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We will never face Germany's specific problems of religion and government, arising as they do from its particular history. The sharply contested religion cases from Germany in the late 1990s do, however, point to problems with our growing reliance on private religious choice analysis that demand our attention in both government funding and speech cases. To understand the problems of funding religious groups in neutral programs, we must back up and ask the foundational question: what goals may the government pursue with its funding? The broader those goals are defined, the greater the potential distortion of private religious choice, through either inclusion or exclusion from the programs. To fully make sense of government funding and the Establishment Clause, we must consider its role in protecting the power of public discourse within the larger political process. The same holds for government religious speech: individual autonomy points in a number of different directions, leaving us with choices among different kinds of distortion and different roles for the courts, which we cannot resolve based on private religious choice alone. The German cases focus us on one normative vision of the political process which will probably never become our vision, but which does help us to see that even our decisions about government religious speech depend upon our assumptions and aspirations about the political process. The appeal of comparative law lies in the details, and the details of the current disputes in Germany around religion and government ask us to think again about exactly what we expect from the Establishment Clause here in America.

The sharply contested religion cases from Germany in the late 1990s.point to problems with our growing reliance on private religious choice analysis that demand our attention in both government funding and speech cases. To understand the problems of funding religious groups in neutral programs, we must back up and ask the foundational question: what goals may the government pursue with its funding? The broader those goals are defined, the greater the potential distortion of private religious choice, through either inclusion or exclusion from the programs. To fully make sense of government funding and the Establishment Clause, we must consider its role in protecting the power of public discourse within the larger political process. The same holds for government religious speech: individual autonomy points in a number of different directions, leaving us with choices among different kinds of distortion and different roles for the courts, which we cannot resolve based on private religious choice alone. The German cases focus us on one normative vision of the political process which will probably never become our vision, but which does help us to see that even our decisions about government religious speech depend upon our assumptions and aspirations about the political process. The appeal of comparative law lies in the details, and the details of the current disputes in Germany around religion and government ask us to think again about exactly what we expect from the Establishment Clause here in America.

As several recent articles in PS have noted, study
abroad remains one of the most important and vital ways to make the
international relations and comparative politics classroom more
active, participatory, and experiential (Thies 2005; Bowman and
Jennings 2005). Along with various pedagogical techniques (such as
simulations, film, and Internet and web-based technologies)
increasingly used by political science instructors to enhance the
learning environment, the study abroad experience helps bring the
world into the classroom because it can connect directly and
experientially with students. Studies have shown that studying
abroad increases students' cross-cultural abilities and global
understanding, skills particularly relevant to comparative politics
and international relations courses (Kitsantas 2004; Hopkins 1999).
Indeed, because of study abroad's value as one component in active,
student-centered learning, as early as 1991 the APSA Task Force on
Political Science, in the so-called Wahlke Report, made the
recommendation that political science departments should strive to
increase the number of their students who participate in study
abroad programs of some kind, a recommendation echoed again recently
by several higher education panels (Wahlke 1991; Bollag 2003).

Does regulation of working hours at national and sector level impose straitjackets, or offer safety nets to employees seeking working time flexibility? This article compares legislation and collective agreements in the metal industries of Denmark, Germany and the USA. The industry has historically been trend-setting for collective bargaining in all three countries, but with very different effects on working time. Organized decentralization seems to pave the way for fewer straitjackets, whereas the opposite seems to be the case with regard to disorganized decentralization.

Stent, A.: U.S.-Russian relations since the end of the Cold War. - S. 1-6. Meier, C.: The Russian economic crisis and its effects on German-Russian economic relations. - S. 7-24. Sevcova, L.: Did the West influence the transformation process in post-communist Russia, and, if so, what were the results of this influence? - S. 25-29

"German industrial expansion in the period 1880-1913 was significantly more rapid than that of the United Kingdom, and substantially less volatile than that of the United States. A partial explanation for the relatively stable growth path of the German economy during these years may be found in the greater relative importance and volatility of the railroad construction component of net investment in the United States. By 1880 only a little over one-third of the U.S. final rail net was in place, compared with over half in the case of Germany. Compared to Germany, railroad investment in the United States between 1880 and World War I was, on average, much larger absolutely. It was also much larger in comparison to total population, total industrial output, and in comparison to expenditures on residential construction. In addition, it was more volatile. The lesser importance and volatility of this component of autonomous expenditure in the German case partially accounts for the relative nonvolatility of the German industrial Output series." (author's abstract)