In German

In dieser Artikelserie soll 1) eine Bilanz der bisherigen Exzellenzprogramme auf strategischer, operativer und inhaltlicher Ebene gezogen und daraus 2) Handlungsanleitungen für die inhaltliche Gestaltung der künftigen Exzellenzskizzen und -anträge skizziert werden. Hier geht es zum Artikel...

(Leviathan - Sonderband) (German Edition) Taschenbuch –2015; Holger Strassheim (Author, Editor), Tom Ulbricht (Author, Editor)

In recent years research on the role of time in politics has gained importance. Studies focus on both time as a medium of politics and governance by temporalization. In democracies, temporal structures and cycles determine the exercise of power. In multi-level systems such as the European Union, different time horizons and strategies of sequencing are increasingly colliding, forming complex timescapes. Moreover, current research suggests that the routines and rhythms of democratic decision-making fail to keep up with the demands of accelerated socio-economic systems. The consequences of divergent modes of asynchronization as well as efforts to resynchronize pose a major yet unexploited research problem in the field of democratic governance. The special issue seeks to offer a contribution to the discussion as it brings together recent debates and results on the relationship of time and politics.

(Dissertation) (2016; Tom Ulbricht (Author), Humboldt-Univesität zu Berlin

The book sheds new light on one of the oldest questions of political science: the causes of the survival and decline of political systems. In the last decades, scientific knowledge on the issue of regime stability has advanced tremendously. At the same time, academic uncertainty has barely shrunk. Today’s research still lacks a broad consensus on the definition of regime types and is in want of generally accepted measures to precisely delineate between states of stability from periods of instability. Read more...

Applying Thick Concepts of Democracy to Reassess Desires for Democracy. Comparative Political Studies, 2018, Vol. 51(11) 1387–1440

Previous research has found evidence of an almost universal public desire for democracy, even in autocratic regimes. However, a single word may evoke different associations for different people. As such, the term democracy is unlikely to trigger the same or equivalent associations between different people. Inspired by the Anchoring Vignettes Approach, I qualify people’s stated desire for democracy with their representative, direct, social, or authoritarian perception of democracy. Using the Analytical Hierarchy Process, I obtain idealized priorities of institutional configurations to determine the membership a specific perception has with regard to a procedural-liberal, participatory-liberal, or social-liberal normative benchmark. I perform a mixed-model analysis on World Values Survey Wave 5 data to test the empirical consequences of my conceptual calibration concerning explanatory factors for people’s democratic desires. Popular support for representative democracy has been consistently overstated, particularly in nondemocratic countries. The design of political institutions is the most important factor in predicting a person’s actual desire for democracy. Read more...

In: Sustainable Governance Indicators 2011. Policy Performance and Governance Capacities in the OECD. Bertelsmann Foundation: Gütersloh, 21-50.

In “The Status Index: Sustainable Governance and Policy Performance,” Friedbert W. Rüb and Tom Ulbricht discuss the theoretical framework of the Status Index, its constituent parts, and how they relate. They examine from a theoretical perspective the conditions for sustainable governance in terms of the quality of democratic standards and how well policies perform in 15 areas, using these premises to delineate the composition of the Status Index. See more