Suchergebnisse

As the crisis of 2011, known as the Arab Spring, broke out, two monarchies in the region, Morocco and Jordan, faced the need to reform their judicial systems in order to preserve stability by means of constitutional reforms that would deliver both countries from poor guarantees of judicial independence and lack of transparency or efficiency. This research thesis will analyse the external and internal dynamics of judicial reforms adopted in Morocco and Jordan since 2011. In particular, we have chosen an important empirical field where the two most similar countries receiving external support to judicial reforms show a variation on the judicial systemic level. This variation is still unexplored and our knowledge of the dynamics of domestic veto players and external support to the judiciary could be further enhanced through comparative analysis of two most similar cases using a Most Similar Systems Design (Mill 1882). ; The European Union (EU) has, since the outset of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, developed instruments of foreign policy that promote and support democracy in countries of the Southern Neighbourhood. These programmes specifically address rule of law and the judiciary in order to support the strengthening of judicial independence and the enhancement of the efficiency of the courts.

As a result of the last enlargement the EU has become a democracy promoter developing a series of instruments that allowed a direct action with the implementation of the political conditionality; in the aftermath of the Eastern Enlargement the EU established the Neighbourhood Policy, ENP, in order to replicate the successful strategy of democracy promotion with the newly countries at the borders. After the enlargement, thus, the EU clearly became a democracy promotion international actor and the new challenges, nowadays, are those countries without membership perspective of the Union.

We compare the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and the Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT). Given the focus of this special issue on the NPF, we first theorize how the IGT can contribute to the development of NPF categories, but also how the former gains conceptual leverage from the latter. We argue that it is useful to consider jointly NPF and IGT as this expands the benefit of NPF usage for policy researchers—uncovering not only the stories policy actors tell but also what these stories mean in terms of institutional statements. We provide a demonstration of how the conversation between these two policy lenses may develop by analyzing original data on the design of consultation procedures in the European Union, Finland, Ireland, and Malta.

Consultation is a policy instrument geared toward stakeholder engagement in the formulation of primary and secondary legislation. It ensures certain categories of actors can access draft proposals, examine the evidence produced by government or regulators, provide comments and receive feedback. Using an original dataset of consultation design across the EU-28, we examine how variations in combinations of consultation design matter for perceptions of corruption. Using Ostrom's Institutional Grammar Tool (IGT), we develop expectations about the causal effects of combinations of formal consultation rules together with the condition of social capital, which captures important attributes of the context in which consultation operates. We test our expectations using set-theoretic techniques. Our findings indicate: formal consultation rules are rarely sufficient for mitigating perceptions of corruption, legally prescribed procedures are often replaced by informal rules, and the limited effect of formal consultation rules on perceptions of corruption is due to an incomplete design of the procedures.

The ExaNeSt project started on December 2015 and is funded by EU H2020 research framework (call H2020-FETHPC-2014, n. 671553) to study the adoption of low-cost, Linux-based power-efficient 64-bit ARM processors clusters for Exascale-class systems. The ExaNeSt consortium pools partners with industrial and academic research expertise in storage, interconnects and applications that share a vision of an European Exascale-class supercomputer. Their goal is designing and implementing a physical rack prototype together with its cooling system, the storage non-volatile memory (NVM) architecture and a low-latency interconnect able to test different options for interconnection and storage. Furthermore, the consortium is to provide real HPC applications to validate the system. Herein we provide a status report of the project initial developments. ; To appear in: the Proceedings of the Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD 2017), Vienna, Austria, 30 August - 1 September, 2017

ExaNest is one of three European projects that support a ground-breaking computing architecture for exascale-class systems built upon power-efficient 64-bit ARM processors. This group of projects share an "everything-close" and "share-anything" paradigm, which trims down the power consumption –by shortening the distance of signals for most data transfers– as well as the cost and footprint area of the installation –by reducing the number of devices needed to meet performance targets. In ExaNeSt, we will design and implement: (i) a physical rack prototype and its liquid-cooling subsystem providing ultra-dense compute packaging; (ii) a storage architecture with distributed (in-node) non-volatile memory (NVM) devices; (iii) a unified, low-latency interconnect, designed to efficiently uphold desired Quality-of-Service guarantees for a mix of storage with inter-processor flows; and (iv) efficient rack-level memory sharing, where each page is cacheable at only a single node. Our target is to test alternative storage and interconnect options on actual hardware, using real-world HPC applications. The ExaNeSt consortium brings together technology, skills, and knowledge across the entire value chain, from computing IP, packaging, and system deployment, all the way up to operating systems, storage, HPC, big data frameworks, and cutting-edge applications. ; This paper appears in the IEEE Proceedings of the Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD 2016), 31 Aug. - 2 Sept. 2016, Limassol, Cyprus. Its camera-ready version is provided at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7723536/