after mid-1993 while its technical capabilities improved, its increasingly monetarist actions began to appear more typical of an "independent" central bank and inflation receded accordingly. This should lead us to rethink our theories on central bank independence - both how we define independence and what we can and cannot expect of an independent central bank. Given the CBR's continuity of personnel, historical objectives, and technical capabilities, even a politically autonomous CBR can not have been expected to internalize and implement new policy goals overnight.

The women’s movement and feminism tend to intimize, to destructure and therefore to depolitizise the public sphere. This accusation is quite popular in the german speaking feminist academic community. What happened to the politics of subjectivity, to the feminist political strategy of overcoming the split between public and privat as well as rationality and emotion? I argue that feminist political science as well as malestream political science is »emotionblind«. This means that emotions are treated as forms of perception, of acting and evaluation that are different from political perceptions and political action. Emotions are outside of the political space – either making the field of politics chaotic (malestream political science) or conzeptualized as a means to feminize and humanize politics (some feminist approaches to female political partizipation). These contradicting appraisals of emotion, gender and politics is putting the connection of gender, emotion and politics on the agenda of feminist political theory. I suggest an approach which conceptualizes emotion as socially and politically constructed. The recent notion of emotion was constructed at the same point in history as gender, with the formation of the capitalist state and the bourgeois class. Gender and emotion build a historical dispositive (Foucault) which emotionalizes women and the private sphere and de-emotionalizes men and the public sphere. The separation of women and men as well as rationality and emotion is a means of control. The notion of an emotional dispositive says that political space is structurally gendered and emotionalized: The dominant mode of beaurocracy – rationality – is the organized hierarchy of male over female as well as rationality over emotion. The Weberian seperation of beaurocracy and (charismatic) politics constructs the public sphere as male and seperates »good« emotions (Vaterlandsliebe/love for the country) from »bad« emotions (sexuality).