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The article describes and explains Germany's societal, economic, and political reactions to the "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI). This is (potentially) China's global interconnectivity platform, established in 2013 to address development challenges in some of the country's border provinces, in its export-led growth model, as well as the infrastructure and development gaps in neighboring regions. Applying a liberal theory perspective, the article finds strong economic support for the initiative in Germany but also growing political concerns about regulatory conflicts over equal market access, Chinese investments in the European Union, and their (potential) political implications for intra-EU decision-making processes. The article concludes that some structural conflicts between the EU/Germany and China are inevitable, as evidenced by the recent launch of the EU's own infrastructure initiative for Asia – but also that several structural adjustments as well as dwindling Chinese resources will mitigate these conflicts in the future (Asien/GIGA)

AbstractInternet based technology constitutes one of the most important policy innovations in the last decades. Its diffusion has been rapid, widespread and sustained. The increase has raised questions about its drivers. The article focuses on an aspect of this dynamic that has been neglected so far: the variance between and among democracies and autocracies and their respective subtypes. Moreover, the majority of studies tackles the diffusion of e‐government techniques, excluding the important array of e‐participation. Our analysis thus offers a broader and more differentiated account of the adoption of online tools by governments. The findings indicate that the adoption of e‐government and e‐participation techniques varies substantially between and among democratic and autocratic regime types as well as over time and in kind.

The phrase "unintended consequences" is often used in the political (science) discourse, yet it still remains theoretically underspecified. We conceptualize unintended consequences in role theoretical terms in three steps, and then apply it to the United States' policy vis-a-vis the Asia-Pacific region under the Obama administration - the so-called "Pivot to Asia." First, we model unintended consequences as a gap be-tween the initial role-taking of an actor and the deviant but commensurate counter-role taking of an Other. Second, we examine the Obama administration's initial role-taking in the diplomatic, security, and economic realms, under the assumption that domestic contestation in the US may lead to unclear signaling about the Pivot's intentions. Third, we investigate counter-role taking by Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia in order to draw conclusions about their interpretation of US role-taking and its consequences for the region's social structure. Our analysis exposes differentiated patterns of unintended consequences due to deviant counter-role taking by these nations vis-a-vis the US, China, and other actors in the region along all three dimensions of the Pivot. (Asien/GIGA)