Daily monetary impulses and security prices

This paper uses Swiss data to study the real long-run effects of monetary policy. Daily unexpected changes in the monetary base are found to be negatively correlated with security price changes. This result is unaffected when, implicitly following Geske and Roll (1983), we try to measure the autonomous component of monetary policy by taking into account a reaction function of monetary policy to changes in real variables.

Keeping citizens, companies, and organizations informed by Web KnowARR

For the main part, electronic government (or e-government for short) aims to put digital public services at disposal for citizens, companies, and organizations. To that end, in particular, e-government comprises the application of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to support government operations and provide better governmental services (Fraga, 2002) as possible with traditional means. Accordingly, e-government services go further as traditional governmental services and aim to fundamentally alter the processes in which public services are generated and delivered, after this manner transforming the entire spectrum of relationships of public bodies with its citizens, businesses and other government agencies (Leitner, 2003). To implement this transformation, one of the most important points is to inform the citizen, business, and/or other government agencies faithfully and in an accessible way. This allows all the partaking participants of governmental affairs for a transition from passive information access to active participation (Palvia and Sharma, 2007). In addition, by a corresponding handling of the participants' data, a personalization towards these participants may even be accomplished. For instance, by creating significant user profiles as a kind of participants' tailored knowledge structures, a better-quality governmental service may be provided (i.e., expressed by individualized governmental services). To create such knowledge structures, thus known information (e.g., a social security number) can be enriched by vague information that may be accurate to a certain degree only. Hence, fuzzy knowledge structures can be generated, which help improve governmental-participants relationship. The Web KnowARR framework (Portmann and Thiessen, 2013; Portmann and Pedrycz, 2014; Portmann and Kaltenrieder, 2014), which I introduce in my presentation, allows just all these participants to be automatically informed about changes of Web content regarding a- respective governmental action. The name Web KnowARR thereby stands for a self-acting entity (i.e. instantiated form the conceptual framework) that knows or apprehends the Web. In this talk, the frameworks respective three main components from artificial intelligence research (i.e. knowledge aggregation, representation, and reasoning), as well as its specific use in electronic government will be briefly introduced and discussed.

Exceptional or just well connected? Political entrepreneurs and brokers in policy making

Policy brokers and policy entrepreneurs are assumed to have a decisive impact on policy outcomes. Their access to social and political resources is contingent on their influence on other agents. In social network analysis (SNA), entrepreneurs are often closely associated with brokers, because both are agents presumed to benefit from bridging structural holes; for example, gaining advantage through occupying a strategic position in relational space. Our aim here is twofold. First, to conceptually and operationally differentiate policy brokers from policy entrepreneurs premised on assumptions in the policy-process literature; and second, via SNA, to use the output of core algorithms in a cross-sectional analysis of political brokerage and political entrepreneurship. We attempt to simplify the use of graph algebra in answering questions relevant to policy analysis by placing each algorithm within its theoretical context. In the methodology employed, we first identify actors and graph their relations of influence within a specific policy event; then we select the most central actors; and compare their rank in a series of statistics that capture different aspects of their network advantage. We examine betweenness centrality, positive and negative Bonacich power, Burt’s effective size and constraint and honest brokerage as paradigmatic. We employ two case studies to demonstrate the advantages and limitations of each algorithm for differentiating between brokers and entrepreneurs: one on Swiss climate policy and one on EU competition and transport policy.

Institutions and coalitions in policy processes: a cross-sectoral comparison

Actors with joint beliefs in a decision-making process form coalitions in order to translate their goals into policy. Yet, coalitions are not formed in an institutional void, but rather institutions confer opportunities and constraints to actors. This paper studies the institutional conditions under which either coalition structures with a dominant coalition or with competing coalitions emerge. It takes into account three conditions, i.e. the degree of federalism of a project, its degree of Europeanisation and the openness of the pre-parliamentary phase of the decision-making process. The cross-sectoral comparison includes the 11 most important decision-making processes in Switzerland between 2001 and 2006 with a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Results suggest that Europeanisation or an open pre-parliamentary phase lead to a dominant coalition, whereas only a specific combination of all three conditions is able to explain a structure with competing coalitions.

Coalition Formation in Parliament and during the Policy Process

In modern democratic systems, usually no single collective actor is able to decisively influence political decision-making. Instead, actors with similar preferences form coalitions in order to gain more influence in the policy process. In the Swiss political system in particular, institutional veto points and the consensual culture of policy-making provide strong incentives for actors to form large coalitions. Coalitions are thus especially important in political decision-making in Switzerland, and are accordingly a central focus of this book. According to one of our core claims - to understand the actual functioning of Swiss consensus democracy - one needs to extend the analysis beyond formal institutions to also include informal procedures and practices. Coalitions of actors play a crucial role in this respect. They are a cornerstone of decision-making structures, and they inform us about patterns of conflict, collaboration and power among actors. Looking at coalitions is all the more interesting in the Swiss political system, since the coalition structure is supposed to vary across policy processes. Given the absence of a fixed government coalition, actors need to form new coalitions in each policy process.

Torn between state and market: Private policy implementation and conflicting institutional logics

Policy implementation by private actors constitutes a “missing link” for understanding the implications of private governance. This paper proposes and assesses an institutional logics framework that combines a top-down, policy design approach with a bottom-up, implementation perspective on discretion. We argue that the conflicting institutional logics of the state and the market, in combination with differing degrees of goal ambiguity, accountability and hybridity play a crucial role for output performance. These arguments are analyzed based on a secondary analysis of seven case studies of private and hybrid policy implementation in diverging contexts. We find that aligning private output performance with public interests is at least partly a question of policy design congruence: private implementing actors tend to perform deficiently when the conflicting logics of the state and the market combine with weak accountability mechanisms.