Suchergebnisse

In an era of increasing political challenges to global and regional organizations, it is crucial to understand how they claim legitimacy and how successful they are in this respect. Yet, we know surprisingly little about the sources and consequences of legitimation in most regional organizations worldwide. In this project, we thus map the legitimation strategies of a sample of 28 organizations between 1980 and 2019.

Regional organizations in the sample:
Africa
- Organization of African Unity/African Union (OAU/AU)
- Central African Economic and Monetary Union (CEMAC)
- Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA)
- East African Community (EAC)
- Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)
- Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD)
- Southern African Customs Union (SACU)
- Southern African Development Community (SADC)
Asia-Pacific
- Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
- Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)
- Pacific Island Forum (PIF)
- South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC)
- Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)
Americas
- Andean Pact/Andean Community (CAN)
- Caribbean Community (CARICOM)
- Common Market of the South (Mercosur)
- Organization of American States (OAS)
- Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS)
- Central American Integration System (SICA)
Europe
- Council of Europe (COE)
- European Free Trade Association (EFTA)
- European Union (EU)
- Nordic Council (NordC)
Cross-Regional
- Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
- Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)
- League of Arab States (LoAS)
- Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC)
- Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)

The GSRE 1.0 dataset is based on recently released historical documents from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and improves the coverage and accuracy of state budget data for most authoritarian regimes and some democracies since the end of World War II. The GSRE dataset includes 39 unique indicators covering major aspects of state finance for 161 countries between 1946 and 2006.

Please consult the GSRE website at https://sites.google.com/a/thomaserichter.de/gsre/ for further changes and updates.

The dataset is part of a project to investigate justifications of repression in North African autocracies. It was set up to answer the question to what extent and how repressive incidents were communicated and justified in Morocco and Tunisia from 2000 to 2010, before the beginning of the Arab uprising protests.

The event dataset is the first to disaggregate data on repressive incidents in two countries over the course of a decade, providing information about the forms of repression, its targets, the actors involved in repression and its justification, and the communication of state violence. All variables are available in textual form, although the forms of repression and repressive actors are all also listed in binary form to facilitate software-supported analysis. The dataset contains in total 439 repressive incidents: namely, 280 for Tunisia and 159 for Morocco. The data was collected from publicly available reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the U.S. State Department, and organizations and news outlets that covered repressive events and their respective justifications. We complemented these English-language sources with further information from French and Arabic sources and provide all data in English.
This systematic collection enables us to assess the extent of justification, as opposed to denial or cover-up, and also to dig into the substantial arguments that were brought forward here. It includes not only cases of protest repression, but also more mundane everyday restrictions on dissidents, and other human rights violations. This gives insight into the political communication of autocracies and their strategies to mitigate the risk of backlash that usually comes with the use of state violence.

Knowledge in psychology is based disproportionately on evidence from western, industrialized samples, non-representative groups in terms of global population. Models built only on such samples may be limited in generalizability. The current project seeks to improve this imbalance in the domain of psychological disorders. Specifically, we aimed to validate an inventory of disorder symptoms for use in two African languages, and provide baseline data on their prevalence and pattern of associations in Namibia including a comparative assessment of among three language groups and with data from the United States. This allows us to build on current knowledge and generate new hypotheses about more universal versus more culturally specific aspects of disorder symptoms. Method: Surveys measuring psychological disorder symptoms, personality traits, well-being, physical health, religiosity, and multiple demographic indicators were collected by oral interview or written survey in three languages. The analytic sample includes 645 Khoekhoegowab-speakers from throughout Namibia, 678 Oshiwambo-speakers from far-northern Namibia, and 589 English-speakers from Windhoek and surrounding areas (Age 18 to 70; M = 33.28; SD = 11.13; 55% female).

The study will also explore how domains of routine mental illness relate to personality characteristics, including personality dimensions defined by the earlier lexical study of personality in Khoekhoegowab. A follow up study will include qualitative interviews to explore local conceptions of serious mental illness, how these are seen to relate to routine (depression, anxiety, substance abuse) mental illness, and the cultural meaning of these domains.

Ultimately this mixed-methods two-part study is intended to (1) establish a better understanding of mental disorder symptoms in Namibia, in order to better inform local psychologists and to provide a solid basis for future work improving mental health services in the country; and (2) to provide evidence to better distinguish between universal versus culturally specific rates and patterns of mental health symptoms.

We present a data set on authoritarian regimes' claims to legitimacy that is based on leading experts' assessments of 98 states for the period 1991–2010. The experts assessed these regimes on the basis of six conceptually distinguishable but interlinked claims to legitimacy – namely (1) foundational myth, (2) ideology, (3) personalism, (4) international engagement, (5) procedural mechanisms and (6) performance.
For the survey, we contacted approximately 800 renowned international and local experts. They were selected on the basis of their publication records, their local expertise and their work for high-quality country-based indices, research institutes, and/or high-profile think tanks. 273 online questionnaires were completed. We collected expert assessments for the most recent non-democratic regime (as of 2013, the year of assessment). The survey comprised questions covering the strength of a regime's six legitimation strategies, based on a six-point scale ranging from 0-5. In addition, the dataset includes information regarding the number of experts per country and the experts' average confidence in answering the questions on the respective country.