Agent-Causation and Paradigms for God’s Knowledge

The article aims at formulating a philosophical framework and by this giving some means at hand to save human libertarian freedom, God’s omniscience and God’s ”eternity’. This threefold aim is achieved by 1) conceiving of an agent as having different possibilities to act, 2) regarding God’s knowledge -- with respect to agents -- not only as being ”propositional’ in character but also as being ”experiential’: God knows an agent also from the ”first person perspective’, as the agent knows herself, and, 3), formulating ”eternity’ and ”temporality’ as being homeomorphically related to each other. This gives rise to a coherent interplay that saves both human libertarian freedom and God’s omniscient ”view from eternity’

The politics of strategic budgeteering

This paper analyzes how opportunistic governments choose between alternative fiscal policies in order to increases their chances of re-election. To increase the provision of public goods shortly before elections – and thus, to generate a fiscal political business cycles – governments may either increase deficits or redistribute governmental resources from longterm efficient sources to short-term efficient public programs. We argue that incumbents who face highly competed elections principally have an incentive to spend more on public goods even though these investments are not efficient in the long term. In principal, they would do so by increasing the deficits (with re-balancing the budget after the election). However, our model demonstrates that incumbents would even electioneer at the cost of long-term investments if the extent of fiscal transparency does not allow them to finance the provision of public goods with higher deficits. In other words, if elections are close and voters may observe the governmental deficit, then governments tend to increase the provision of public goods – and consequently, their electoral prospects – by a redistribution of budget resources from long-term efficient investment to a short-term provision of public goods. We test the predictions with new data on the composition of government consumption for 17 OECD countries over 35 years. The preliminary findings suggest that governments indeed reshuffle resources from long-term efficient investment to short-term public goods before elections especially if elections are contested

Formal and informal labour markets: Challenges and policy in the Central and Eastern European new EU members and candidate countries

The paper aims at comparing the formal and informal labour markets in the Central and Eastern European new EU Member States and candidate countries of the European Union. First, the current situation of the labour market is described, focusing on the recent developments since the breaking up of the East. Then the policy design of these labour markets is depicted and its effects on formal and informal labour markets. The most important challenges for employment policy as well as the effects of enlargement on the labour markets are analysed. The paper ends with a short summary.Formal and informal labour markets; shadow economy; labour market policy; unemployment; employment; wage compensation; labour market regulation

The Domestic Politics of International Cooperation: Germany and the European Debt Crisis

AbstractInternational cooperation can fail even though governments have no distributional conflicts or incentives to free-ride, face no informational or credibility problems, and even agree on the policies that need to be implemented. Germany's refusal to cooperate with the Eurogroup members on the Greek bailout in 2010 until the crisis threatened to derail the entire Eurozone is puzzling in that regard especially because Germany is the main beneficiary of the euro. It was alleged at the time that this was a dilatory tactic designed to postpone a domestically unpopular decision until after crucial regional elections. But why would voters allow themselves to be misled like that? And why did Merkel agree to the bailout before the elections took place? To analyze how citizen preferences affect international cooperation, we develop a game-theoretic model of the four-way interaction between two governments that must coordinate a response to a crisis affecting both countries but who also must face the polls domestically with an electorate that might be uncertain whether a response is necessary. We find that, paradoxically, governments that stand to receive the greatest benefits from international cooperation face the greatest obstacles to implementing the required policies even when voters would want them to. We show how the model can rationalize Merkel's electoral strategy and why her party suffered at the polls when the strategy went off the rails.</jats:p

Islamic Feminism and Muslim Women’s Rights Activism in India: From Transnational Discourse to Local Movement - or Vice Versa?

The very recent phenomenon called Islamic feminism receives quite a lot of attention from academia and media alike. Although it is basically a discourse whose strategy and praxis is primarily script related, there seems to be an overt tendency to equate Islamic feminism with an ideology for a transnational social or political movement. As a perceived singular movement, Islamic feminism is often distinguished from two other supposedly singular movements, namely “Muslim feminism” and “Islamist feminism.” With regard to India, however, these ideal types don’t seem to be very helpful as analytical categories, as the growing influence and reference to Islamic feminism there simply cannot be associated with one distinct group of proponents or one movement exclusively. Therefore, I will argue here that a clear distinction should rather be made between Islamic feminism as a discursive movement, and the distinct local, national or transnational social and political movements that are all increasingly referring to this discourse. In India, these movements in many cases precede the emergence of Islamic feminism in the 1990s. So by making this distinction, the focus of analysis can be shifted from the repeated finding of ideological divisions and frictions within a supposedly singular Islamic feminist movement to the focus on the enormous potential that this discourse obviously has for Muslim women’s agency in general as well as for the emergence of new female subjectivities in India (and elsewhere) which in turn seem to challenge and change secular-national gender discourses

Tea for Interreligious Harmony?: Cause Marketing as a New Field of Experimentation with Visual Secularity in India

This working paper is part of a larger research project on emerging visualities and imaginaries of living together in plurality and on equal terms. Against the background of growing majoritarianism in India and the normalization of violence against religious minorities and marginalized communities, the search for new visual forms and aesthetic means to counter increasing divisiveness and conflict has acquired exceptional urgency. It is a search pursued by many and in multiple directions, occasionally even in the realm of marketing and advertising which is the focus of this article. The larger project considers documentaries, fictional films and transmedia interventions in order to understand how different actors seek to create new visualities that are markedly different from earlier form(at)s used to visually mediate the normative project of political secularism for many decades, but nevertheless draw on the idea that secularity is a mode of living together and socially interacting in plural societies

Universal Algorithm for Simulating and Evaluating Cyclic Voltammetry at Macroporous Electrodes by Considering Random Arrays of Microelectrodes

An algorithm for the simulation and evaluation of cyclic voltammetry (CV) at macroporous electrodes such as felts, foams, and layered structures is presented. By considering 1D, 2D, and 3D arrays of electrode sheets, cylindrical microelectrodes, hollow‐cylindrical microelectrodes, and hollowspherical microelectrodes the internal diffusion domains of the macroporous structures are approximated. A universal algorithm providing the timedependent surface concentrations of the electrochemically active species, required for simulating cyclic voltammetry responses of the individual planar, cylindrical, and spherical microelectrodes, is presented as well. An essential ingredient of the algorithm, which is based on Laplace integral transformation techniques, is the use of a modified Talbot contour for the inverse Laplace transformation. It is demonstrated that first‐order homogeneous chemical kinetics preceding and/or following the electrochemical reaction and electrochemically active species with non‐equal diffusion coefficients can be included in all diffusion models as well. The proposed theory is supported by experimental data acquired for a reference reaction, the oxidation of [Fe(CN)6]4− at platinum electrodes as well as for a technically relevant reaction, the oxidation of VO2+ at carbon felt electrodes. Based on our calculation strategy, we provide a powerful open source tool for simulating and evaluating CV data implemented into a Python graphical user interface (GUI)

Formal and informal labour markets: Challenges and policy in the Central and Eastern European new EU members and candidate countries

The paper aims at comparing the formal and informal labour markets in the Central and Eastern European new EU Member States and candidate countries of the European Union. First, the current situation of the labour market is described, focusing on the recent developments since the breaking up of the East. Then the policy design of these labour markets is depicted and its effects on formal and informal labour markets. The most important challenges for employment policy as well as the effects of enlargement on the labour markets are analysed. The paper ends with a short summary