In recent years, there is growing interest in the study of cross-national policy convergence. Yet we still have a limited understanding of the phenomenon: Do we observe convergence of policies at all? Under which conditions can we expect that domestic policies converge or rather develop further...

In January 1995 Austria, Sweden, and Finland became member states of the European Union. All three countries have traditionally given comparatively high priority to environmental protection. This paper deals with the question of what influence the new members will have on environmental...

Little empirically based social scientific research has been carried out with the aim of evaluating mediation procedures. Generally, such procedures are evaluated retrospectively and on the basis of very general criteria (Was an agreement achieved?). The Social Science Research Centre Berlin...

Im Rahmen eines teilweise (1991 - 1994) vom Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie (BMBF) geförderten Forschungsprojekts analysiert eine multidisziplinäre Forschergruppe der Abteilung Normbildung und Umwelt des WZB in- und ausländische Mediationsfälle im...

no abstract available.

It took the EU 35 years to achieve a co-operative agreement on co-ordinated measures of savings taxation in a world with mobile capital. Political science has offered two explanations for this co-operation problem. First, co-operation is difficult as a result of the heterogeneity of governments'...

The problem of collective action is usually identified with social dilemmas. A wider notion of the term collective action problem is introduced, as dilemmas are not the only problems to arise in collective action. The article first presents a typology of collective action problems based on...