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This paper investigates the conditions under which cooperative team reasoning arises and stabilizes in complex social structures. Team reasoning is a theory that explains cooperative behavior in social settings of strategic choice, even in situations where classical game theory fails. By simulating the emergence of cooperation via team reasoning, this paper analyzes the performance of team reasoners compared to classically rational agents and individual reasoners. Simulation results are provided regarding the efficacy of team reasoning in mixed-game settings. It is shown that cooperative team reasoning is viable and stabilizing under favorable conditions such as the share of coordination games played, but sensitive to the amount and abilities of their interacting counterparts. Finally, the paper provides first ideas on how the current framework might be extended toward collective actors that gain further stability through processes of self-formalization and inner-organizational redistribution., Historical Social Research Vol. 48, No. 3 (2023)

Regional parliaments have only limited formal possibilities to engage in the European Union’s (EU’s) multi-level system of governance. Our paper focuses on networking activities of regional members of parliaments (MPs) as informal attempts to make agency claims and as a main driver for perceived collective agency. We employ a relational perspective, taking into account the various stakeholders and environments which regional parliaments have to deal with in the EU. Engaging in such networks can enhance collective agency since such activity is linked to recognition and can open doors to new resources and networks. We use data from a survey of regional deputies in Austria, Germany, Spain, and the Czech Republic to investigate these associations. The results point to the importance of such activities for the perceived influence of regional parliaments on political decision-making in the region and for perceptions about the future role of regions in the EU. Contacts with European actors prove to be crucial in this respect since they can lead to new, agency-enhancing contacts and resources., Historical Social Research Vol. 48, No. 3 (2023)

Agenda setting determines whether and how topics are discussed and voted in parliament. Many parliaments delegate this task to a specific body charged with coordinating parliamentary business. However, we know little about the composition and powers of these “coordination committees” (CC). This paper maps the existence, composition, and institutional powers of coordination committees across 31 European parliaments. It shows that CCs exist in most parliaments and have a relatively similar composition, usually including the president of parliament, their deputies, and party group representatives, but vary strongly in their agenda-setting powers. Exploring whether this variation is related to the functional need for coordination, we find limited evidence that larger sizes of parliaments and higher ideological polarization between parties are associated with stronger coordination committees. In terms of this HSR Special Issue, we show that CCs as horizontal collective actors exist even in a hierarchical organization such as a parliament and have relevant, albeit variable, resources., Historical Social Research Vol. 48, No. 3 (2023)

Throughout its 40-year history, the Vlaams Belang (VB, Flemish Interest) has established itself as an important player within the Belgian party system, albeit with significant electoral fluctuations. In 2019, it became the second largest party in Flanders. The party developed and maintained a mass-party organisation by investing significantly in local party branches and in a rigid vertically articulated structure. It relies heavily on social media, particularly Facebook, to communicate to supporters beyond the more limited group of party members. Using both modern and traditional tools, VB representatives aim to create communities of supporters bonded to the party, facilitating dissemination of the party’s messages. Despite this investment in a grassroots organisation, the VB’s decision-making remains highly centralised. Social media and local branches allow informal consideration of members’ views, but the party has not created significant mechanisms for internal democracy. While it is often claimed that political parties have moved away from the “mass-party” model, this article demonstrates that the VB still maintains characteristics of the mass party, albeit with a modern twist. New social media tools facilitate attempts to foster communities and disseminate party messages among a wider group of supporters, both formal members and more informal sympathisers.

The evolution of the inter-institutional balance of powers has been a constant feature of the European integration process. Therefore, this thematic issue reopens these theoretical and empirical discussions by looking at an underexploited angle of research, namely the impact of rule change on policy outputs. We offer a discussion on how to theorise rule change, actors’ behaviour, and their impact on policy outputs. We also examine the links between theory and methods, noting the strengths and weaknesses of different methods for the study of institutional and policy change. We draw on the contributions of this thematic issue to delineate further paths to push forward the current frontiers in EU decision-making research.

This article aims to examine the effect of intra-institutional conflicts in the European Commission on the extent of changes made to legislative proposals in trilogue negotiations. We develop and test three hypotheses related to how conflicts within the Commission, namely that intra-institutional disagreements during policy formulation (h1), and potential conflicts with previous (h2) or subsequent (h3) colleges of commissioners, increase the number of amendments to the Commission’s proposal adopted in trilogues. To test our hypotheses, we use a new dataset measuring the number of changes between Commission proposals and adopted legislation for 216 legislative acts negotiated between 2012 and 2019 by means of text-mining techniques. It is important to note that we control for differences between the Commission’s proposals and the co-legislators’ positions in order to distinguish between an effect on preferences anticipation and on the negotiations proper. Our results indicate that intra-institutional conflicts affect the Commission’s anticipation of the co-legislators’ positions. The effect on its behaviour in trilogues, that is, after the legislative proposal has been tabled, is less clear. Regarding the latter, only the number of Directorates-General involved is significantly linked with the number of amendments tabled. These findings suggest that while intra-institutional disagreements affect the Commission’s role in trilogues, the range of preferences is more important than the intensity of conflicts.

Communication is a process and part of human identity without which man could not exist today. Intercultural communication is a form of global communication, which refers to intercultural interactions between different cultures that appear in a social group with different religious, social, ethnic, cultural, and social backgrounds. North Macedonia and Kosovo are considered multicultural states which have ethnic identities within them, which are part of the mosaic and the promotion of intercultural communication is a test of the democratic development of these states. Therefore, this study aims to research and analyze the role of intercultural communication between local communities in both countries, communication of local government with the community, and community participation in public meetings as part of local decision-making. The methodology applied in this paper is the study of literature and the development of quantitative research with local communities. The results show that even though the participation of local communities is low in both countries, due to various factors, intercultural communication has broken down barriers between communities and has influenced the initiatives for the organization and development of the community itself.

A populist surge in Europe is affecting Euro-Mediterranean cooperation 25 years after the Barcelona Process was launched, reinforcing existing trends of de-Europeanization and renationalization of foreign policies. This article analyses the landscape of political contestation of Mediterranean cooperation in Europe in a new age of populism, focusing on France, Italy and Spain as well as the Visegrad 4 states that have turned from bystanders to veto players in Mediterranean affairs. We find that the 'thick' ideologies from which populists are borrowing condition the thrust of their influence. The impact of right-wing populism trumps that of its left-wing counterpart in quantity and quality, while market-liberal populism is in decline and regional populism is mainly an issue only in Spain. Populism has personalized decision-making and shaped political agendas directly and indirectly, most notably on migration. It has whitewashed authoritarian leaders in the southern Mediterranean and fragmented the European Union's position on key issues such as the Arab-Israeli conflict. National interests and the weight of institutions have, however, formed a counterbalance to the focus on migration emanating from domestic politics. Populism alone cannot be blamed for renationalization trends that have existed before, but it does build on and reinforce them.

Newsroom innovation labs have been created over the last ten years to develop algorithmic news recommenders (ANR) that suggest and summarise what news is. Although these ANRs are still in an early stage and have not yet been implemented in the entire newsroom, they have the potential to change how newsworkers fulfil their daily decisions (gatekeeping) and autonomy in setting the agenda (agenda-setting). First, this study focuses on the new dynamics of the ANR and how it potentially influences the newsworkers’ role of gatekeeping within the newsgathering process. Second, this study investigates how the dynamics of an ANR could influence the autonomy of the newsworkers’ role as media agenda setters. In order to advance our understanding of the changing dynamics of gatekeeping and agenda-setting in the newsroom, this study conducts expert interviews with 16 members of newsroom innovation labs of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Der Spiegel, the BBC, and the Bayerische Rundfunk (BR) radio station. The results show that when newsworkers interact with ANRs, they rely on suggestions and summaries to evaluate what is newsworthy, especially when there is a “news peak” (elections, a worldwide pandemic, etc.). With regard to the agenda-setting role, the newsworker still has full autonomy, but the ANR creates a “positive acceleration effect” on how certain topics are put on the agenda.

How do authoritarian governments learn? What kind of events and experiences can lead them to adopt more or less restrictive policies towards social actors? And, how are such lessons from others' experiences integrated into new policies? These questions have been addressed and answered quite differently from various disciplinary perspectives, focusing either on international dynamics such as “authoritarian diffusion” or on domestic policy learning. This article seeks to integrate different perspectives on authoritarian learning by proposing a typological framework of positive and negative learning from three distinct sources: authoritarian peers, democratic countries, and subnational policy experiments. I argue that such a comprehensive framework better accounts for both the relative importance and for the interaction of different kinds of learning in national-level policy processes. To illustrate the framework's added analytical value, I use an exemplary case study of recent legislative changes to China's civil society policy, which have been alternatively interpreted as part of an authoritarian “wave” or as another step in incremental domestic learning processes.

This article investigates how municipal governments negotiate far-right contestations through the format of citizens’ dialogues and contemplates to what extent they disrupt established assumptions about participatory urban governance. In doing so, I want to contribute to emerging scholarship on reactionary responses to migration-led societal transformations in cities via scrutinising their effects on institutional change in participatory practices. Building on participatory urban governance literature and studies on the far right in the social sciences, I argue that inviting far-right articulations into the democratic arena of participation serves to normalise authoritarian and racist positions, as the far right’s demand for more direct involvement of ‘the people’ is expressed in reactionary terms. I will show how this applies to two prominent notions of participation in the literature, namely, agonistic and communicative approaches. This argument is developed through an explorative case study of two neighbourhood-based citizens’ dialogues in Cottbus, East Germany, which the municipal government initiated in response to local far-right rallies. While a careful reading of these forums reveals productive potentials when the issue of international migration is untangled from context-specific, socio-spatial problems in the neighbourhoods, my analysis also shows how the municipality’s negotiation of far-right contestations within the citizens’ dialogues serves to legitimise far-right ideology. I find that to negotiate today’s societal polarisation, municipal authorities need to rethink local participatory institutions by disentangling these complex dynamics and reject far-right contestations, while designing dialogues for democratic and emancipatory learning.

Besides representative mechanisms, democratic decision-making entails the participation of individuals, communities, and organizations. However, in complex and modern societies, the implications of these multiple interactions are difficult to map and evaluate. Social network analysis allows us to scrutinize the decisionmaking process and its outcomes in terms of effectiveness, fairness, and legitimacy. We present two different cases dealing with decision-making in the context of sustainability. By looking at the patterns of interactions, we can identify the most relevant actors and explain why they are important, as well as describe the composition, structure, and evolution of a network to explain certain outcomes. The results offer empirical insights, which challenge common perceptions and provide practical solutions for decision-makers to maintain or improve good governance., easy social sciences No. 66 (2021): Content Meets Structure - Social Network Perspectives Starting Point and Frequency: Year: 1989, Issues per Year: 2, easy social sciences

Akklamation, Okkupation und Verantwortungsflucht - Ratsreferenden genießen als Top-down-Verfahren in der lokalen Politikforschung einen zweifelhaften Ruf. Der Autor unternimmt nun erstmalig eine empirisch-systematische Erforschung des direktdemokratischen Entscheidungsinstruments: Anhand vergleichender Fallstudien in vier Städten untersucht er die vielfältigen Initiierungsgründe und Akteurskonstellationen von Ratsreferenden. Er hinterfragt dabei ihre im Vergleich zu Bürgerreferenden negative Rezeption und entwickelt eine Analyseheuristik, die auch auf Top-down-Referenden anderer politischer Ebenen übertragbar ist. Acclamation, occupation, escape from responsibility? The view of local political research on council referendums.

Sustainability-oriented real-world laboratories involve the co-design and co-creation of knowledge, based on a trans- disciplinary cooperation between actors from different social worlds-academia,theadministration,business,civilsociety- each endowed with specific interests, resources and world- views. Sustainability-oriented real-world laboratories claim to be a means of inclusive participation in the co-creative shaping of solutions for socioecological issues and exploring pathways to sustainability. In the literature dealing with sus- tainability-oriented real-world laboratories, participation is thus mainly understood as active involvement by civil society, change agents and citizens in processes of experimentation and the implementation of solutions. We call this co-creative participation. However, participation in talk-based opinion formation and decision-making processes - we call this de- liberative participation - is hardly discussed in the respective literature. In this paper, we argue that co-creative and delib- erative participation are two forms of participation which can be conceptualized differently but which are both relevant for successful experimentation in sustainability-oriented real- world laboratories and are mainly intertwined in practice. We propose an ideal-typical conceptual framework for par- ticipation in sustainability-oriented real-world laboratories that combines co-creative and deliberative participation. The aim is to contribute to a systematization of, and rationale for, different forms of participation in real-world laboratories. Basierend auf der transdisziplinären Kooperation von Akteuren aus unterschiedlichen Feldern (Wissenschaft, Verwaltung, Wirtschaft, Zivilgesellschaft), die sich jeweils durch spezifische Interessen, Weltsichten und Ressourcenausstattungen auszeichnen, zielen Reallabore auf das Co-Design und die Co-Kreation von Wissen ab. Damit ist der Anspruch verbunden, dass Reallabore ein Mittel inklusiver Partizipation in der co-kreativen Lösungsfindung für sozialökologische Probleme sein sollen. In der aktuellen Literatur zu Reallaboren wird Partizipation zumeist als aktive Beteiligung von Zivilgesellschaft, Pionier*innen des Wandels und Bürger*innen in praktischen Prozessen des Experimentierens und der Implementation von Problemlösungen verstanden. Wir bezeichnen dies als co-kreative Partizipation. Formen dialogbasierter Meinungsbildung und Entscheidungsfindung (deliberative Partizipation) finden in der einschlägigen Literatur dagegen kaum Beachtung. In diesem Artikel argumentieren wir, dass co-kreative und deliberative Partizipation zwei unterschiedlich verfasste Formen von Partizipation sind, die jedoch beide von Relevanz für den Erfolg eines Reallabors sind. Basierend auf unseren praktischen Erfahrungen im Reallabor für nachhaltige Mobilitätskultur (RNM) erarbeiten wir einen idealtypischen konzeptionellen Rahmen, der co-kreative und deliberative Partizipationsformen in Beziehung zueinander setzt und so eine Systematisierung und Begründung unterschiedlicher Partizipationsformen in Reallaboren liefert.

The United Nations Conference on Certain Conventional Weapons (UNCCW) is the only multilateral humanitarian arms control forum. Yet the consensus principle by which it makes decisions has repeatedly thwarted progress and is endangering the current process on the use of autonomy in weapons systems: if negotiations for a legally binding instrument are not launched in 2021, this goal is likely to be pursued outside the UNCCW. Failure to ban inhumane technology for a third time in a row would considerably damage the legitimacy of the UNCCW. Emphasizing that the UNCCW must remain the main venue not only for discussing but also for resolving humanitarian arms control issues, this policy brief argues for an alternative: a procedural reform that would replace consensus voting with two-thirds majority voting.

From the perspective of policymakers, planning for the many uncertainties that the future brings is a complicated task. Because of the growing complexity of global affairs, more and more information is destined to land on the desks of decision makers. State-of-the-art futures analysis structures information about conceivable events and developments, thus supporting more effective and legitimate anticipatory governance. Forecasting and foresight, the dominant analytical approaches, serve different political functions. Forecasting geopolitical events is primarily relevant for the execu­tive branch, which must act on short-term assessments. Foresight scenarios, on the other hand, significantly contribute to deliberations on the desirability of plausible mid- to long-term developments in consultative bodies such as parliaments. Both approaches should be utilized in EU policymaking. (author's abstract)

Demokratische Entscheidungsfindung geht neben Repräsentationsmechanismen auch mit der Mitwirkung von Einzelpersonen, Gemeinschaften und Organisationen einher. In komplexen und modernen Gesellschaften lassen sich jedoch die Auswirkungen dieser multiplen Interaktionen nur schwer erfassen und auswerten. Mithilfe von sozialer Netzwerkanalyse können wir den Entscheidungsfindungsprozess und seine Ergebnisse im Hinblick auf Effektivität, Gerechtigkeit und Legitimität untersuchen. Wir stellen zwei unterschiedliche Fallbeispiele von Entscheidungsfindung in Zusammenhang mit Nachhaltigkeit vor. Wenn wir uns die Muster der Interaktionen anschauen, können wir die wichtigsten Akteur*innen identifizieren und erklären, warum sie wichtig sind, sowie die Zusammensetzung, Struktur und Entwicklung eines Netzwerks beschreiben, um bestimmte Entscheidungsausgänge zu erklären. Die Ergebnisse liefern empirische Erkenntnisse, die gängige Sichtweisen in Frage stellen und praktische Lösungen für Entscheidungsträger*innen zur Aufrechterhaltung oder Verbesserung einer verantwortungsbewussten Regierungsführung bieten., easy social sciences No. 66 (2021): Content Meets Structure - Social Network Perspectives Starting Point and Frequency: Year: 1989, Issues per Year: 2, easy social sciences

Analyses of strategic agenda-setting in the European Union treat the European Commission as a unitary actor with perfect information. Yet, the constraints for correctly anticipating acceptable policies vary heavily across its individual Directorates-General. Do these internal rifts affect the Commission’s agenda-setting ability? This article tests corresponding expectations on the edit distances between 2237 Commission proposals and the adopted laws across 23 years. The quality of legislative anticipation indeed varies with the responsible Directorate-General. Legislative proposals are more likely to remain unchanged if they face less parliamentary involvement, are less complex, were drafted by an experienced Directorate-General, and were coordinated more seamlessly within the Commission. However, the uncovered variation also calls for more systematic research on the distribution of legislative capacities inside the Commission.

Die Energiewende ist ein viel diskutiertes Thema im Bundestag - doch bleibt dabei auch der eigentliche Anspruch eines Transformationsprojekts bestehen? Die Autorin greift diese Frage in ihrer Diskursanalyse der Bundestagsdebatten von 1998 bis 2017 auf. Dazu entwickelt sie ein innovatives Forschungsdesign, das computerbasierte quantitative mit qualitativen Methoden kombiniert und auch für weitere politische Transformationsforschung anwendbar ist. Mit dem Vorsorgenden Wirtschaften erweitert sie ihre Analysen um die politische Ökonomie und verortet sie in der feministischen, sozial-ökologischen Transformationsforschung. Ergebnis: Die Energiewende wurde im Bundestag nach 2011 politisch entleert.

Do citizens' decisions, which are discussed and co-ordinated a priori on online participation platforms, have any policy effects? The article addresses this question in an exploratory study. Taking theoretical concepts of participation and policy effects into account, LiquidFeedback platforms are investigated in four municipalities in Lower Saxony (Germany). A total of 80 cases - i.e., successful citizens’ initiatives that were afterwards considered by local city or district councils - are included in a content analysis. Results show that crucial policies are less often translated into binding policy decisions than other policies. Even though citizens’ decisions can have binding policy effects, large-scale projects, in particular, show rather diffuse policy effects. However, diffuse policy effects are hardly transparent for citizens and could, accordingly, inhibit the willingness to participate altogether. Haben von Bürger*innen auf Online-Bürgerbeteiligungsplattformen getroffene Entscheidungen Auswirkungen auf politische Entscheidungen? Der vorliegende Artikel befasst sich mit dieser Frage in einer explorativen Studie. Unter Berücksichtigung theoretischer Konzepte von Partizipation und politischen Effekten werden LiquidFeedback-Plattformen in vier niedersächsischen Kommunen untersucht. In die Inhaltsanalyse werden 80 Fälle miteinbezogen, die auf der Beteiligungsplattform positiv abgestimmt und später von den örtlichen Stadt- oder Bezirksräten geprüft wurden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass es vor allem in Politikfeldern, die viel Planungszeit erfordern, seltener zu bindenden Policy-Entscheidungen kommt. Unklare politische Entscheidungen sind für die Bürger*innen jedoch schlecht nachvollziehbar. Sind sie überdies noch intransparent, wirken sie sich hemmend auf die Bereitschaft zur (weiteren) Teilnahme aus.

Three years after the judgment of the General Court in the De Capitani case, we assess whether the findings of the Court have settled for good the debate between transparency and effectiveness in EU law-making or rather opened new reflections on legislative transparency in the EU.

The global threat of the coronavirus pandemic has forced policy makers to react quickly with totally new policy‐making approaches under conditions of uncertainty. This article focuses on such crisis‐driven policy learning, examining how the experiences of China and South Korea as early responder states influenced the subsequent coronavirus crisis management in Germany. The first reaction of the German core executive was the quick concentration of decision‐making power at the top of the political hierarchy. Asserting the prerogatives of the executive included the radical simplification of the relationship between politics, law and science. State actors took emergency measures by recourse to a single piece of legislation—the ‘infection protection law’ (Infektionsschutzgesetz)—overriding other elements of the legal order. They also limited the government’s use of scientific expertise to a small number of advisors, thereby cutting short debates about the appropriateness or otherwise of the government’s crisis measures. Finally, German actors failed to understand that some of the earlier Chinese and Korean responses required a precondition—namely public willingness to sacrifice privacy for public health—that is absent in the German case.

In this article, we aim to disentangle the extent to which citizens’ conceptions of democratic decision-making are shaped by populist attitudes or rather by radical left and right host ideologies. Following recent work by Landwehr and Steiner (2017), we distinguish four modes of decision-making embedded in different conceptions of democracy: trusteeship democracy, anti-pluralism, deliberative proceduralism, and majoritarianism. Drawing on data from Austria and Germany, we show that populism and radical host ideologies tap into different dimensions of democracy. While populism is primarily directed against representative forms of democratic decision-making, preferences for deliberative procedures and majority decisions appear entirely shaped by radical left and right host ideologies. Populism thus views decision-making based on the general will of the people as the only legitimate democratic procedure, whereas radical left and right host ideologies aim at involving the relevant group(s) of citizens. Further analyses of the interactions between populist attitudes and radical host ideologies confirm that the effects of populism remain robust and thus independent of the specific manifestations of radical host ideologies. These findings help to disentangle the causes of democratic discontent and to develop possible responses through democratic reforms that specifically and separately aim to mitigate populism and radical host ideologies.

Policy-specific actor-constellations consisting of party- and group-representatives commonly drive the effective establishment of new policy programmes or changes in existing policies. In the EU multi-level system, the creation of such constellations is complicated because it practically requires consensus on two dimensions: the European public policy at stake and the issue of European integration. This means that, for interest groups with interests in particular policy domains, and with limited interest in the actual issue of European integration, non-Eurosceptic parties must be their main ally in their policy battles. We hypothesise that interest groups with relevant European domain-specific interests will ally with non-Eurosceptic parties, whereas interest groups whose interests are hardly affected by the European policy process will have party-political allies across the full range of positions on European integration. We assess this argument on the basis of an elite-survey of interest group leaders and study group-party dyads in several European countries (i.e., Belgium, Lithuania, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, and Slovenia) in a large number of policy domains. Our dependent variable is the group-party dyad and the main independent variables are the European policy interests of the group and the level of Euroscepticism of the party. We broadly find support for our hypotheses. The findings of our study speak to the debate concerning the implications of the politicisation of European integration and, more specifically, the way in which party-political polarisation of Europe may divide domestic interest group systems and potentially drive group and party systems apart.

Blame games between governing and opposition parties are a characteristic feature of domestic politics. In the EU, policymaking authority is shared among multiple actors across different levels of governance. How does EU integration affect the dynamics of domestic blame games? Drawing on the literatures on EU politicisation and blame attribution in multi-level governance systems, we derive expectations about the direction and frequency of blame attributions in a Europeanized setting. We argue, first, that differences in the direction and frequency of blame attributions by governing and opposition parties are shaped by their diverging baseline preferences as blame avoiders and blame generators; secondly, we posit that differences in blame attributions across Europeanized policies are shaped by variation in political authority structures, which incentivize certain attributions while constraining others. We hypothesize, inter alia, that blame games are “Europeanized” primarily by governing parties and when policy-implementing authority rests with EU-level actors. We test our theoretical expectations by analysing parliamentary debates on EU asylum system policy and EU border control policy in Austria and Germany.

The paper evaluates the types of e-democracy initiatives on local level in the Republic of Macedonia. E-democracy initiatives were classified by the elements of the democratic process, which they work to enhance: transparency, accountability and active participation. For the purpose of our research we analysed websites of the units of local self-government in the Republic of Macedonia in the period of 2017, with special emphasis on e-democracy initiatives in order to provide a framework for classification. The research discovered many outstanding local e-democracy initiatives. However, there is a little evidence that these initiatives have done much to ameliorate the problems on local level that Republic of Macedonia is facing, such as: weak democratic institutions and low level of citizen participation in democratic processes using ICT as intermediary. The paper also provides some recommendations for improving e-democracy initiatives on local level and their performance in general.

This contribution considers how the values of transparency and efficiency are realised in the context of “EU negotiations” both in the internal and the external sphere. Legislating comes with a presumption of openness in the EU, while international negotiations have traditionally been assumed to require secrecy. However, irrespective of the basic paradigms, the institutions often appear to follow a rather simple rationale that secrecy makes better decisions, both in internal and external affairs. Similar efficiency concerns seem to relate to protecting the procedure of decision-making from external influence. Therefore, the fundamental trade-off between democratic accountability and efficiency in the external and internal fields might not be all that different: efficiency is linked with secrecy, and comes at a cost for participation and openness. I explain how the two paradigms—openness and transparency in legislative work and secrecy in international negotiations have recently developed, and how the values of openness and efficiency have been addressed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in its recent jurisprudence. This discussion witnesses to a possibility that the old secrecy paradigm might be about to break in international relations while a new transparency paradigm in EU legislative work is struggling to emerge., published version, peerReviewed

It is more than twenty years since the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child gave governments and states an international mandate to ensure the safety and wellbeing of children and young people and to promote their participation in decisions that affect their lives. Considerable advances have been made since that time that have, in some but not all instances, seen transformations in the status, roles and responsibilities of children and young people and in the ways in which they are perceived and treated. These advances have included greater inclusion of children’s voices in research, policy and practice underpinned by children’s rights to participation and ‘best interests of the child’ decision-making. Bringing together a unique collection of international articles from authors with considerable expertise in researching and working with children and young people, this thematic issue explores some of the ways in which facilitating constructive dialogues with children and young people, and engaging them more directly in consultation about their lives, has led to genuine improvements in the way they are treated and understood. It also considers some of the barriers that exist to prevent children and young people from full participation in public life, some of which occur as a result of structural or systemic factors, while others are the result of the decisions adults make on their behalf.

I argue that the transparency reforms that have been implemented in the Council of the EU in the last decades are unlikely to change the perception of the Council as a non-transparent institution. My argument is based on three distinctions: the distinction between transparency (availability of information) and publicity (spread and reception of information); between transparency in process and transparency in rationale; and between plenary and committee decision-making arenas in legislatures. While national parliaments tend to have all these features, the Council of the EU only has two (transparency in process and committee decision-making). As a consequence, publishing ever more documents and detailed minutes of committee meetings is unlikely to strengthen the descriptive legitimacy of the Council. Furthermore, I argue that the democratic transparency problem is the reverse of what is most often argued: It is not the lack of transparency that causes a democratic deficit, but the (perceived) lack of a democratic infrastructure that makes more serious transparency reforms unthinkable to government representatives.

Like any regulatory effort, private transnational standard-setters need to legitimate themselves to the audiences from which they seek support or obedience. While early scholarship on private transnational governance has emphasized the centrality of democratic legitimation narratives in rendering private governance socially acceptable, evidence from more recent standard-setting schemes suggests a declining relevance of that narrative over time. In my analysis of private sustainability regulation, I identify a combination of two factors that jointly contribute to this diminished role of democratic legitimation. First, private transnational governance has become a pervasive phenomenon. This means that new entrants to the field no longer face the same liability of newness that required first movers to make an extra effort in legitimation. Second, private standard-setting has moved from areas characterized by ‘governance gaps’ to areas in which meaningful intergovernmental regulation already exists. In these areas, however, the ‘state prerogative’ in legitimating governance holds. As a result, transnational standard-setters rely not so much on stressing their democratic credentials, but instead emphasize their contribution to achieving internationally agreed goals.

© 2017 by the author; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). According to advocates of direct democracy, it is important to involve citizens more directly in political decision-making processes in order to create a democratic linkage between citizens and the political system. Indeed, some studies have demonstrated that citizens who live in direct democracies have higher levels of trust in political institutions and a higher sense of political efficacy. However, not all empirical evidence confirms this relationship. In a recent article on Switzerland, it was shown that, while the availability of direct democratic rights enhances trust in political institutions, using those rights actually initiates distrust. In this paper I expand the analysis of Bauer and Fatke (2014) and test whether the different effects of availability of direct democratic rights and the frequency of their use also hold for broader measures of trust in political institutions and political efficacy. I find that, even though an increased use of direct democratic measures is associated with lower levels of confidence in authorities on the cantonal level, this relationship is no longer apparent when applying a more comprehensive measurement of trust in political institutions. ispartof: Politics and Governance vol:5 issue:2 pages:16-26 status: published

Der Artikel basiert auf einem Deliberativen Forum zur deutschen Arbeitsmarkt- und Sozialpolitik. Er untersucht Gruppendynamiken und Meinungsänderungen sowie den Einfluss von aktiven Personen auf diese Dynamiken mittels quantitativer Vor- und Nachbefragung der Teilnehmer_innen, um einen Beitrag zur Debatte über einen möglichen Mehrwert von Deliberation in demokratischen Entscheidungsprozessen zu leisten. Die These von durch Deliberationsprozessen angestoßenen Meinungsänderungen kann grundsätzlich bestätigt werden, allerdings deuten die Ergebnisse darauf hin, dass die Mehrheit in ihren Positionen weitgehend unverändert aus der Debatte gegangen ist. Auch inhaltlich lässt sich feststellen, dass die in der Demokratietheorie und empirischen Deliberationsforschung getroffenen normativen Erwartungen hinsichtlich Gemeinwohlorientierung, Großzügigkeit und Nachhaltigkeit von getroffenen Entscheidungen nur zu einem geringen Ausmaß erfüllt wurden. Gleichzeitig finden sich kaum Hinweise auf einen systematischen Einfluss aktiver Personen auf die Positionen der übrigen Gruppenmitglieder.

Interest groups are important intermediary organisations that function as a transmission belt between societal interests and political decision-makers. However, while some interest groups survive over decades, others only last a few years. This article argues that the survival of interest groups depends on their ability to mobilise resources which is crucially affected by interest group type and the public salience of an interest group’s policy domain. The theoretical expectations are tested based on a novel dataset mapping the survival of 1699 interest groups registered at the German Bundestag between 1974 and 2012. Using event history analysis, it is shown that interest group type and public salience indeed affect whether interest groups survive. Sectional groups last significantly longer than cause groups, and interest group survival increases with the public salience of their policy area. The results have major implications for our understanding of interest groups and political representation in contemporary democracies.

Since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, energy policy in Japan and Germany appears to have taken radically different directions. In contrast to Germany's consensus for an Energiewende ("energy transition"), Japan has renewed its political support for nuclear power. Yet, energy transitions in both countries are highly contested - with a much less predictable future than government plans would like us to believe. Japan has always connected energy self-sufficiency with national security due to its lack of natural resources and its isolated - as well as fragmented - national electricity grid. In contrast, Germany has a single grid, can trade electricity with its neighbours, and has large coal reserves. In Japan, nuclear power became a quasi "home-grown" energy source without strong opposition, while in Germany it has been increasingly contested by the "coal lobby," wind power, and the public. When the Fukushima disaster happened, both countries generated about 30 per cent of their electricity from nuclear power plants. Both countries had ambitious renewable targets already beforehand. Today, renewables account for 38 per cent of electricity production in Germany and 15.6 per cent in Japan. In both countries, the Fukushima disaster caused the collapse of the "safety myth" of nuclear power plants. In Germany, the long history of contestation over a nuclear phase-out and the broad public anti-nuclear consensus made a return to nuclear impossible. In Japan, anti-nuclear protests accelerated only after the Fukushima disaster. Thus with Prime Minister Abe's pledge to put the economy back on track, Japan is taking the political risk of reactor restarts. Energy transition is as much a reality in Japan as it is in Germany. Renewable energies have been evolving even more rapidly in Japan than in Germany in recent years, a trend further fuelled by current dynamics in the energy sector. Old regimes of energy policies are obsolete, and it is time to replace outdated analytical models with more dynamic ones to interpret national energy transitions and to pave the way for informed policymaking.

Previous research on public support for participatory decision-making fails to distinguish between vote-centric (referendums and initiatives) and talk-centric (deliberative-style meetings) instruments, despite a deliberative turn in democratic theory suggesting that political discussion among ordinary citizens improves decision-making. In an online factorial survey experiment conducted among a sample of 960 Americans recruited on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we compared support for the use of referendums and public meetings, arguing that attitudes towards these instruments depend on whether they are used to inform legislators or take binding decisions. Public meetings were rated considerably lower than referendums and initiatives, especially when the outcomes were binding. Contrary to expectations, we did not find a preference for binding (over advisory) referendums and individuals from referendum and initiative states, where these instruments are legally binding, expressed less support for binding participatory reforms than individuals from non-direct democratic states. Despite the many critiques of direct democracy, public debate in the US has not considered whether advisory outcomes might appease some of these concerns. The results also demonstrated that individuals expressing concerns about the inability of ordinary citizens to understand politics and about the welfare of minority groups were not as negative about participatory decision-making when legislators had the final say.

Power is the essence of politics. Whoever seeks to understand and master it must understand its logic. Drawing on two decades of international experience in political consulting, Dominik Meier and Christian Blum give profound and honest insights into the inner workings of power. Introducing their Power Leadership Approach, the authors provide a conceptual analysis of power and present the tools to successfully exercise it in the political domain. "Power and its Logic" is a guidebook for politicians, business leaders, civil society pioneers, public affairs consultants and for every citizen who wants to understand the unwritten rules of politics.

Timely and accurate demographic data, resulting from robust Civil Registration and Vital Statistics [CRVS] systems play critical roles in facilitating the realisation of key developmental goals in most countries. A well-functioning CRVS system can afford Nigeria the ambit to gather timely data for evidence-based policy-making. However, just as in many other developing countries, Nigeria’s CRVS framework is plagued by weak institutional linkages resulting to poor quality sociodemographic data. Therefore, this paper focused on the importance of a robust CRVS system as source of quality sociodemographic data in Nigeria, with the objective of situating it within the broader context of good governance. The paper is primarily theoretical and employed the activity theory to examine access to and use of population-based data from the CRVS system for good governance. This paper concludes that the inability to generate actionable and quality population-based data due to Nigeria’s weak CRVS system, as well as non-data driven socioeconomic policies hinders good governance. Therefore, more investments are needed to scale-up Nigeria’s CRVS system and the resulting sociodemographic data should be a priority in driving national policy-making for good governance.

Abels und Mushaben (2012) argumentieren, dass in der Europäischen Union ein doppeltes Demokratiedefizit bezogen auf Geschlecht existiert: Frauen seien in den EU-Institutionen unterrepräsentiert und der EU-Politik fehle es insgesamt an einer Geschlechterperspektive. Dieser Beitrag trägt mit einem spezifischen Fokus auf Klimapolitik zu dieser Forschungsperspektive bei. Die EU ist eine wichtige Konstrukteurin des internationalen Klimaregimes und sie hat sich gleichzeitig verpflichtet, Gender Mainstreaming umzusetzen. Darüber hinaus sind in Europa geschlechtsspezifische Unterschiede bezogen auf das Verhalten zum und Ansichten über den Klimawandel dokumentiert. Dieser Artikel untersucht, wie relevant das doppelte Demokratiedefizit in der EU Klimapolitik ist. Wir stellen die Anteile der Expertinnen und Experten bei den zuständigen Referaten für Klimapolitik in der Europäischen Kommission dar und zeigen mit Dokumentenanalysen und Interviews mit politischen Entscheidungsträger*innen, dass geschlechtsspezifische Aspekte in den EU Klimadokumenten nicht enthalten sind. Mittels feministischem Institutionalismus kommen wir zu dem Ergebnis, dass die bestehenden geschlechtsspezifischen Machtverhältnisse innerhalb der Kommission die erforschten Klimaeinheiten beeinflussen und diese männlich konnotierte institutionelle Praktiken reproduzieren. (Autorenreferat), Abels and Mushaben (2012) argue that there is a double democratic deficit in the European Union regarding gender: women are underrepresented within the EU institutions and gender awareness is lacking in EU policymaking. This article contributes to this scholarship with a specific focus on the climate domain. The EU is an important constructor of the international climate regime and the Union is committed to gender mainstream all its policies and processes. Furthermore, there are documented gender differences in Europe regarding behaviour and views on climate change. This article investigates the relevance of the double democratic deficit for the EU´s climate policymaking. We map the representation of female and male experts at the European Commission´s climate units and search for gender recognition in the EU´s climate documents. There we discover silence regarding gender, confirmed through interviews with policy-makers. Using feminist institutionalism we conclude that existing gender power relations within the Commission affect the explored climate units, which reproduce masculine institutional practices. (author's abstract)

"The article offers an insider's account of how the Paris Agreement on climate change was reached. Focusing on participation and ambition, it describes the efforts to include a long-term temperature goal, expectations for regular ratcheting up of climate efforts, and provisions for tracking global progress. The author argues that a shift from the earlier top-down approaches to setting targets, to a bottom-up, self-determined approach has spurred participation and made it easier to reach agreement. In addition, the Paris Agreement anchors a clearer direction of travel than before. The article also discusses the negotiations of the provisions in the Agreement to drive increased national climate mitigation efforts over time. Finally, the author considers the role of conference diplomacy, particularly the need for inclusive leadership. It is argued that the French Presidency combined a transparent negotiations process with a clear sense of direction that helped achieve a comprehensive and ambitious outcome. The role of back-channel talks as part of effective conference diplomacy is also discussed." (author's abstract)

"We examine the negotiations held under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change in Paris, December 2015. Prior to these negotiations, there was considerable uncertainty about whether an agreement would be reached, particularly given that the world’s leaders failed to do so in the 2009 negotiations held in Copenhagen. Amid this uncertainty, we applied three different methods to predict the outcomes: an expert survey and two negotiation simulation models, namely the Exchange Model and the Predictioneer’s Game. After the event, these predictions were assessed against the coded texts that were agreed in Paris. The evidence suggests that combining experts’ predictions to reach a collective expert prediction makes for significantly more accurate predictions than individual experts’ predictions. The differences in the performance between the two different negotiation simulation models were not statistically significant." (author's abstract)

Dem raketenhaften Aufstieg der Piratenpartei folgte ihr ebenso schneller Niedergang. Ist das mit ihr verbundene Experiment politischer Willensbildung - Liquid Democracy - also ebenso gescheitert? Auf dem originellen Weg der Grounded Theory nähert sich Anja Adler der jüngsten deutschen Politikgeschichte, um sich mit dem ambitionierten Vorschlag zur Entwicklung eines neuen Betriebssystems für die Politik auseinanderzusetzen. Durch zahlreiche Interviews mit den Akteurinnen internet-gestützter Beratungs- und Entscheidungsverfahren zeichnet sie ein lebendiges und durchaus zukunftstaugliches Portrait sowohl der konkreten Verfahren als auch der Einstellungen und Visionen von Demokratieentwicklerinnen. Taking the most recent history of German politics as an example, this first comprehensive study about liquid democracy shows that algorithms of democratic decisions hamper as well as enrich politics.

Data contained in Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) is not only a prerequisite for the vote recommendations they provide but can also be used for estimating party positions in low‐dimensional spaces. Given that VAAs can be designed differently in terms of their number of items and their measurement level, how much can one trust the party positions obtained from this source? We tackle this question by exploiting relevant variation in a real‐world setting: three VAAs offered at the 2017 Lower Saxony election. Despite substantial design differences, the policy spaces extracted through an inductive scaling approach are highly convergent. Simulated random item removal from the pooled dataset of all three VAAs furthermore suggests that about 40 items yield satisfactory reliability of the party positions. Finally, we find that a priori assigning VAA‐items to ideological dimensions is potentially problematic as the interpretation of resulting party spaces may differ from the ones derived inductively.

Academic studies regarding the impact of various forms of gender representation focus largely on quantitative evidence that women in power can make a difference, downplaying qualitative case studies that can establish causal links between women's participation in government and better policies for women. Analyzing policy changes initiated by Germany’s first female Chancellor since 2005, the paper argues that despite her CDU-affiliation, Angela Merkel has contributed more to gender equality in Germany than all previous chancellors, even though she refuses to label herself a feminist. The author explores three factors shaping Merkel's reluctance to embrace the (western dominated) feminist label, e.g., her socialization under a diametrically opposed GDR gender regime, her preference for data-driven policy learning, her aversion towards “ideological” framing, coupled with a tendency to pursue mixed motives, respectively. The paper concludes with recent examples geared towards leveling the global gender playing-field, attesting to her willingness to embrace transformational representation., Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen, die sich auf die Wirksamkeit verschiedener Formen der Geschlechter-Repräsentation konzentrieren, sind oft dazu geneigt, die quantitativen Dimensionen zu betonen, auch wenn qualitative Fall-Studien besser dazu geeignet sind, einen kausalen Zusammenhang zwischen Frauen in der Politik und besserer Politik für Frauen zu etablieren. In diesem Aufsatz geht es um Deutschlands erste Bundeskanzlerin. Der Text argumentiert, dass Angela Merkel seit 2005 Jahre - trotz ihrer CDU-Mitgliedschaft und ihrer wiederholten Beteuerung, keine Feministin zu sein - mehr für die Geschlechtergleichheit in Deutschland getan hat als alle ihre Amtsvorgänger. Ihre Nicht-Identifikation mit dem Feminismus führt die Autorin auf drei Faktoren zurück, nämlich, ihre langjährige Sozialisierung im Gender Regime der DDR, ihre Vorliebe für datengetriebenes policy learning und ihre Abneigung gegenüber einem ideologischem Framing zugunsten von "mixed motives". Die Autorin schließt mit konkreten Beispielen, die zeigen, dass sie tatsächlich daran interessiert ist, das globale Geschlechter-Spielfeld im Geist einer transformativen Repräsentation umzugestalten.

Visegrád, Weimarer Dreieck, nordische Staaten oder Eurozone: Regional wie funktional organisierte Gruppen von Mitgliedstaaten der EU haben in ihrer Politikformulierung klar an Bedeutung gewonnen. Für die Stabilität der Union jedoch ist dieser neue »Minilateralismus« ambivalent. Staatengruppen können Fragmentierung und Intransparenz begünstigen, etwa durch Ausgrenzung, Gegengewichtsbildung – gerade gegen Deutschland – und die Stärkung intergouvernementaler Verfahren. Sie tragen aber auch zum Funktionieren der EU bei, sei es durch Agendasetzung, Interessenausgleich oder als diplomatische Brücken. Deshalb sollte Berlin solche Gruppen nicht bloß als schädliche Fliehkräfte betrachten, welche die Einheit der Union gefährden. Vielmehr sollte Deutschland sich diesen Formaten gezielt zuwenden, denn damit ließe sich vor allem die Inklusion kleiner und mittelgroßer EU-Staaten verbessern. (Autorenreferat)

The article is devoted to a comparison of different U.S. administrations’ foreign policy in the beginning of the 21st century. This period was chosen because it appears to be a critical moment in American history. The analysis shows that, despite the differences in party adherence and other ideological affiliations, successive administrations tend to follow identical or similar guidelines while implementing foreign policy. The author suggests several possible reasons for this continuity. First, there is the stability of the institutional and decision-making systems and mechanisms, which, in turn, are based on a stable system of interest representation. More broadly, it is the persistent system of values and basic attitudes, political and philosophical traditions, ideology and long-term behavioral patterns - those phenomena forming the core of political culture - that are the most important non-institutional factors driving the continuity of American foreign policy. So, comparison of the foreign policy courses of the Bush and Obama administrations leads to the conclusion that the mechanism of U.S. foreign policy is impersonal to a great extent. The key biographical parameters of the politicians play an only limited role in defining their political course.

Die Einführung von Mehrheitsentscheidungen in der Gemeinsamen Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik (GASP) ist kein neues Thema. Aufgrund wachsender internationaler Herausforderungen an die EU nimmt die Diskussion jedoch wieder Fahrt auf. Befürworter plädieren dafür, das Einstimmigkeitsprinzip abzuschaffen, um die GASP effektiver zu machen. Allerdings sind die rechtlichen Möglichkeiten dafür ohne Vertragsänderung begrenzt. Mehrheitsentscheidungen in der GASP sind zudem dann problematisch, wenn sie die Legitimität der EU nach innen und ihre Glaubwürdigkeit nach außen schwächen. Hier böte sich ein doppelter Ansatz an: Mittelfristig ließe sich die EU-Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik durch Flexibilisierung stärken. Langfristig könnte die Entwicklung einer gemeinsamen strategischen Kultur durch den Aufbau europäischer Analysefähigkeiten unterstützt werden. (Autorenreferat)

Die Annexion der Krim durch Russland, die sogenannte Flüchtlingskrise im Sommer 2015 und Donald Trumps Wahl zum US-Präsidenten sind einige markante Beispiele für Überraschungen, welche die Politik in Berlin und Brüssel vor anhaltende Herausforderungen gestellt haben. Da sich solche Überraschungen zu häufen scheinen, verwundert es nicht, dass auf Seiten der Politik das Interesse an Früherkennung wächst. Sie soll dabei helfen, insbesondere böse Überraschungen so rechtzeitig zu antizipieren, dass deren Eintritt vermieden werden kann. Aber wie wird Früherkennung besser? In den Blick zu nehmen gilt es dafür den gesamten Früherkennungsprozess von (1) der Erarbeitung der Analysen über (2) deren Management an der Schnittstelle zwischen Wissens­produktion und Politik bis zu (3) der Ebene, auf der Entscheidungen fallen. Beachtliche Fortschritte gibt es vor allem bei der Forschung über Forecasts. Dabei handelt es sich um nachprüfbare Vorhersagen darüber, ob in der näheren Zukunft liegende Ereignisse eintreten werden. Kognitive Merkmale wie Neugier, Unvoreingenommenheit und Vorurteilsfreiheit tragen dazu bei, die Qualität dieser Vorhersagen zu erhöhen. Auch die strategische Voraus­schau (Foresight) kann ausgebaut werden. Zwei Implikationen besserer Früherkennung sind allerdings problematisch. So können methodische Innovationen, optimiertes Management und aufgeschlossene Entscheidungsträger das Überraschungsrisiko zwar ver­ringern, aber nicht ausschalten. Und mit besserer Früherkennung steigt der Druck auf die Politik, präventiv zu handeln. Je genauer Früherkennung wird, desto mehr verringern sich politische Handlungsspielräume. Doch präventive Interventionen, die durch Früherkennung ausgelöst werden, können unerwünschte Folgen haben - das zeigen Erfahrungen der Vergan­genheit. (Autorenreferat)

Zusammenfassung Ziele: Nach Mitteilung einer mit dem Leben nicht zu vereinbarenden Diagnose des Kindes, werden Eltern mit der Entscheidung konfrontiert, die bereits weit fortgeschrittene Schwangerschaft vorzeitig zu beenden oder das Kind auszutragen, bis es spontan während der Schwangerschaft oder kurz nach der Geburt verstirbt. Diese meistens vollkommen überraschende Situation ist von der Unausweichlickeit des Verlustes geprägt und eng mit ethisch schwierigen Entscheidungen verknüpft. Ein solcher Verlust kann die psychische Gesundheit betroffener Eltern massiv belasten. Studien zeigen, dass bedürfnisorientierte Begleitung die Eltern entlastet, unabhängig von ihrer Entscheidung, die Schwangerschaft frühzeitig zu beenden oder fortzuführen. Ziele der Studie sind, das Unterstützungsangebot in der Schweiz aus Sicht betroffener Eltern und beteiligter Fachpersonen zu beleuchten und Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten der Versorgung aufzuzeigen. Dieser Artikel schildert die auf den Erfahrungen der Eltern basierenden Ergebnisse. Methodik: Interviews wurden mit 32 Müttern und Vätern zwischen Dez. 2012 und März 2014 geführt, verbatim transkribiert und thematisch analysiert. Ergebnisse: Es wurden 6 Themen identifiziert, die sich über den Zeitraum zwischen Diagnose und kurz nach der Geburt erstrecken: „Schock“, „Optionen und Dilemmas“, „Verantwortung übernehmen“, „Immer noch schwanger sein“, „Abschied nehmen“ und „die Zukunft planen“. Die Ergebnisse weisen auf Lücken bezüglich Kontinuität und Qualität der Versorgung hin und offenbaren unterschiedliche Sichtweisen auf die Problematik. Schlussfolgerung: Die Studie liefert wertvolle Einsichten in die Erfahrungswelt und Versorgungsbedürfnisse von Eltern, die während der Schwangerschaft mit einer letalen fötalen Diagnose konfrontiert worden sind. Die Resultate tragen dazu bei, die aktuellen Praktiken von involvierten Fachpersonen zu überdenken und den spezifischen Bedürfnissen der Eltern während Schwangerschaft, Geburt und Wochenbett sowie der Palliativpflege des Kindes anzupassen.

This paper examines the claim that democratic decision making is epistemically valuable. Focussing on communication and voting, circumstances are identified under which groups are able to reliably identify the ‘correct alternative.’ Employing formal models from social epistemology, group performance under varying conditions in a simple epistemic task is scrutinized. Simulation results show that larger majority requirements can favour the veto power of closed-minded individuals, but can also increase precision in well-functioning groups. Reasonable scepticism against other people's opinions can provide a useful impediment to overly quick convergence onto a false consensus when independent information acquisition is possible.