Browsing by Subject "Politics"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Animal welfare in non-anthropocentric cost-benefit analysis and social welfare functions: A critical review to guide practical application
(2024-10) Dusel, Sara; Wieck, Christine
Cost-benefit analysis and social welfare functions are two closely related methods to evaluate impacts of policies on humans (producers, consumers etc.) and animals. In cost-benefit analysis, the impacts on animals are currently either disclosed as intangible impacts or monetised from the human (anthropocentric) perspective through production costs, revenues and willingness to pay. Social welfare functions are more flexible to aggregate and trade-off impacts on animals, but they are not yet applied in practice. In the literature, advances have been made to monetise policy impacts from the animals’ (non-anthropocentric) perspective and to include animals in social welfare functions. Yet, policy analysts who seek to implement any of these approaches in practice face substantial challenges because the available studies differ considerably in the methodologies and underlying normative assumptions. We conduct a critical review of the scientific and grey literature with the aim to synthesise the available material, to facilitate an informed debate on conflicting normative assumptions, and to eventually guide the practical application of non-anthropocentric cost-benefit analysis and social welfare functions. The results of the critical review are presented in the form of a checklist that allows to better comprehend key steps of the methodologies. Step-by-step, the checklist gives an overview of the alternative options and normative assumptions in the literature, and points to any remaining research gaps. Beside the academic debate, this is relevant for practical policy analysts who need to make methodological choices for their policy questions at hand.
Zum Begriff der Transparenz : politikbezogene Vorstellungen, kognitive Bezüge und medial vermittelte Bilder
(2015) Zipfel, Theodor; Brettschneider, Frank
Transparency is a very frequently used term but it is also a volatile one. Frequently, the semantic content and conceptual imagination of the figurative meaning of the word in linguistic usage is kept relatively vague. This paper thus pursues the objective of contributing towards establishing the understanding of the term transparency. To this end, the linguistic and epistemological bases of analysing a term were first explained and the theoretical and methodical basis for the study was elaborated. Based on this, lexical information on the conveyed meaning of the word transparency was analysed. This analysis formed the basis for a qualitative analysis of the content of specialised texts from politics, where it was possible to demonstrate that the content of the term by its definition is far more complex than presented in dictionaries; that more than anything else, subject-related and object-related references of notions of the term need to be differentiated. In addition, the manifold dimensions of usage of the politics related term of transparency were defined and the functional meaning transparency adopts in the political system was presented. The results of the qualitative study subsequently served as a starting point for a quantitative analysis of newspaper articles. The result was that more than a few conveyed the concepts of specialist texts in the newspapers. Yet, that is precisely where there are restrictions to the presentation, where the contents of terms become more abstract.