Prospects for a European welfare state: Lessons from welfare state development in six OECD-Federations

This paper uses the findings of a very recent major international research collaboration on the impact of federal arrangements on the development of the welfare state to explore the possibilities of progress beyond Europe's present diversity of nation-state welfare standards. These findings - based on the longterm historical experience of the OECD's oldest federations - suggest that federal arrangements tend to slow down welfare state consolidation, but that much depends on the context of historical development. The emergence of bypass mechanisms circumventing federal veto-points is located as the key to welfare progress, and the role of regulation in European integration and the special role of the ECJ as well as that of "the open method of co-ordination" are tentatively identified as possible EU bypass equivalents. --

Gender Voice and Correlations with Peace

The statistics regarding violence in today’s society are staggering. A newly released study published by the World Health Organization, making headlines in the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 3, 2002) reports that “Violence Took 1.6 Million Lives in 2000.” Notably, this report considers only the data obtained from the seventy countries that report such statistics to the World Health Organization. It does not include reports from many countries whose violence is also high, such as Burundi, Rwanda, Iraq, Liberia and Afghanistan. This manuscript seeks to address some of these issues of violence by considering issues of gender. We pose the question whether there may be some correlation between violence and the lack meaningful involvement of women in the economy. If the countries that appear more violent are also countries where women are systematically excluded from business opportunities, perhaps one way to curb some of the societal violence would be to improve the opportunities for women in the economy. Multi-national corporations can play an important role in increasing these opportunities. As has been argued elsewhere, a reduction in poverty promotes stability and leads to a more peaceful society. Studies show that in developing countries, involving women in the economy as wage earners can reduce poverty. As the locus of production shifts away from the home, an initial decline in employment opportunities may occur. However, this eventually disappears and both women and men benefit.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39915/3/wp530.pd

Don't Raise the Retirement Age! An Experiment on Opposition to Pension Reforms and East-West Differences in Germany

For policy reforms to increase a society's welfare, reliable information on people's prefer-ences and expectations is crucial. Representative opinion polls, often involving simplified questions about the complex topics under debate, are an important source of information for both policy-makers and the public. Do people's answers to these poll questions reliably reflect their preferences and expectations, or does fundamental, undiscriminating opposition to reforms distort them? We address this question in the context of a recent German pension reform which raised the statutory retirement age by two years to age 67. By introducing an experiment into a representative household survey, we are able to disentangle expectations of work ability at retirement and fundamental opposition. Our results show that expected work ability declines substantially with increasing target age (63, 65, or 67 years). Answers from West German respondents reflect their current life situation as well as individual health and other risk factors. However, a fundamental opposition to reforms of the welfare state appears to strongly affect responses from East German households.retirement, health, work ability, survey experiment, public opinion poll, PAYG pension system, East Germany

Estimating parties’ policy positions through voting advice applications: Some methodological considerations

The past few years have seen the advent and proliferation of Voting Advice (or Aid) Applications (VAAs), which offer voting advice on the basis of calculating the ideological congruence between citizens and political actors. Although VAA data have often been used to test many empirical questions regarding voting behaviour and political participation, we know little about the approaches used by VAAs to estimate the positions of political parties. This article presents the most common aspects of the VAA approach and examines some methodological issues regarding the phrasing of statements, the format of response scales, the reliability of coding statements into response scales and the reliability and validity of scaling items into dimensions. The article argues that VAAs have a lot of potential but there is also much space for methodological improvements, and therefore concludes with some recommendations for designing VAAs

On Government Centralization and Fiscal Referendums: A Theoretical Model and Evidence from Switzerland

We propose and test a positive model of fiscal federalism in which centralization is less likely to occur in jurisdictions with referendum decisions on policy centralization. Citizens choose centralization of public spending and revenue in order to internalize spillovers if individual preferences in two jurisdictions are sufficiently homogeneous. Under representative democracy, centralization is inefficiently high because representatives can extract political rents by policy centralization. Referendums thus restrict representatives’ ability for rent extraction. An empirical analysis using a panel of Swiss cantons from 1980 to 1998 supports the hypothesis that centralization is less likely under referendum decision-making.Centralization, Fiscal Federalism, Fiscal Referendums

Beyond the Veil of Ignorance: The Influence of Direct Democracy on the Shadow Economy

In this paper we analyze the influence of direct democratic institutions on the size and development of the shadow economies. The framework developed predicts a negative relationship between the degree of direct democracy and the size of the shadow economy. Countries where direct democratic institutions support democratic life are expected to be characterized by a lower informal sector, ceteris paribus. The empirical / econometric investigation of a sample of 56 democracies confirms our core hypothesis and demonstrates that the effect of direct democratic institutions on the shadow economy is negative and quantitatively important; the results are robust and also depend on the interaction of direct democracy with other political institutions, such as district magnitude.shadow economy, direct democratic institutions, district magnitude, good governance

Political institutions and suicide: A regional analysis of Switzerland

The question to what extent governance structure affects people’s well-being, here reflected in the decision to commit suicide, remains still largely unknown. This paper examines the effects of political institutions and governance structure on suicide using a balanced panel for 26 Swiss states (cantons) over the period 1980–1998. Our results indicate that stronger popular rights and more fiscal decentralization reduce suicide, while more local autonomy increases it. The effects are not strongly gender-specific. However, we find evidence that the effect of direct legislation is partly transmitted through sub-federal budgets, but not through health sector spending exclusively.Suicide, Direct democracy, Decentralization, Happiness, Well-being

Кибербезопасность в образовательных сетях

The paper discusses the possible impact of digital space on a human, as well as human-related directions in cyber-security analysis in the education: levels of cyber-security, social engineering role in cyber-security of education, “cognitive vaccination”. “A Human” is considered in general meaning, mainly as a learner. The analysis is provided on the basis of experience of hybrid war in Ukraine that have demonstrated the change of the target of military operations from military personnel and critical infrastructure to a human in general. Young people are the vulnerable group that can be the main goal of cognitive operations in long-term perspective, and they are the weakest link of the System.У статті обговорюється можливий вплив цифрового простору на людину, а також пов'язані з людиною напрямки кібербезпеки в освіті: рівні кібербезпеки, роль соціального інжинірингу в кібербезпеці освіти, «когнітивна вакцинація». «Людина» розглядається в загальному значенні, головним чином як та, що навчається. Аналіз надається на основі досвіду гібридної війни в Україні, яка продемонструвала зміну цілей військових операцій з військовослужбовців та критичної інфраструктури на людину загалом. Молодь - це вразлива група, яка може бути основною метою таких операцій в довгостроковій перспективі, і вони є найслабшою ланкою системи.В документе обсуждается возможное влияние цифрового пространства на человека, а также связанные с ним направления в анализе кибербезопасности в образовании: уровни кибербезопасности, роль социальной инженерии в кибербезопасности образования, «когнитивная вакцинация». «Человек» рассматривается в общем смысле, в основном как ученик. Анализ представлен на основе опыта гибридной войны в Украине, которая продемонстрировала изменение цели военных действий с военного персонала и критической инфраструктуры на человека в целом. Молодые люди являются уязвимой группой, которая может быть главной целью когнитивных операций в долгосрочной перспективе, и они являются самым слабым звеном Систем