Existiert religöses Gedankengut in der Gemeinschaft der Anonymen Alkoholiker? Läßt sich ein Zusammenhang zwischen dem religiösen Gedankengut einerseits und der "Heilung" eines Betroffenen vom Alkoholismus andererseits erkennen? Inwieweit kann Religion Therapie ersetzen? Diese Fragen werden anhand der Entwicklung einer der größten Selbsthilfegruppen, der Anonymen Alkoholiker, untersucht und beantwortet.
AbstractIn this study, we test the hypothesis that farmers' experienced administrative burden affects their policy perceptions. Based on survey data from 808 randomly chosen Swiss farmers, a latent class approach is used to depict the heterogeneity of farmers' policy perceptions. We find that 20 percent of farmers are grumpy with the current direct payment policy, 23 percent are supporters, and 57 percent are indifferent, meaning that the latter group of farmers neither agree nor disagree with the direct payment policy. Regression results indicate that the higher the perceived administrative burden, the higher the probability of belonging to the grumpy class of farmers. Additionally, our results show that grumpy farmers have less social exchange than their peers and exhibit lower environmental awareness. Our findings show that the bureaucracy involved in agricultural policy matters not only because it increases private and public administrative costs but also because it negatively shapes farmers' view of agricultural policy.
Farmers' subjectively perceived that administrative transaction costs are of high importance for the uptake of agri-environmental programs with direct effects on the effectiveness and efficiency of these programs and the well-being of farmers. This paper empirically estimates private administrative transaction costs resulting from an uptake of the newly introduced grassland-based milk and meat program in Switzerland, based on farmers' perceived administrative workload. Using ordered logit models, we analyze how the administrative tasks and farm and farmer characteristics influence the perceived administrative workload. We find that the time spent on monitoring or inspection tasks has no effect. In contrast, an outsourcing of program-related administrative tasks significantly reduces the perceived administrative workload. We also find that a better understanding of agricultural policy regulations significantly reduces the farmers' perceived administrative workload. We recommend that public administration improve the communication of agricultural policy regulations, rather than investing in the simplification of administrative forms.
