Education policy making is often considered an exclusive domain of the nation state in western industrialised countries. Since the 1990s, however, international organisations (IOs) have started to play a greater role in the field of education by developing new forms of governance. As a...

Bildungspolitik wird in den westlichen Industrienationen häufig als ausschließliche Aufgabe des Nationalstaates betrachtet. Seit den 1990ern ist jedoch zu beobachten, dass internationale Organisationen (IOs) eine immer größere Rolle im Politikfeld Bildung spielen, indem sie neue Formen der...

Despite of their methodological and practical significance mixed-methods-designs have so far largely been neglected by political science. In this working paper, we elaborate a mixed-methods-design combining qualitative methods, such as expert interviews and document analysis, and quantitative...

Drawing on theories of legitimacy and democratic deficits in international politics this paper provides an actor-centered relational approach of mapping legitimacy-flows within the transnational policy network of the Bologna Process for a European Higher Education Area. It is shown that...

Processes such as internationalisation and privatisation bring along new challenges both for the conceptualisation and for the measurement of transformations of the state. This paper outlines a semiotic Method of Structural Connotation, which combines content- and network analysis, thus to model...

International initiatives in education, such as PISA and the Bologna Process, have distinctly changed conditions framing domestic policy-making. This paper sheds light on the territorial and modal dispersion of national education policy networks by means of a systematic network analytical...

In this paper, I review existing approaches to network analysis in comparative politics and International Relations (IR). I argue that the theoretical and empirical exploration of global policy networks in IR today can benefit from systematically taking into account the literature that has...

New institutionalism has repeatedly shown that education has become a common institution in current world society, but so far parties have not been the subject of inquiry. This is surprising, given the fact that institutionalization processes relevant to politics should be well observable in...

This article develops a theoretical framework to analyze the rise and spread of global public policy. After an introduction to the background of sociological institutionalism, it first elaborates on the role and functions of international organizations, identifying instruments by which these can...

This paper deals with the methodological question of using data from international organizations (IOs) for comparative analysis. It explores how large-N analyses can profit from using different types of data, including text analysis. The paper proceeds as follows: First, it is introduced for...