Das Vorhaben, über das hier zu berichten ist, geht auf eine Anregung des Max-Planck-Instituts für Gesellschaftsforschung (MPIfG) im Frühjahr 2003 zurück, die von der VolkswagenStiftung aufgegriffen und als Projekt finanziell gefördert wurde. Ausgangspunkt war die Beobachtung, dass in den...

Tax competition poses two problems for international cooperation: defection and distributive conflict. Multilateral cooperation to stop tax competition may fail because states face incentives to renege on their promises or because they face adverse distributional consequences, either of which...

Hat Kommunikation einen positiven Einfluß auf Kooperation? In der Debatte, die die deutsche Theorie internationaler Beziehungen in den letzten Jahren um die Rationalität von Kommunikation geführt hat, wird diese Frage emphatisch bejaht. Es besteht Konsens, daß internationale Verhandlungen...

There is a tendency in the new institutionalist literature to equate institutional inertia with stasis and 'no-change'. Using case studies from the international telecommunications regime and the German health care system, the paper tries to show that this equation is wrong. Inertia does not...

In der Politikwissenschaft gibt es drei verschiedene Thesen zum Zusammenhang von Globalisierung und Wohlfahrtsstaat. Die erste behauptet, die Globalisierung sei schuld an der chronischen Krise des Wohlfahrtsstaates. Der Prozess der außenwirtschaftlichen Öffnung und internationalen Integration...

The purpose of this paper, which was written for a forthcoming book on the state-of-the-art in the social sciences, is to survey the influence which natural science concepts and models have recently had on theoretical developments in the social sciences, especially sociology. Such influences can...

No governor has sufficient capabilities to govern single-handedly; all governors rely on agents, and thus become principals. The "governor's dilemma" results from the tradeoff between agent competence and principal control. Competent agents are difficult to control because their policy...

Regulators and other governors rely on intermediaries to set and implement policies and to regulate targets. Existing literatures focus heavily on intermediaries of a single type – Opportunists, motivated solely by self‐interest. But intermediaries can also be motivated by different types of...