In October, the Board of the NCCR Doctoral Program granted the first Living Reviews in Democracy Award to NCCR PhD students Nils-Christian Bormann, Rinaldo Kühne, Antoinette Scherz, and Thomas Winzen. The prize recognizes the best articles published in the open access online-journal Living Reviews in Democracy (LRD), which publishes review articles that survey progress in democracy research and guide readers to the most important literature in the field. LRD articles are regularly updated by their authors to incorporate the latest developments on the theme.

The jury selected the award-winning articles particularly due to their completeness and originality:

Nils-Christian Bormann’s review summarizes the discussion of Lijphart’s typology of consensus and majoritarian democracies and challenges the typology’s usefulness for understanding democracies beyond the OECD world.

Rinaldo Kühne’s article focuses on the question of how the appeal to citizens’ emotions made by media coverage of political issues influences political opinions. It offers a review of the literature on the effects of mood, arousal, and emotions in judgment processes and analyzes if all affects, whether relevant to a judgment or not, have the same impact.

Questions on the legitimacy of the demos are the topic of Antoinette Scherz’s review. Democracy needs a clearly delimitated demos to be able to make decisions. But who are the people that constitute the demos? The article aims to clarify the legitimacy of the demos’s boundaries, a question that has gained considerable importance due to migration and globalization.

Thomas Winzen deals with the question of whether political integration challenges democracy by undermining the impact of national parliaments and parliamentary elections on policy making. The paper reviews the literature on the role of national parliaments in the European Union and observes that the question of how national parliaments relate to citizens in EU affairs is a rarely studied field.

[from NCCR Newsletter Dec. 2012]

Fachzeitschriften “European Integration online Papers” und “Living Reviews in European Governance” neu an der Uni Wien

Open Access ist wichtiges Instrument in der Wissenschaft

Wien (OTS) – Open Access bedeutet, dass wissenschaftliche Texte kostenfrei und öffentlich im Internet zugänglich sind. Sie können dann unter Angabe des Copyrights frei heruntergeladen, kopiert und weiterverbreitet werden. Auch die Universität Wien fördert Open Access Projekte und der Wissenschaftsfonds (FWF) will künftig in Kooperation mit dem Wissenschaftsministerium sogar eine Anschubfinanzierung zur Etablierung innovativer Open Access Fachzeitschriften leisten.

Das Institut für europäische Integrationsforschung (EIF) engagiert sich schon seit Jahren mit zwei englischsprachigen Journals besonders stark in diesem Bereich, seit kurzem im Rahmen der Universität Wien. Die “European Integration online Papers (EIoP)”, die sogar in den Social Science Citation Index aufgenommen wurden und damit unter den
weltweit anerkanntesten wissenschaftlichen Zeitschriften rangieren, positionieren sich als interdisziplinäres Journal. Die “Living Reviews in European Governance (LREG)” sind ein besonders innovatives Projekt, denn darin diskutieren streng qualitätsgeprüfte Überblicksartikel den State-of-the-art zu einschlägigen Forschungsfragen. Dr. Falk Reckling, Open-Access-Experte des Wissenschaftsfonds, nennt LREG im Bereich Open Access Fachzeitschriften “sehr renommiert”. “Diese Zeitschriften-Kooperation
mit der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft ist ein wichtiges Angebot des EIF im Dienste der weltweiten Scientific Community, besonders für Studierende und Forschende, die sich in einen neuen Expertisebereich einarbeiten wollen”, so Prof. Gerda Falkner, Leiterin des EIF.

European Integration online Papers (EIoP):
http://eiop.or.at/eiop/index.php/eiop

Living Reviews in European Governance (LREG):
http://europeangovernance.livingreviews.org

In der Rubrik Thema des Monats stellt das Büro für Öffentlichkeitsarbeit regelmäßig aktuelle Forschung an der Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW) rund um ein Schwerpunktthema vor. Das Thema des Monats November 2010 ist Europäisierung. Ein Beitrag stellt die innovative Fachzeitschrift “Living Reviews in European Governance” vor:

Die Forschung zur europäischen Integration gehört zu den sich derzeit rasant entwickelnden Wissenschaftsfeldern. Mit den “Living Reviews in European Governance” gibt das EIF eine in den Sozialwissenschaften bahnbrechende Fachzeitschrift heraus, die dieser Entwicklung gerecht werden soll.

[weiter]

On 10 July 2009, the European Research Papers Archive (ERPA) network added Living Reviews in European Governance (LREG) to their database.

ERPA is a continuously updated reference for online working papers in the field of European integration research since 1998. Today, it contains over 1330 top research papers.

Its powerful search-engine allows searches for authors, paper titles, publication dates, keywords, full text, or any combination of these. Furthermore, “Quick Search” updates you on the latest entries in the ERPA database. Also abstracts are available for many papers.

The Living Reviews in European Governance (LREG) is a joint winner of the European Information Association’s 2009 Awards for European Information Sources.

The European Information Association (EIA) is a non-profit organisation with charitable status, registered in the United Kingdom. It serves as a focus of expertise on EU information.

The Awards highlight products that are considered to be excellent in the provision of EU information and recognise the Living Reviews in European Governance as the best of a large number of publications and online services. Previous winners include: Eurostat website, PreLex, Council of the EU website, Celex on the web, the American Chamber of Commerce to the EU’s Guide to EU Consumer Affairs.

This year’s winners of the Awards were formally announced on 11 May 2009 at the EIA annual meeting at the European Parliament office, London.

The prize will encourage us to follow up our endeavor to publish state-of-the-art review articles on core themes relating to European integration research, freely available on the internet!

Gerda Falkner (Editor-in-Chief)
Michael Nentwich (Technical Director)
and Patrick Scherhaufer (Managing Editor)

[press release in German]

The Living Reviews in Democracy (LRD) is now online. It is a new member of the family of Living Reviews journals. One of the most important features of the LRD is that its articles are updated regularly by the authors; this is the significance of the word ‘living’ in the title. Web-based and peer-reviewed, the LRD publishes reviews of research on core themes relating to democracy. Articles are solicited by an international editorial board from scientists who are experts in their fields. They provide critical outlines of the state of the art in the subjects covered and offer annotated insights (and where possible, active links) into the key literature. The goal of the journal is to develop its articles into a carefully screened and edited, well-integrated, topical set of hypertext documents that, taken together, form a valuable research tool for scholars of democracy.

LRD is part of the global Open Access movement for free, immediate, and permanent online access to knowledge and research results. The journal is published by the Center for Comparative and International Studies at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich in the framework of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research “Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century”. The Editor-in-Chief is Prof. Dr. Frank Schimmelfennig.

The concept of Living Reviews journals was developed by institutes of the Max Planck Society, which pioneered the Living Reviews in Relativity (LRR) and the Living Reviews in Solar Physics (LRSP). Living Reviews in Relativity has already been online for ten years and became one of the primary resources in gravitational physics. Since 2007, the Living Reviews in Landscape Research (LRLR) is published by the ZALF, an institute of the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft. The journal family is now affiliated with the Max Planck Digital Library, which provides technical infrastructure and software support.

LRD is the second Living Reviews journal in the social sciences, besides the recently launched Living Reviews in European Governance (LREG), which is published by the European Community Studies Association Austria.

Press release (PDF): en | de