| 21411. |
- Knotz, Carlo Michael, et al.
(author)
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Coalitions and Compensation: The Case of Unemployment Benefit Duration
- 2015
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In: Comparative Political Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 1552-3829 .- 0010-4140. ; 48:5, s. 586-615
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper examines unemployment benefit reforms in twenty-five advanced democracies between the middle of the 1980s and the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. The paper’s main argument is that the type of government – coalition or single-party – has an effect on whether cutbacks in social benefits are combined with compensating measures that mitigate the negative effects of the cuts. We show empirically that when cuts in unemployment benefit duration were made by coalition governments, spending on training programs tended to increase, but when cuts in duration were made by single-party governments, training spending tended to decrease. This pattern suggests that coalition governments, but not single-party governments, use compensation mechanisms to build political support for labor market reforms.
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| 21412. |
- Knotz, Carlo Michael
(author)
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Measuring the 'New Balance of Rights and Responsibilities' in Labor Market Policy A quantitative overview of activation strategies in 20 OECD countries
- 2012
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Labor market policies have been re-configured during the ´activation turn' in labor market policy-making in the 1990s. This included restricting behavioral requirements for job seekers and benefit claimants, but also improving services (e.g. better placement services). In a nutshell, the `rights and responsibilities' of jobseekers and labor market participants were re-balanced. To date, there is only scarce data that could capture this in a quantitative way. This paper sets out to fill this gap. Using a number of quantitative indicators for 20 core OECD countries, it is shown what instruments countries use and how they balance instruments that either enforce labor market participation or enable to participate. It is shown that countries are overall rather similar with regard to the degree of enforcement (responsibilities), but differ with regard to the support (rights) they offer. Despite similarities and regime cross-cutting differences, three `worlds of activation' can be distinguished.
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| 21413. |
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| 21414. |
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Knowledge as a Public Good: Reconceiving the Purpose and Methods of Knowledge Production
- 2024
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Editorial collection (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This volume originally started as a conversation between academics from across the Arab world, all of whom have bridged their academic careers or professional development expertise to the public sphere in order to use their knowledge more actively to push for progressive, democratic change in their respective countries. Over the course of the conversation, Arab engaged scholars and activists shared a decade’s worth of experiences and the lessons learned about how knowledge dissemination can help civil society organisations, community leaders, and average citizens to become informed and seasoned about the links between their grievances and demands and the public policies produced by their political systems. The conversation quickly shifted to how knowledge production can reinstate the ‘public good’ as a cornerstone of any social contract between governing groups and governed populations. Indeed, over the last decade, the Arab region has seen the emergence of this new generation of social scientists, activist-researchers, and experts (individuals, networks, or organizations), who are seeking to use their research and the knowledge they produce for the purpose of informing the public sphere and contributing to or questioning the public policy agenda in their respective countries. Like the authors collected in this volume, they became more focused on “policy change” as a main drive for their knowledge production. Evidently, other variables fostered this shift as think tanks, INGOs, and funding agencies were keener to measure impact in terms of tangible policy change, even in hard transitional contexts like the ones which followed the collapse of the Arab Spring mobilizations and the consolidation of authoritarianism in countries such as Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, and Lebanon. Throughout this conversation, that lasted the better part of two years as expressed in public conferences and webinars as well as private roundtables and exchanges, these knowledge producers presented how they aim to play a pivotal role in feeding and shaping the public debate and driving the momentum of social movements. For most of them, the production and dissemination of knowledge serves not only as a catalyst for awareness or advocacy, but also equally as important reference for contentious politics against the new rise of authoritarianism across the region.
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| 21415. |
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| 21416. |
- Knudsen, Olav Fagerund
(author)
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Nordic perspectives on Baltic security : A view through diagnostic statements
- 1999
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In: International Politics. - 1384-5748 .- 1740-3898. ; 36:1, s. 89-112
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In the first post-Cold War decade, Nordic states' policymakers were confronted by fundamental changes in their security environment - with Soviet dismemberment being pushed by, and leading to the renewed independence of the three Baltic states. This situation required the immediate concern and attention of Nordic states around the Baltic. New, emerging regional ties, dependencies and guarantees are important from a policy standpoint, and vital if we are to understand the construction of security relationships writ large. How were Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania viewed by top Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish foreign policymakers? How can we explain similarities and differences among Nordic perspectives of Baltic security? Rather than gauging these perspectives through the aggregate behavior of states, policymakers' pronouncements are the empirical foundation of this analysis, focusing on their 'diagnostic statements' in interviews, speeches and writings. Swedish and Finnish positions on the security of the Baltic states are found to differ in significant respects from Norwegian and Danish assessments; the former's proximity is an evident feature in diagnostic statements, and the simple but powerful explanatory role of geography is clear.
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| 21417. |
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| 21418. |
- Knutsen, Carl Henrik, et al.
(author)
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Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding
- 2023
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper addresses three interrelated questions. First, how strong is the evidence that democracy has declined globally over the last decade? Second, how should we best measure (change in) democracy? Third, given that much of the recent evidencefor global backsliding comes from measurement projects that rely on expert ratings, is there evidence that experts have become harsher judges of democratic quality in recent years? We begin our analysis with a discussion of how to conceptualize democracy and democratic backsliding, stressing that for contested concepts such as democracy, no one operationalization is likely to reign supreme. We then dissect the distinction between “subjective” and “objective” measures, examining how measurement error can affect even seemingly objective indicators, and highlight how subjectivity pervades all measurement enterprises. Next, focusing on V–Dem’s methodology, we show—through both theoretical considerations and empirical tests—that it is highly unlikely that time-varying expert biases drive recent declines in estimates of the state of global democracy. Finally we evaluate Little and Meng’s (2023) recent attempt to assess the prevailing case for global backsliding using “objective” measures. We demonstrate multiple issues that make their measurement strategy ill-suited to studying trends in global democracy.
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| 21419. |
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| 21420. |
- Knutsen, Carl Henrik, et al.
(author)
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Fighting the Disease or Manipulating the Data? Democracy, State Capacity, and the COVID-19 Pandemic
- 2022
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- We discuss and analyze how regime type and state capacity shape the abilities and incentives of political leaders to respond to COVID-19. We argue that there is likely a complementary relationship between democracy and state capacity, both in terms of mitigating adverse consequences of the pandemic, such as deaths, and the honest reporting of these consequences. Using a recent, global dataset on officially reported COVID-19 deaths and estimated deaths based on excess mortality, we find evidence supporting different implications from our argument. Democracies have much higher officially reported death tolls than autocracies, but this basically reflects underreporting in autocracies. In high-capacity states, democracies have fewer actual deaths than autocracies. State capacity, generally, seems to mitigate both actual deaths and underreporting, but these relationships are stronger in democracies. Countries that combine democracy and high state capacity both experience fewer COVID-19 deaths and provide more accurate tolls of the pandemic’s consequences.
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