"When the welfare state meets the regulatory state: EU occupational pension policy"

The increasing relevance of occupational pensions for the income security of the elderly moves this policy area to the core of the tension between national redistributive welfare states and EU-wide single market regulations. Focusing on the European pension fund directive, the paper investigates whether European occupational pension policies are primarily shaped by the Commission’s and international business’ agenda of market liberalization or the governments’ preferences for national autonomy in social policy. The study finds that the Directive liberalizes the pension market to some extent. Member states largely succeeded in securing the national prerogative in social policy. In explaining this outcome the paper argues that the nature of domestic pension arrangements does not only shape government preferences but also the preferences of the European Parliament and important business actors. Business was too fragmented internally to succeed in establishing a full blown liberal Europe in regard to occupational pensions, although their pressure was sufficient to secure liberal investment principles

EcoGIS – GIS tools for ecosystem approaches to fisheries management

Executive Summary: The EcoGIS project was launched in September 2004 to investigate how Geographic Information Systems (GIS), marine data, and custom analysis tools can better enable fisheries scientists and managers to adopt Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries Management (EAFM). EcoGIS is a collaborative effort between NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and four regional Fishery Management Councils. The project has focused on four priority areas: Fishing Catch and Effort Analysis, Area Characterization, Bycatch Analysis, and Habitat Interactions. Of these four functional areas, the project team first focused on developing a working prototype for catch and effort analysis: the Fishery Mapper Tool. This ArcGIS extension creates time-and-area summarized maps of fishing catch and effort from logbook, observer, or fishery-independent survey data sets. Source data may come from Oracle, Microsoft Access, or other file formats. Feedback from beta-testers of the Fishery Mapper was used to debug the prototype, enhance performance, and add features. This report describes the four priority functional areas, the development of the Fishery Mapper tool, and several themes that emerged through the parallel evolution of the EcoGIS project, the concept and implementation of the broader field of Ecosystem Approaches to Management (EAM), data management practices, and other EAM toolsets. In addition, a set of six succinct recommendations are proposed on page 29. One major conclusion from this work is that there is no single “super-tool” to enable Ecosystem Approaches to Management; as such, tools should be developed for specific purposes with attention given to interoperability and automation. Future work should be coordinated with other GIS development projects in order to provide “value added” and minimize duplication of efforts. In addition to custom tools, the development of cross-cutting Regional Ecosystem Spatial Databases will enable access to quality data to support the analyses required by EAM. GIS tools will be useful in developing Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) and providing pre- and post-processing capabilities for spatially-explicit ecosystem models. Continued funding will enable the EcoGIS project to develop GIS tools that are immediately applicable to today’s needs. These tools will enable simplified and efficient data query, the ability to visualize data over time, and ways to synthesize multidimensional data from diverse sources. These capabilities will provide new information for analyzing issues from an ecosystem perspective, which will ultimately result in better understanding of fisheries and better support for decision-making. (PDF file contains 45 pages.

Modeling Ceramic Transport with GIS in East-central Arizona

Pottery was central to the lives of ancient peoples in the American Southwest, having both mundane and special purpose functions. Some ceramic types were widely circulated well beyond where they were crafted. However very little investigation has been done on the processes or paths used to transport pottery within social networks. This project examines the movement of a central fourteenth-century pottery type in east-central Arizona. Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), I analyze the physical and cultural landscapes in this area to identify possible corridors of human movement between known pottery-creator and -recipient villages. Building on existing knowledge of where pottery is produced, this project will focus needed attention on how ceramics were moved around the landscape and what trails were used to move them in the ancient Southwest

A preferred vision for leading secondary schools : a reflective essay

I believe there are four critical elements necessary for any administrator to be a successful leader of learning. The first critical element is the creation and maintenance of an exceptional school climate and culture where learning is approached with enthusiasm and wonder. Second, the administrator must maintain a direct connection to the learning environment, at all times, so that learning is seen as important and expected. Third, ethical leadership of the school community is foundational to the success of the school community, and the building administrators must always act with integrity. Finally, the administrator must develop, implement, and continually support a strong and unified vision that is much more than writing on a wall. Where these elements are absent, an administrator can accomplish little because these elements focus and provide the passion for making education exemplary in the face of tremendous challenges in today\u27s schools

If similarity is the challenge - congruence analysis should be part of the answer

Abstract: This contribution to the debate on the challenges to comparative politics largely focuses on the issue of differences versus similarities, the issue that has been raised by both authors: Caramani and Van Kersbergen. I share their concern that too much research focuses on differences between countries and I also join them in locating the sources of this bias in methodological considerations. I do not agree however with some of Caramani’s points, in particular his fundamental claim that explanation necessarily demands variations across cases; a claim that seems also to be made at least implicitly by Van Kersbergen. I argue that the validity of an explanation rather depends on the degree to which empirical evidence is congruent with observable implications of this explanation and is not congruent with implications of rival explanations. It is irrelevant whether these theoretical expectations concern differences or similarities between countries. I therefore advocate a theory-driven rather than a case-driven analysis of national political systems in order to meet the challenge to explain similarities between them. Key words: case study; comparative method; comparative politics; research desig

Bread and butter or bread and circuses? Politicisation and the European Commission in the European Semester

Does domestic contestation of European Union legitimacy affect the behaviour of the European Commission as an economic and fiscal supervisor? We draw on theories of bureaucratic responsiveness and employ multilevel and topic modelling to examine the extent to which the politicisation of European integration affects the outputs of the European Semester: the Country-Specific Recommendations. We develop two competing sets of hypotheses and test these on an original large-N data set on Commission behaviour with observations covering the period 2011–2017. We detect a twofold effect on the Commission's recommendations: member states that experience greater politicisation receive recommendations that are larger in scope but whose substance is less oriented towards social investment. We argue that this effect is best explained as an outcome of the Commission's institutional risk management strategy of regulatory ‘entrenchment’. The supranational agent issues additional recommendations while simultaneously entrenching on a stronger mandate substantively, which allows it to maintain its regulatory reputation and signal regulatory resolve to observing audiences

Bread and butter or bread and circuses? Politicisation and the European Commission in the European Semester

Does domestic contestation of European Union legitimacy affect the behaviour of the European Commission as an economic and fiscal supervisor? We draw on theories of bureaucratic responsiveness and employ multilevel and topic modelling to examine the extent to which the politicisation of European integration affects the outputs of the European Semester: the Country-Specific Recommendations. We develop two competing sets of hypotheses and test these on an original large-N data set on Commission behaviour with observations covering the period 2011–2017. We detect a twofold effect on the Commission's recommendations: member states that experience greater politicisation receive recommendations that are larger in scope but whose substance is less oriented towards social investment. We argue that this effect is best explained as an outcome of the Commission's institutional risk management strategy of regulatory ‘entrenchment’. The supranational agent issues additional recommendations while simultaneously entrenching on a stronger mandate substantively, which allows it to maintain its regulatory reputation and signal regulatory resolve to observing audiences