Religion und Staat in der europäischen Religionsgeschichte: Zur historischen Sinnbildung einer Differenz bei Jacob Burckhardt

Der folgende Beitrag geht Verhältnisbestimmungen von Religion und Staat in der zweiten Hälfte des 19.Jahrhunderts am Beispiel der Religionsgeschichtsschreibung von Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) nach. An der Schnittstelle von Religionswissenschaft, Historik und Historiographiegeschichte wird Geschichtsschreibung der Religion dazu als spezifische Form historischer Sinnbildung in den Blick genommen. Burckhardts Diagnose einer Veränderung des Staatsverständnisses verweist auf eine semantische Verhältnisbestimmung von Religion und Kirche, die Aufschluss über eine Verschiebung des Religionsverständnisses in der zweiten Hälfte des 19.Jahrhunderts gibt. Darüber hinaus wird eine Ähnlichkeit zwischen Verhältnisbestimmungen von Religion und Staat im öffentlichen Religionsdiskurs der Gegenwart und in der Religionsgeschichtsschreibung im 19.Jahrhundert aufgezeig

Best practice report on policy learning infrastructures in innovative labour market policies

This report synthesizes the findings of 11 country reports on policy learning in labour market and social policies that were conducted as part of WP5 of the INSPIRES project, which is funded by the 7th Framework Program of the EU-Commission. Notably, this report puts forward objectives of policy learning, discusses tools, processes and institutions of policy learning and presents the impacts of various tools and structures of the policy learning infrastructure for the actual policy learning process. The report defines three objectives of policy learning: evaluation and assessment of policy effectiveness, vision building and planning, and consensus building. In the 11 countries under consideration, the tools and processes of the policy learning, infrastructure can be classified into three broad groups: public bodies, expert councils, and parties, interest groups and the private sector. Finally, we develop four recommendations for policy learning: Firstly, learning processes should keep the balance between centralisation and plurality. Secondly, learning processes should be kept stable beyond the usual political business cycles. Thirdly, policy learning tools and infrastructures should be sufficiently independent from political influence or bias. Fourth, Policy learning tools and infrastructures should balance out mere effectiveness, evaluation and vision building

Economic and financial crises can change the dynamics of federal relationships

Economic recession and soaring deficits in the wake of the recent fiscal and economic crisis do not only ask for intelligent fiscal policies but need also coordinated efforts in federal states in order to forego contradictory and inefficient fiscal reactions to the crisis. Dietmar Braun and Philipp Trein have investigated eleven federations to discover what extent the crisis has contributed to such confrontation and changes in federal relations