Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Research Paper Series最新文献

{"title":"A Snowball Against Global Warming: An Alternative to the Kyoto Protocol","authors":"M. Verweij","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.296369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.296369","url":null,"abstract":"Last November, in The Hague, international cooperation on global warming came to a grinding halt. But even if this United Nations conference had been an unqualified success, it would still not have made any difference to the world's climate. Only a radically different approach to international decision-making can save the world from over-heating. This alternative approach would be less statist and formalistic, and would focus more on the development of cheap forms of energy and technology that do not emit greenhouse gases. In this essay, it is asserted that the current international cooperation on climate change is doomed to fail, and a more realistic solution is described.","PeriodicalId":247961,"journal":{"name":"Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Research Paper Series","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129919871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the Implementation of Product Responsibility in Used-Car Disposal: Cost Reimbursement Rather than a Take-Back Obligation?","authors":"M. Lehmann","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.278874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.278874","url":null,"abstract":"This paper compares two instruments for implementing producer responsibility for used cars. The German regulatory solution, relying on take-back obligations for producers, free for the last holder, is contrasted with a rule of partial cost recovery. It is shown that the cost-recovery rule saves infra-strucure costs and avoids the anti-competitive impacts of the take-back obligation. In contrast to the take-back obligation, the cost-recovery rule makes it possible to optimize between the environmental and competition policy objectives, and it can thus defuse the alleged tradoff between these policy areas. This paper concludes by giving a mixed judgement on the European Guideline.","PeriodicalId":247961,"journal":{"name":"Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Research Paper Series","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114639861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Composite Democratic Legitimation in Europe: The Role of Transparency and Access to Information","authors":"A. Heritier","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.278852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.278852","url":null,"abstract":"The European Union is a composite democracy (Heritier 1999a; Benz 1998; Auel et al 2000; Manin 2000). It is comprised of diverse elements of democratic legitimation: the vertical legitimation through parliamentary representation in the EP; executive representation through delegates of democratically-elected governments in the Council of Ministers; horizontal mutual control among member states; associative and experts' representation (delegation) in policy networks (Benz 1998); and, finally, individual rights based legitimacy. Together these elements paint a variegated picture of the reality of democratic legitimation in Europe. The individual elements have not been developed and linked in a systematic and consistent way; rather, they have emerged from a series of pragmatic decisions, made among the range of limited possibilities allowed for by the unanimity requirements of the intergovernmental conferences or as a result of incremental individual initiatives of the different European decision-making bodies. As a consequence, it does not come as a surprise that some elements are incompatible with each other, both with respect to their primary goals and their modes of operation. The nature, reasons and consequences of this type of incompatibility or compatibility are at the centre of this article. Of particular interest is the question of relationship between the legimatory components of access to information and transparency, on the one hand, and the element of negotiative democracy that is, governance in policy networks, as an ubiquitous mode of governance in Europe, on the other. While transparency and access to information stress the input-oriented goals of democratic legitimation, that is the right to know who makes which decisions when, associative representation and negotiative democracy emphasise the output-oriented goals of democratic legitimation, that is government legitimation through policy performance accommodating the widest possible scope of interests. Both input- and output-oriented legitimation are important and have to be viewed in their reciprocal relationship. The argument developed in this article will proceed in the following steps: In the first step the various strands of democratic legitimation are described, and transparency, and access to information are situated in the overall context of the elements of democratic legitimation existing in the European Union. In the second step the programme to increase transparency is specified in more detail. In the third step a discussion ensures the compatibility of the relationship between access to information and transparency, on the one hand, and the central components of European democratic legitimation, on the other. In a fourth step normative conclusions will be drawn with respect to the possible functions that access to information and transparency ? bearing the compatibility of the individual components in mind ? serve in the context of the composite democracy in Europe.","PeriodicalId":247961,"journal":{"name":"Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Research Paper Series","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125299314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Standardising as Governance: The Case of Credit Rating Agencies","authors":"D. Kerwer","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.269311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.269311","url":null,"abstract":"The global integration of financial markets has been accompanied by a transformation of their governance structures. Private intermediary organisations now play a more important role than in the past. A prominent example is provided by the commercial credit rating agencies that have established themselves as influential gatekeepers of the international credit market. A problem with this form of intermediation is that when there are errors rating agencies can do considerable damage to borrowers and investors alike. Still, it is very difficult to hold rating agencies accountable. This paper proposes comparing the activity of credit rating agencies with standard setting in order to explain this accountability gap. The argument is that the standards of credit-worthiness established by the rating agencies are difficult to challenge because they are based on neutral expertise, on the one hand, but are subject to mandatory enforcement by financial market regulation, on the other. The resulting compliance without complaints reduces the possibilities for learning. This perspective leads to a research agenda in which the preconditions and institutional remedies for accountability problems of global governance by private intermediary organisations can be comparatively explored.","PeriodicalId":247961,"journal":{"name":"Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Research Paper Series","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121078913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Open Definitions of the Common Good","authors":"C. Engel","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.271651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.271651","url":null,"abstract":"Doesn't work. Has failed. Apolitical. Naive. Pre-modern. Non-scientific. Such hardly ornamental epithets get pinned on anybody who still sets out to define the common good today. Ideas and interests cannot be translated into one another without fracture. There is no abstract basic norm from which all normative decisions could be deduced. But neither the individual, nor society and the state can forego a definition of the common good. The ostensive a priori dissolves when a closed definition of the common good is exchanged for an open one. A definition of the common good cannot claim validity once and for all, but always just for one time. Such openness is able to be created with numerous decision-making techniques. The co-existence of incommensurable ideas can be organized through differentiation. Institutions can keep the struggle between conflicting ideas open over the long run. Or decisions and reasons break up. It is easier if the conflict is only settled for the concrete circumstance to be decided upon. Sometimes there is even agreement in the concrete case about the reasons on which a decision is based; more often in any case there is agreement about the decision itself. The plasticity of the definition of the problem can also be used. The need for a decision for which no reasons can be given does not completely disappear with any of these techniques. However, it does diminish. And if it does come to such a decision, that decision is more controlled.","PeriodicalId":247961,"journal":{"name":"Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Research Paper Series","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114495563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Breaking the Spell of Regulatory Competition: Reframing the Problem of Regulatory Exit","authors":"Henri I. Tjiong","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.267744","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.267744","url":null,"abstract":"Regulatory competition is increasingly becoming the dominant argument on regulatory structure in both the debate on federalism in the United States and that on subsidiarity in the European Union. The argument, briefly put, is that regulatory competition might produce efficiency benefits that justify yielding federal or harmonized regulation in favor of decentralizing governance. The present direction in this debate is to identify in which contexts and under what circumstances these efficiency benefits are likely. This paper intends to contribute to this debate by analyzing the proposition that regulatory competition can be understood as an argument of regulatory structure modeled on the principles of market order. The purpose of this paper is to clarify but ultimately to challenge the wisdom of this intriguing argument. Regulatory competition is an intriguing and sophisticated argument which, as it deals with interpreting the complex dynamic between political and economic integration, deserves to be spelled out in full and with considerable care. The persuasive force of regulatory competition as an academic proposition however lies in the double efficiency argument hidden in it. Regulatory competition can be and is most often understood as a macro-argument for federal governance structures in that these allow for extrinsic efficiency benefits in the form of experimentation and innovation at a broad scale (economies of scope). But regulatory competition can also be framed as a force for improving the intrinsic efficiency of regulations by allowing actors to structure their need for economic coordination to their own liking, thus incorporating the preferences of consumers into the structure of regulation (a micro argument). The debate in the US after several critiques which expressed frustration at the broadness and inexactness of the initial macro arguments has steadily moved on to focus on the micro argument which attempts to detail the instances and conditions under which regulatory competition might indeed work to improve the intrinsic efficiency of regulation. Regulatory competition, to the extent that actors internalize the costs of their decision, has come to be viewed as a largely untapped mechanism for improving the efficiency of rules in a potentially wide range of legal domains. The European debate appreciates regulatory competition in light of the common market and the effort to reduce regulatory trade barriers. Regulatory competition is treated here under the nomers of standortwettbewerb, competition among rules, institutional competition or competition over organizational arrangements. Regulatory competition is argued essentially in its macro form: Negative integration leads to economic flows of mobility unleashing arbitrage over regulatory policies. The room left for this type of arbitrage by existing harmonization measures is the topic of continuing discussion among commission officials, political scientists and economists. Generall","PeriodicalId":247961,"journal":{"name":"Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Research Paper Series","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116967701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"State Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty","authors":"Indra Spiecker","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.280912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.280912","url":null,"abstract":"The legal system encounters many problems in facing uncertainty. Neither does a particular theory exist of how to recognize and clarify situations of missing knowledge nor has an explicit theory been designed how to decide in such situations between possible alternatives of action. One reason for this obvious difficulty lies in the structure of law itself: It is aimed at providing stability, predictability and durability. Its mechanism is one of declaring a precise decision rule in a static environment. Situations of uncertainty cause these mechanisms to falter as missing knowledge and missing predictability do not allow for precision and determination. The paper transfers insights from the economic perspective, especially the decision theory, into the legal understanding starting from the definition of Knightian risk and uncertainty as well as the concept of ignorance. Evolutionary approaches are sketched. Therefore, after portraying these differentiations, a particular decision-oriented definition of uncertainty versus risk is proposed that aims specifically at the legal context. Based on this, categories of several different types, origins and reasons of uncertainty are developed. The paper then further studies in an overview the different mechanisms of how legislation could and should deal with uncertainty primarily generating knowledge and the conditions thereof. Here, again, economic concepts are described and transferred to the legal understanding. In a final step, the paper discusses possibilities of legal decision making based on economic and social propositions. A particular emphasis is laid on the concept of proportionality as understood in German public law. Examples from the field of genetic engineering will illustrate the importance of including economic concepts into the legal approach to uncertainty.","PeriodicalId":247961,"journal":{"name":"Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Research Paper Series","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122832348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Differential Responses to European Policies: A Comparison","authors":"A. Heritier, Christoph Knill","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.280910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.280910","url":null,"abstract":"Community legislation is unquestionably a factor to be reckoned with in member-state policy making. But the extent and mode of its impact on domestic policies and administrative structures will depend on the existing policy practices and the political and institutional structures of the country in question. In cases where there is a mismatch between an established policy of a member state and a clearly specified European policy mandate, there will be an expectation to adjust, which in turn constitutes a precondition for change. Assuming the existence of a need for change, the ability to adapt will depend on the policy preferences of key actors, and the capacity of institutions to implement reform, realize policy change, and administratively adjust to European requirements. The policy preferences of key actors are influenced by the distributional consequences of the policies to be adopted (Milner 1996); the capacity to change depends on the degree of integrated political leadership, caused by a lack of formal veto points (Tsebelis 1995), or a decisional tradition capable of surmounting formal and factual veto points by way of consensual tripartite decision making. Where there is a divergence of mismatch between European and national policies, and the policy preferences of political leaders are defined by a willingness to adapt, the absence of formal veto points and a cooperative decisional tradition will enhance the capacity to change and to adjust administrative structures in compliance with European policy mandates. The most far-reaching consequence - tantamount to innovation - is the replacement of old administrative structures with a comprehensive set of new ones. A less far-reaching form of adjustment occurs by \"tinkering at the edges of old structures\" (Lanzara 1998, 40), whereby new administrative units are patched onto existing organizational structures in order to accommodate the Europe-imposed policies. Another important measure of change is whether public actors, public and private actors, or only private actors are engaged in administering the sector and whether administrative functions pass from one form to another. By contrast, the existence of a high number of formal or de facto veto points, which are not compensated by consensual decision-making patterns, makes adjustment to European policy demands more difficult and administrative change less probable because bids for change are blocked by veto players. This poses no problem as long as there is a basic congruence between the national policy, its administrative implementation structures, and European policy demands, one that allows the latter to be smoothly absorbed into current procedures and structures. If, however, there is a clear mismatch between national policiesand European policy demands, political structures ridden with formal and factual veto points and the absence of cooperative decisional traditions will lead to non-implementation and in consequence to no, or only margi","PeriodicalId":247961,"journal":{"name":"Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Research Paper Series","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132775373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Institutional Dynamics in Environmental Corporatism. The Impact of Market and Technological Change on the Dutch Polder Model","authors":"Henri I. Tjiong","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.299446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.299446","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes how market and technological change can be conceived to affect corporatist politics in the area of waste management. The paper adopts a political economy approach to institutional change which seeks to trace the impact of market and technological change on established political and regulatory institutions. The paper demonstrates that the main impact of marketization of waste services and the introduction of ISO 14001 environmental management systems was to expand the range of choices for companies and regulators to engage in regulatory interaction concerning environmental waste management practices. The main purpose of the paper is to demonstrate exactly how the emergence of regulatory choices for both companies and regulators is likely to open up new avenues for regulation in the environmental field that, once pursued, systematically reduce incentives for corporate and regulatory actors to engage in associational politics.","PeriodicalId":247961,"journal":{"name":"Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Research Paper Series","volume":"136 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128618171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When are Governmental Interventions into Freedom Constitutionally Legitimate?","authors":"C. Engel","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.314926","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.314926","url":null,"abstract":"The German constitution stands out for the exceptionally powerful position of the Constitutional Court. Any governmental intervention into freedom, and any unequal treatment, are constitutional issues. And any inhabitant can attack any administrative act, and any piece of legislation, in the Constitutional Court. The basic test is proportionality. Given the legislators', or the administrators', end the interference must be conducive, least intrusive, and not out of proportion. All three tests are relative. How powerful they are depends on the definition of the governmental aim. Unlike constitutional jurisprudence, doctrine is hesitant to say which governmental aims are constitutionally legitimate. The paper does two things: it reconstructs dogmatic principles for the definition of governmental aims from the jurisprudence, and it demonstrates how the quality of these definitions can be improved by relying on concepts from the social sciences, like the economic theory of market failure. Sceptics raise three concerns: there is no universally agreed philosophical starting point from which the legitimacy of governmental aims could deductively be derived; the Constitutional Court is ill prepared for engaging in the application of theories from the social sciences; strict dogmatic principles for the definition of legitimate aims siphon power away from the democratically elected legislator. The paper rebuts all three concerns.","PeriodicalId":247961,"journal":{"name":"Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Research Paper Series","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128150079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}