Religiöse Eliten engagieren sich in vielen Gewaltkonflikten für Frieden. Normative Rechtfertigungen für ihr Verhalten können dies oftmals jedoch nur unzureichend erklären. Zur Identifizierung von Faktoren für ein Friedensengagement rationaler religiöser Eliten stützen sich die Autoren...

Institutions can contribute to regulating interethnic conflict; however, in many cases they fail to bring about lasting peace. The paper argues that their negligence of intraethnic factors accounts for some of this failure. Ethnic groups are often treated as unitary actors even though most...

This article aims to evaluate to what extent the Argentine Senate was able to fulfil its constitutional function of controlling the Executive's prerogative to nominate judges between 1983 and 2006, as well as to examine the factors that influenced the exercise of this role. To do so, the paper...

This paper builds on institutional analysis to generate new conclusions about the economic viability of federalism. It does so by suggesting that Weingast´s seminal model of marketpreserving federalism falls short of accounting for the poor fiscal performance of multitiered systems in the...

The institutionalization of political parties is said to be important for democratic development, but its measurement has remained a neglected area of research. We understand the institutionalization of political organizations as progress in four dimensions: roots in society, level of...

The termination of war is mostly seen as a basis not just for recovery but for a fundamental transformation or change in development paths towards peace, stability and development. The Central American peace processes of the last decades were one of the first laboratories for the liberal...

Half a century after independence, African elites, at least those in conflict-ridden countries, often live in constant fear for their life. Real or invented coup attempts, political assassinations, beatings of opposition leaders, the distribution of death lists, etc. have a profoundly...

Studien über die institutionellen Determinanten innerstaatlicher Gewalt legen nahe, dass die Präsenz multipler politischer Parteien das Konfliktpotential innerhalb der Länder reduziert. Es wird behauptet, dass Parteien oppositionelle Gruppierungen in eine institutionalisierte politische Arena...

This paper explores the use of hydrocarbon revenues in post-conflict Algeria. While the bloody years of the 1990s now seem to be over, recurring terror attacks and the ongoing state of emergency leave room for doubt that a situation of stable peace has been achieved yet. It is therefore...

Historical institutionalism has been used to explain the emergence of democracy and dictatorship in various regions of the world, but not applied to political development in Africa. Based on the recently refined concepts of historical institutionalism, the aim of this study is to provide a...