U.S. unions' strategic campaigns against transnational enterprises in Germany

"Gewerkschaften in den USA haben das Instrument der 'strategischen Kampagne' entwickelt, um den wachsenden Widerstand von Unternehmen und Politik gegen Organisierungsbemühungen und Tarifverhandlungen zu überwinden. In jüngerer Zeit versuchen US-Gewerkschaften zunehmend, transnationale Verbindungen der Zielunternehmen in den Kampagnen auszunutzen, einschließlich der Unterstützung von Gewerkschaften im 'Heimatland' der Unternehmen. Der Verfasser untersucht erstens, warum deutsche Gewerkschaften den amerikanischen strategischen Kampagnen oft skeptisch gegenüberstanden, und zweitens, unter welchen Bedingungen die Kampagnen trotz dieser Skepsis unterstützt wurden. Unterschiede in den Systemen industrieller Beziehungen erklären die grundlegende Skepsis deutscher Gewerkschaften in Bezug auf strategische Kampagnen. Vier Faktoren helfen zu erklären, wann die Kampagnen dennoch unterstützt wurden: Politische Ausrichtung, gewerkschaftliche Stärke, Branche und Zielunternehmen." (Autorenreferat)"U.S. unions have developed the instrument of strategic campaigns to overcome growing employer resistance and political hostility towards union organizing and bargaining. In recent years, campaigning unions have increasingly sought to leverage transnational linkages of target companies, including attempts to employ the support of unions in the company's 'homecountry.' The author explores, firstly, why German unions have often encountered U.S. unions' strategic campaigns in Germany with scepticism, and secondly, the circumstances under which German unions have been forthcoming with support despite their scepticism. Differences in industrial relations account for the scepticism of German unions regarding strategic campaigns. Four factors help explain under which circumstances German union support is forthcoming regardless of the scepticism: Political orientation, union strength, industry sector, and target company." (author's abstract

On the Behaviour of Marginal and Conditional Akaike Information Criteria in Linear Mixed Models

In linear mixed models, model selection frequently includes the selection of random effects. Two versions of the Akaike information criterion (AIC) have been used, based either on the marginal or on the conditional distribution. We show that the marginal AIC is no longer an asymptotically unbiased estimator of the Akaike information, and in fact favours smaller models without random effects. For the conditional AIC, we show that ignoring estimation uncertainty in the random effects covariance matrix, as is common practice, induces a bias that leads to the selection of any random effect not predicted to be exactly zero. We derive an analytic representation of a corrected version of the conditional AIC, which avoids the high computational cost and imprecision of available numerical approximations. An implementation in an R package is provided. All theoretical results are illustrated in simulation studies, and their impact in practice is investigated in an analysis of childhood malnutrition in Zambia

Tuareg-Rebellion, Islamismus und Staatskrise in Mali

The root causes of the ongoing crisis in Northern Mali lie in the region’s underdevelopment, exacerbated by longstanding, if recently decreasing, neglect of the central government; the complex social relationship between the largest minority, the Tuareg, and the majority population, which has worsened since a largely unresolved crisis in the 1990s; and the growing interest of a small but growing number of actors involved in the drug trade and other criminal activities in the absence of the state. Among the latter have been a growing number of Jihadists, at first mostly from Algeria, who have been taking Western citizens hostage and therefore caused the US and France to pressure the Malian government to re-establish a presence of the state in the North. The clash was all but inevitable when several thousand heavily armed Tuareg fighters came to Mali after the defeat of Gaddafi in Libya. A new element of the crisis is the growing number of jihadists among the Tuareg rebels and other Malians, but neither Tuareg irredentism nor Islamic fundamentalism has more than minority support in Mali, Northern Mali, or among the Tuareg. The coup d’état against the president, while most likely a spontaneous reaction to the inability of the government to fight the rebellion, uncovered a structural crisis of Malian democracy and society. The disintegration of Mali’s long-praised formal democratic institutions after the coup showed fundamental problems. However, political supporters of the coup who assumed that the population’s tacit support of the coup could be turned into a movement for fundamental social change, had to find that it was largely an opportunistic and diffuse expression of general discontent

Conditional Model Selection in Mixed-Effects Models with cAIC4

Model selection in mixed models based on the conditional distribution is appropriate for many practical applications and has been a focus of recent statistical research. In this paper we introduce the R package cAIC4 that allows for the computation of the conditional Akaike information criterion (cAIC). Computation of the conditional AIC needs to take into account the uncertainty of the random effects variance and is therefore not straightforward. We introduce a fast and stable implementation for the calculation of the cAIC for (generalized) linear mixed models estimated with lme4 and (generalized) additive mixed models estimated with gamm4. Furthermore, cAIC4 offers a stepwise function that allows for an automated stepwise selection scheme for mixed models based on the cAIC. Examples of many possible applications are presented to illustrate the practical impact and easy handling of the package

Die USA nach dem 11. September 2001: The War at Home

The article outlines the domestic consequences of 9-11. It details the war on the homefront by describing steps taken in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, such as the passage and content of the USA Patriot Act, its consequences for immigrants as well as U.S. citizens, and the secrecy surrounding the detention of more than a thousand suspects in what looks like a massive campaign in racial profiling. It also looks at the congressional debate on how the government should intervene to support affected economic sectors and regulate airport security