Suchergebnisse

Measuring the quality of political regimes is a field that occupies a traditional place in statistical studies that have the subject of studying the characteristics of the political system as an important segment of the explanation of the behavior of states in international relations. In a desire for a comprehensive and complete spatial and temporal interaction, researchers seek to classify data categories through an extremely complex set that represents the starting point for further research. The aim of this article is a comparative overview of the most used quantitative instruments of the level of the political regime. In addition, the author points to the advantages or limitations of certain databases. The subject of the comparative presentation are the following databases: Polity IV, Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy-LIED, Authoritarian Regime Dataset, Varieties of Democracy, and other data sets relevant to statistical testing. In addition, the author presents the problems that researchers in security studies meet in "measuring" the level of the political regime, that is, quantifying the relationship between democracy and autocracy. The method of descriptive statistics will be used in order to present the most important statistical cross-sections of the instruments used in modern research.

The Minamata Convention, which entered into force on 16 August 2017, is a global, legally binding instrument on mercury. The initiative on the Minamata Convention was mainly driven by research showing negative effects on human health and the environment in the Arctic. The Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum promoting cooperation on Arctic issues, and its Working Group, AMAP, played an important role in the process leading up to international negotiations on the Minamata Convention. This paper elucidates the evolutionary process in which scientific knowledge, herded by an intergovernmental, regional forum, is involved and forms the basis for a legally binding agreement. The paper provides new insight on multilevel governance of the mercury issue and unravels the role that AMAP has played in this dynamic process.