Diagnosing institutional barriers and opportunities for adaptation to climate change

Institutions are one of the decisive factors which enable, constrain and shape adaptation to the impacts of climate change, variability and extreme events. However, current understanding of institutions in adaptation situations is fragmented across the scientific community, evidence diverges, and cumulative learning beyond single studies is limited. This study adopts a diagnostic approach to elaborate a nuanced understanding of institutional barriers and opportunities in climate adaptation by means of a model-centred meta-analysis of 52 case studies of public climate adaptation in Europe. The first result is a novel taxonomy of institutional attributes in adaptation situations. It conceptually organises and decomposes the many details of institutions that empirical research has shown to shape climate adaptation. In the second step, the paper identifies archetypical patterns of institutional traps and trade-offs which hamper adaptation. Thirdly, corresponding opportunities are identified that enable actors to alleviate, prevent or overcome specific institutional traps or trade-offs. These results cast doubt on the validity of general institutional design principles for successful adaptation. In contrast to generic principles, the identified opportunities provide leverage to match institutions to specific governance problems that are encountered in specific contexts. Taken together, the results may contribute to more coherence and integration of adaptation research that we need if we are to foster learning about the role of institutions in adaptation situations in a cumulative fashion.

Direct Democracy and Institutional Trust: Relationships and Differences across Personality Traits

Direct democracy plays a prominent role in the explanation of institutional trust. To date, however, empirical findings on the effects of direct democracy remain inconclusive. In this article, we argue that this inconclusiveness can be partly ascribed to the diverse effects direct democracy has on individuals. In other words, direct democracy influences institutional trust, but how and to what degree depends on individuals’ personality traits. Running hierarchical analyses of unique survey data from a random sample of eligible Swiss voters, we document three findings: First, we show that the number of ballot measures is not directly associated with institutional trust. Second, we demonstrate that the Big Five personality traits affect the propensity to trust. Third, some of these traits also alter the relationship between direct democracy and institutional trust, suggesting that certain personality types are more likely to be sensitive to popular votes than others and that not everyone is equally likely to respond to political stimuli, even in highly democratic environments.

Taking the multidimensionality of democracy seriously: institutional patterns and the quality of democracy

Democracies come in all shapes and sizes. Which configuration of political institutions produces the highest democratic quality is a notorious debate. The lineup of contenders includes ‘consensus’, ‘Westminster’, and ‘centripetal’ democracy. A trend in the evaluation of the relationship between empirical patterns of democracy and its quality is that the multidimensional nature of both concepts is increasingly taken into account. This article tests the assertion that certain centripetal configurations of proportionality in party systems and government, and unitarism in the remaining state structure, might outperform all other alternatives both in terms of inclusiveness and effectiveness. Analyzing 33 democracies, the results of interactive regression models only partially support this claim. Proportional–unitary democracies have the best track record in terms of representation, but there are little differences in participation, transparency, and government capability compared with other models.

Missions-Wesen und Unwesen : Einblick in das Urchristenthum

E. J. E.

Institutional Repository Workflow from Initial Inquiry to Repository Upload

A workflow flowchart on the verification steps involved in preparation to uploading assets to the University of Connecticut's institutional repository (http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu). This flowchart is geared towards assisting subject liaisons who also serve as series administrators for UConn@DigitalCommons.