Suchergebnisse

Why do small states sometimes defy the behavioral expectations of powerful allies? Realism would suggest that they would not only ally themselves with more powerful states to ensure their security but would maintain that security through an accommodative strategy toward their protector once an alliance had been formed. Yet, this does not always happen; and the present article, building on Harnisch's (2014) pioneering effort to integrate role theory and the two-level game metaphor, investigates why. It offers and tests the hypothesis that, when small states prioritize their domestic role conceptions in formulating their foreign policy, they defy the behavioral expectations of more powerful allies. The 2014 visa revocation crisis between Hungary and the United States is used to illustrate this process: and contrary to what the literature suggests, the finding is that ego-dominated role-taking in international relations remains possible today even for small states.

This article discusses the challenges of moving towards student-centredness in East-Central Europe through the example of Hungary's subject-focused academic culture and the (re-)design of a political science research methods course at the University of Szeged for Spring 2012. Although countries participating in the Bologna Process undersigned the importance of student-centredness, few countries have actually yet moved in this direction. In addition, we know very little about how these instructional methods work outside the Western democratic context. I show that research into teaching is an important means to improve the process of education and that there are specific problems in transferring student-centredness into post-Communist higher education settings. Finally, I argue that knowing one's teaching context is vital for planning student-centred courses effectively, which would be greatly fostered by experiencing other teaching contexts through early-career teacher exchanges. The European Commission has recently affirmed its commitment to staff exchanges, but such opportunities are only likely to be beneficial if they go beyond the current 6-week long exchange scheme that the Erasmus programme offers. Adapted from the source document.

This article explores how the Moscow-Washington hotline has contributed to crisis stability. Drawing on symbolic interactionist role theory, the article argues that the hotline provides leaders with an opportunity to engage in altercasting behavior so as to trust each other, even if only temporarily, when they contact each other through the hotline to communicate about a situation they define as a crisis. This function of the hotline is particularly useful when leaders have not managed to develop interpersonal trust between them. This new understanding of the hotline questions the dominant view that it merely facilitates communication, and improves on existing symbolic understandings of the device by offering a conceptualization that explains why the intentions with which it is used to communicate are seen as credible. Furthermore, seeing trust as role contributes to trust scholarship in International Relations by offering a middle ground between defining trust as interests, which are often ambiguous in crises, and as shared identity, which is unattainable between adversaries in the short term. We use two historical cases studies, the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, to illustrate our theoretical claims.

This article, unlike the vast existing literature on political trust, focuses on trust in post-socialist countries and, more specifically, on trust of young people rather than on trust of general populations. Studying young people is important in the context of establishing democracy and the survival of democracy. The authors examine the continuous effect of socialism and stipulate that the legacy of the type of socialist regime is a major determinant of political trust in Central and Eastern European and former Soviet Union countries. Utilizing individual-level data from an institutional survey, the authors find that distinguishing between different types of socialism is instrumental in explaining political trust. Results on the former Yugoslavia, however, suggest that the effects of socialism might be temporarily overshadowed in the short run by drastic post-socialist events such as warfare. The findings have implications for policies aimed at fostering political trust in post-socialist countries and for discerning future patterns of political and social developments.