Diskurskoalitionen in der Finanzmarktrettung: das Finanzmarktstabilisierungsgesetz

Das Finanzmarktstabilisierungsgesetz kann als eines der weitreichendsten Gesetze der jüngeren Geschichte der Bundesrepublik gelten. Dieses Gesetz, das die Grundlage der Rettungsaktionen definierte, gibt eine politische Richtung vor, die das Verhältnis von Staat und Markt neu zugunsten des Staates definiert, auf stärkere Kontrolle der Finanzmarktakteure setzt und gleichzeitig demokratische Kontrollmechanismen aufweicht. Um dieses Policy-Ergebnis zu erklären, untersucht der Artikel die Diskurskoalitionen, die sich in der Policy-Arena Finanzmarktrettung gebildet haben.The Financial Market Stabilization Act (Finanzmarktstabilisierungsgesetz) is one of the most far reaching legislative acts in recent German history. The act defines the base for the German initiatives to rescue financial markets. It stands for a new relation between state and market in favour of "more state", stricter rules for financial market actors but less democratic control of political action. To understand this policy result the article analyses the "discoursecoalitions"

„Neue Weltordnung“: Nach dem 11. September bleibt vieles, wie es war

The attacks on 11th September are – according to the current belief – a turning point in the US-foreign policy. The authors contest this popular view and suggest that a new military policy was already designed in the aftermath of the collaps of the Soviet Union in 1990. Focussing on the Gulf War and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty the authors argue, that the USA has relied on both unilateralism and mulitlateralism to further its particular foreign policy intersts

Shareholder Kapitalismus und das Casino Spiel an den Börsen

'Das Konzept des Shareholder Value ist durch die jüngsten Entwicklungen im Unternehmenssektor, vor allem durch die Bilanz- und Betrugsskandale von TNC's und die damit verbundene Vernichtung von Arbeitsplätzen in die Kritik geraten. In den politischen Debatten über Shareholder Value wird ein Systemunterschied zwischen dem 'Stakeholder-Ansatz' (wie im rheinischen Kapitalismus) und dem mit der Liberalisierung der Finanzmärkte Ende der 70er Jahre in den USA entwickelten Begriff Shareholder Value (angelsächsischer Kapitalismus) skizziert. Ziel des Papiers ist es die Widersprüchlichkeit und Ungenauigkeit des Shareholder Value Konzeptes theoretisch zu untersuchen, um dann zu zeigen, wie Shareholder Value den amerikanischen Kapitalismus seit den 70er Jahren verändert hat und warum diese Variante des Kapitalismus sich auch immer mehr als Unternehmerstrategie in Europa durchsetzt.' (Autorenreferat)'The concept of shareholder value has come in for heavy criticism as a result of the recent developments in the corporate governance sector, particularly the revelations of false accounting by global corporate titans and the subsequent large lay-offs in the workforce. In the debates, two models of capitalism are contrasted. On the one hand, the 'Stakeholder' capitalism (as in the 'rhinish' model)and, on the other, the model of Shareholder Value (anglo-saxon model), which emerged as a result of the liberalisation of the US financial markets at the end of the 70s. The purpose of the paper is to analyse the contradictions and theoretical confusion about the concept of Shareholder Value, in order to demonstrate how Shareholder Value has initiated changes in the Anglo-Saxon capitalism since the 1970s, and why Shareholder Value is increasingly accepted as a corporate governance strategy in Europe.' (author's abstract

Understanding and evaluating harms of AI-generated image captions in political images

The use of AI-generated image captions has been increasing. Scholars of disability studies have long studied accessibility and AI issues concerning technology bias, focusing on image captions and tags. However, less attention has been paid to the individuals and social groups depicted in images and captioned using AI. Further research is needed to understand the underlying representational harms that could affect these social groups. This paper investigates the potential representational harms to social groups depicted in images. There is a high risk of harming certain social groups, either by stereotypical descriptions or erasing their identities from the caption, which could affect the understandings, beliefs, and attitudes that people hold about these specific groups. For the purpose of this article, 1,000 images with human-annotated captions were collected from news agencies “politics” sections. Microsoft's Azure Cloud Services was used to generate AI-generated captions with the December 2021 public version. The pattern observed from the politically salient images gathered and their captions highlight the tendency of the model used to generate more generic descriptions, which may potentially harm misrepresented social groups. Consequently, a balance between those harms needs to be struck, which is intertwined with the trade-off between generating generic vs. specific descriptions. The decision to generate generic descriptions, being extra cautious not to use stereotypes, erases and demeans excluded and already underrepresented social groups, while the decision to generate specific descriptions stereotypes social groups as well as reifies them. The appropriate trade-off is, therefore, crucial, especially when examining politically salient images

Dancing to the Partisan Beat: A First Analysis of Political Communication on TikTok

TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service, whose popularity is increasing rapidly. It was the world's second-most downloaded app in 2019. Although the platform is known for having users posting videos of themselves dancing, lip-syncing, or showcasing other talents, user-videos expressing political views have seen a recent spurt. This study aims to perform a primary evaluation of political communication on TikTok. We collect a set of US partisan Republican and Democratic videos to investigate how users communicated with each other about political issues. With the help of computer vision, natural language processing, and statistical tools, we illustrate that political communication on TikTok is much more interactive in comparison to other social media platforms, with users combining multiple information channels to spread their messages. We show that political communication takes place in the form of communication trees since users generate branches of responses to existing content. In terms of user demographics, we find that users belonging to both the US parties are young and behave similarly on the platform. However, Republican users generated more political content and their videos received more responses; on the other hand, Democratic users engaged significantly more in cross-partisan discussions.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at the 12th International ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci 2020). Please cite the WebSci version; Second version includes corrected typo

Are Social Bots on Twitter Political Actors? Empirical Evidence from a Ukrainian Social Botnet

A considerable amount of data in social networks like Twitter is not generated by humans but by automatic programs (bots). Some of these bots are mimicking humans (socialbots) and can hardly be identified. In this article, we analyze a social botnet involved in the Ukrainian/Russian conflict. Based on text mining and unsupervised learning, we can identify three different behaviors: mimicry, window dressing, and reverberation