Pertti Ahonen
Biographic Data
| ID | 310905 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pertti Ahonen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pertti |
| FAMILY NAME | Ahonen |
| SIGNATURE | AHONEN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Jyväskylä |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-5492-1685 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Modern Antisemitism, Nationalism, and the Estate of Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Finland
Finland was an autonomous part of Russia from 1809 to 1917. Jews had no civil rights in Russia, and in addition, Finland was permitted to retain old Swedish laws, which stated that Jews had no right to reside in Finland. In the late 1850s, Tsar Alexander II allowed Jewish soldiers who had served in the Imperial Russian Army to settle in their station cities. The Jewish minority in Finland originally consisted of these soldiers and their families.…
Three Germanies: From Partition to Unification and Beyond
After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to the Present, by Hope M. Harrison
As a site of memory in contemporary and particularly post-1945 history, the Berlin Wall knows few rivals. Wherever one looks in the history of Germany, the European Cold War or its aftermath, the Wall looms large. It symbolises the division of Germany, the bifurcation of the continent into hostile blocs, and the manifold tragic consequences of the armed border that ran through the heart of Europe. It also evokes more positive images, particularly…
Comparing computational and non-computational methods in party position estimation: Finland, 2003–2019
It is often claimed that computational methods for examining textual data give good enough party position estimates at a fraction of the costs of many non-computational methods. However, the conclusive testing of these claims is still far from fully accomplished. We compare the performance of two computational methods, Wordscores and Wordfish, and four non-computational methods in estimating the political positions of parties in two dimensions, a…
Durch den eisernen Vorhang: Die Ära Brandt und das Ende des Kalten Kriegs, by Gottfried Niedhart
The existing literature on the twin topics addressed in Gottfried Niedhart’s new study—détente in Europe in general and West German Ostpolitik in particular—is not exactly scarce. Numerous scholars have made insightful contributions in this area during the past few decades, and additional works continue to emerge at a steady clip. The period of Willy Brandt’s tenure as chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1969 and 1974, on which …
The contents of the National Audit Office of Finland performance audits, 2001–2016
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a qualitative, computationally assisted examination of prominent content patterns in the 2001–2016 National Audit Office of Finland (NAOF) performance audit reports and foremost changes in these patterns. Design/methodology/approach Without ex ante researcher decisions on which content elements are important, the authors use computational content analysis of topic modelling for detecting content pat…
People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Second World War and Its Aftermath
Europe has a long history of state-led population displacement on ethnic grounds. The nationalist argument of ethnic homogeneity has been a crucial factor in the mapping of the continent. At no time has this been more the case than during and after the Second World War. Both under the aggressive expansionism of the Third Reich and after Germany's defeat, millions were brutally forced out of their homelands. Presenting a history from the top as we…
Transparency in algorithmic decision-making: Ideational tensions and conceptual shifts in Finland
This article uses a theoretical and methodological framework derived from the political theorist Quentin Skinner and the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck to examine ideational and conceptual tensions and shifts related to the transparency of algorithmic and other automatic governmental decision-making in Finland. Most of the research material comprises national and international official documents and semi-structured expert interviews. In …
Of Walls and Fences: Brexit and the History of Cross-Border Migration
Champions of Brexit have employed a large arsenal of arguments to boost their case for a Britain better off on its own, freed from its current European entanglements. All kinds of supposed ills have been linked to the country’s EU membership in British public debates over the years, ranging from petty bureaucratic absurdities, such as directives regarding crooked bananas, to heavy-handed rulings on higher matters of domestic and foreign policy. L…
Different Germans, Many Germanies: New Transatlantic Perspectives
This far-ranging edited volume is constructed around an ambitious intellectual agenda. As Konrad H. Jarausch and Harald Wenzel explain in the introduction, the intention is to challenge prevailing Anglo-American perceptions of modern Germany, particularly an excessive preoccupation with Nazism, war and genocide, which has left many scholars ‘trapped in a negative perception of the past’ (p. 1). To widen the parameters of mainstream trans-Atlantic…
Europe and refugees: 1938 And 2015–16
Ahonen attempts to provide some historical contextualization for the refugee crisis that has dominated much of European public and political debate since 2015. He draws comparisons between the crisis-ridden present and the decade of the previous century that was particularly laden with anticipation of disaster and doom: the 1930s. More specifically, his article explores parallels in public discussions of refugees by European political leaders and…
Jeffrey Herf. Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967–1989
nonPeerReviewed
States of Division: Border and Boundary Formation in Cold War Rural Germany, by Sagi Schaefer
Until about two decades ago, the standard Western narrative of the history of the ‘Iron Curtain’ in Cold War Europe used to be a straightforward story. The Communist East had imposed the barrier actively and unilaterally, and the West had reacted by consistently denouncing and opposing it. More recently, a revisionist historiography has emerged to challenge this interpretation. According to the new scholarship (the most prominent example of which…
Germany and the Aftermath of the Second World War
peerReviewed
A Weberian Study of Small, Prosperous Democracies: Comparing New Zealand and Finland
Max Weber constructed ideal types highlighting economic, social, political, or other values in objects of inquiry to utilize these ideal types in empirical studies. In this article, Weber’s ideal type, the ideal type of Herrschaft—“domination”—is adapted first to examine New Zealand, and using New Zealand as baseline to next examine Finland. The asymmetric comparative design is applied along three dimensions of domination. In an economic dimensio…
Berliner Luftmenschen: Osteuropäisch-jüdische Migranten in der Weimarer Republik, by Anne-Christin SassVerfolgt von Land zu Land: Jüdische Flüchtlinge in Westeuropa 1938–1944, by Insa Meinen and Ahlri…
Migration history has come a long way in the past decades. Long gone are the days when population movements, particularly those across national boundaries, were regarded as exceptional phenomena, precipitated by particular crises, and analysed overwhelmingly on the macro level through such processes as assimilation and integration into the receiving societies. Instead, drawing on insights offered by Eugene M. Kulischer and others as early as the …
Institutionalizing Big Data methods in social and political research
We expect Big Data methods to contribute to research with results that are not inferior to those attained in other ways but possibly better, or hard or impossible to generate in other ways. Those who apply these methods may also aspire to augment the arsenal of research methods, offer surrogates for existing research designs, and re-orient research. Moreover, we can critically examine the institutional, societal and political effects of the Big D…
Holdings of National and Local Governments in Companies in Finland: Persistence and Change in the Longer Term
Applying an approach of neo‐institutional research, this article examines the history of company holdings of the national government and local governments in Finland in the longer term. The article examines the genealogy of the institutional forms of these holdings, the diffusion, adoption and adaptation of these forms, and the political legitimacy of new forms and the political de‐legitimation of earlier forms. For theory, the results indicate t…
Aspects of the institutionalization of evaluation in Finland: Basic, agency, process and change
This article draws on neo-institutional theoretical ideas to empirically examine the institutionalization of evaluation in the national government of Finland. The results indicate ambiguity in the basic institutionalization of Finnish evaluation, and imprecision in the agency of the actors that carry out or commission evaluations or utilize the evaluation results. Some Finnish institutional practices of evaluation enhance formal rationality such …
On Forced Migrations: Transnational Realities and National Narratives in Post-1945 (West) Germany
This article examines tensions between the transnational realities of the extensive forced migrations that accompanied the end of the Second World War in Europe and the nationally focused public portrayals of those forced migrations that have prevailed in individual European countries since the war. The article does so through a case study of West Germany, which became home to some eight million forced migrants defined as ethnic Germans. It argue…
Administrative Research in a Neoinstitutionalist Perspective: Finland, Calling for Globalization, and the Rehabilitation of Public Administration
Applying a neoinstitutionalist perspective, the article analyzes administrative research in Finland. The results pinpoint contradictory official microinstitutional regulation influencing the research albeit moderated by flexible implementation, and recent institutional weakening in the status of the research field. Institutional trade-offs obtain between the limited global scholarly contribution of Finland’s administrative research and the domest…
The Legacy of the Second World War
In War's Wake: Europe's Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order
In the preface to this exciting new study, Gerard Daniel Cohen jokingly notes how members of his family thought that his project on European displaced persons in the aftermath of the Second World War was ‘interminable’ (p. viii). Fortunately, Cohen has proved them wrong in an impressive fashion, delivering a book that is worth every bit of effort invested in it. His monograph is a model of the genre of international history: a thoroughly research…
A historical theory of organization and management in Europe's Orthodox East: A Weberian re-enchantment of disenchanted rationalization
With my article I first and foremost aim to contribute with a re-enchanting historical alternative to the winning western model of disenchanted rationalization in organization and management. I also promote moderation to the dominance of organization and management theories of Northern America and core Europe. I spell out a Weberian ideal-type theory of Eastern Orthodox monastic organization and management, implementing Weber's advice to contextu…
The Curious Case of Werner Weinhold: Escape, Death, and Contested Legitimacy at the German-German Border
In the early morning hours of December 19, 1975, a shooting incident took place at the inter-German border, on the boundary line between Thuringia and Bavaria, near the East German town of Hildburghausen. According to West German border guards on duty at the time, the moonlit calm of a cold and clear winter night was disrupted around 2:25 a.m. by the sound of submachine-gun fire from the eastern side of the boundary. During the next hours plenty …
Taming the Expellee Threat in Post–1945 Europe: Lessons from the Two Germanies and Finland
This article analyses the process through which the dangers posed by millions of forced migrants were defused in continental Europe after the Second World War. Drawing on three countries – West Germany, East Germany and Finland – it argues that broad, transnational factors – the cold war, economic growth and accompanying social changes – were crucial in the process. But it also contends that bloc-level and national decisions, particularly those c…
Domestic Constraints on West German Ostpolitik: The Role of the Expellee Organizations in the Adenauer Era
The Ostpolitik of the early Federal Republic presents a puzzle: why did West Germany—a country that consistently denounced the brutal Eastern policies of the Third Reich and sought to present itself as a new, peace-loving entity—refuse to normalize its relations with most East European countries until the early 1970s? The existing literature has explained Bonn's behavior primarily with reference to foreign policy calculations, such as the need to…
Transparency in algorithmic decision-making: Ideational tensions and conceptual shifts in Finland
This article uses a theoretical and methodological framework derived from the political theorist Quentin Skinner and the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck to examine ideational and conceptual tensions and shifts related to the transparency of algorithmic and other automatic governmental decision-making in Finland. Most of the research material comprises national and international official documents and semi-structured expert interviews. In …
Europe and refugees: 1938 And 2015–16
Ahonen attempts to provide some historical contextualization for the refugee crisis that has dominated much of European public and political debate since 2015. He draws comparisons between the crisis-ridden present and the decade of the previous century that was particularly laden with anticipation of disaster and doom: the 1930s. More specifically, his article explores parallels in public discussions of refugees by European political leaders and…
Aspects of the institutionalization of evaluation in Finland: Basic, agency, process and change
This article draws on neo-institutional theoretical ideas to empirically examine the institutionalization of evaluation in the national government of Finland. The results indicate ambiguity in the basic institutionalization of Finnish evaluation, and imprecision in the agency of the actors that carry out or commission evaluations or utilize the evaluation results. Some Finnish institutional practices of evaluation enhance formal rationality such …
Looking for governance configurations of European welfare states
Franz‐Josef Strauss and the German nuclear question, 1956–1962
Comparing computational and non-computational methods in party position estimation: Finland, 2003–2019
It is often claimed that computational methods for examining textual data give good enough party position estimates at a fraction of the costs of many non-computational methods. However, the conclusive testing of these claims is still far from fully accomplished. We compare the performance of two computational methods, Wordscores and Wordfish, and four non-computational methods in estimating the political positions of parties in two dimensions, a…
Germany and the Aftermath of the Second World War
peerReviewed
On Forced Migrations: Transnational Realities and National Narratives in Post-1945 (West) Germany
This article examines tensions between the transnational realities of the extensive forced migrations that accompanied the end of the Second World War in Europe and the nationally focused public portrayals of those forced migrations that have prevailed in individual European countries since the war. The article does so through a case study of West Germany, which became home to some eight million forced migrants defined as ethnic Germans. It argue…
The Curious Case of Werner Weinhold: Escape, Death, and Contested Legitimacy at the German-German Border
In the early morning hours of December 19, 1975, a shooting incident took place at the inter-German border, on the boundary line between Thuringia and Bavaria, near the East German town of Hildburghausen. According to West German border guards on duty at the time, the moonlit calm of a cold and clear winter night was disrupted around 2:25 a.m. by the sound of submachine-gun fire from the eastern side of the boundary. During the next hours plenty …
The Berlin Wall and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany
The Berlin Wall was a key site of contestation between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic in their Cold War struggle over political legitimacy. On both sides, the Wall became a tool in intense publicity battles aimed at building legitimacy and collective identity at home, and undermining them in the other Germany. The public perceptions and politicized uses of the barrier evolved through stages that reflected the relative for…
Franz‐Josef Strauss and the German nuclear question, 1956–1962
Domestic Constraints on West German Ostpolitik: The Role of the Expellee Organizations in the Adenauer Era
The Ostpolitik of the early Federal Republic presents a puzzle: why did West Germany—a country that consistently denounced the brutal Eastern policies of the Third Reich and sought to present itself as a new, peace-loving entity—refuse to normalize its relations with most East European countries until the early 1970s? The existing literature has explained Bonn's behavior primarily with reference to foreign policy calculations, such as the need to…
General considerations and user experiences of project cycle management in a small donor-transitional country context
Promoted by the EC in 1993, project cycle management (PCM) helps project planning, managment and evaluation. This article analyses a feasibility and planning exercise for a specific project between a small donor country and a transitional, developing country. It focuses on generic questions about PCM, based on the hypotheses: PCM should be applied flexibly; it tends to exert unintended conditions on its use; new professionals may get carried away…
After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe, 1945-1990
This book connects two central problems encountered by the Federal Republic of Germany prior to reunification in 1990, both of them rooted in the Second World War. Domestically, the country had to integrate eight million expellees forced out of their homes in Central and Eastern Europe as a result of the lost war. Externally, it had to reestablish relations with Eastern Europe, despite the burdens of the Nazi past, the expulsions, and the ongoing…
Taming the Expellee Threat in Post–1945 Europe: Lessons from the Two Germanies and Finland
This article analyses the process through which the dangers posed by millions of forced migrants were defused in continental Europe after the Second World War. Drawing on three countries – West Germany, East Germany and Finland – it argues that broad, transnational factors – the cold war, economic growth and accompanying social changes – were crucial in the process. But it also contends that bloc-level and national decisions, particularly those c…
Looking for governance configurations of European welfare states
Ethnonationalism in European East – west borderlands: Weltanschauungen in the European Union and Central and Eastern Europe ∗ 1
Defining ‘Europe’ is ultimately an impossible task. ‘Europe’ is an ‘essentially contested concept’: there is an incessant political – rhetorical struggle about what ‘Europe’ involves. Against this
The Berlin Wall and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany
The Berlin Wall was a key site of contestation between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic in their Cold War struggle over political legitimacy. On both sides, the Wall became a tool in intense publicity battles aimed at building legitimacy and collective identity at home, and undermining them in the other Germany. The public perceptions and politicized uses of the barrier evolved through stages that reflected the relative for…
A historical theory of organization and management in Europe's Orthodox East: A Weberian re-enchantment of disenchanted rationalization
With my article I first and foremost aim to contribute with a re-enchanting historical alternative to the winning western model of disenchanted rationalization in organization and management. I also promote moderation to the dominance of organization and management theories of Northern America and core Europe. I spell out a Weberian ideal-type theory of Eastern Orthodox monastic organization and management, implementing Weber's advice to contextu…
The Curious Case of Werner Weinhold: Escape, Death, and Contested Legitimacy at the German-German Border
In the early morning hours of December 19, 1975, a shooting incident took place at the inter-German border, on the boundary line between Thuringia and Bavaria, near the East German town of Hildburghausen. According to West German border guards on duty at the time, the moonlit calm of a cold and clear winter night was disrupted around 2:25 a.m. by the sound of submachine-gun fire from the eastern side of the boundary. During the next hours plenty …
Gilad Margalit. Guilt, Suffering, and Memory: Germany Remembers Its Dead of World War II
Gilad Margalit's book, first published in Hebrew in 2008, provides a far-ranging analysis of German commemoration of the dead of World War II after 1945. According to Margalit, German memory culture about the war has been shaped by the competition between two master narratives. The first—and far more dominant—is what he calls “the reconciliation narrative,” an apologetic account that emerged in both Germanys by the late 1940s. The reconciliation …
The Legacy of the Second World War
In War's Wake: Europe's Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order
In the preface to this exciting new study, Gerard Daniel Cohen jokingly notes how members of his family thought that his project on European displaced persons in the aftermath of the Second World War was ‘interminable’ (p. viii). Fortunately, Cohen has proved them wrong in an impressive fashion, delivering a book that is worth every bit of effort invested in it. His monograph is a model of the genre of international history: a thoroughly research…
On Forced Migrations: Transnational Realities and National Narratives in Post-1945 (West) Germany
This article examines tensions between the transnational realities of the extensive forced migrations that accompanied the end of the Second World War in Europe and the nationally focused public portrayals of those forced migrations that have prevailed in individual European countries since the war. The article does so through a case study of West Germany, which became home to some eight million forced migrants defined as ethnic Germans. It argue…
Administrative Research in a Neoinstitutionalist Perspective: Finland, Calling for Globalization, and the Rehabilitation of Public Administration
Applying a neoinstitutionalist perspective, the article analyzes administrative research in Finland. The results pinpoint contradictory official microinstitutional regulation influencing the research albeit moderated by flexible implementation, and recent institutional weakening in the status of the research field. Institutional trade-offs obtain between the limited global scholarly contribution of Finland’s administrative research and the domest…
Institutionalizing Big Data methods in social and political research
We expect Big Data methods to contribute to research with results that are not inferior to those attained in other ways but possibly better, or hard or impossible to generate in other ways. Those who apply these methods may also aspire to augment the arsenal of research methods, offer surrogates for existing research designs, and re-orient research. Moreover, we can critically examine the institutional, societal and political effects of the Big D…
Holdings of National and Local Governments in Companies in Finland: Persistence and Change in the Longer Term
Applying an approach of neo‐institutional research, this article examines the history of company holdings of the national government and local governments in Finland in the longer term. The article examines the genealogy of the institutional forms of these holdings, the diffusion, adoption and adaptation of these forms, and the political legitimacy of new forms and the political de‐legitimation of earlier forms. For theory, the results indicate t…
Aspects of the institutionalization of evaluation in Finland: Basic, agency, process and change
This article draws on neo-institutional theoretical ideas to empirically examine the institutionalization of evaluation in the national government of Finland. The results indicate ambiguity in the basic institutionalization of Finnish evaluation, and imprecision in the agency of the actors that carry out or commission evaluations or utilize the evaluation results. Some Finnish institutional practices of evaluation enhance formal rationality such …
A Weberian Study of Small, Prosperous Democracies: Comparing New Zealand and Finland
Max Weber constructed ideal types highlighting economic, social, political, or other values in objects of inquiry to utilize these ideal types in empirical studies. In this article, Weber’s ideal type, the ideal type of Herrschaft—“domination”—is adapted first to examine New Zealand, and using New Zealand as baseline to next examine Finland. The asymmetric comparative design is applied along three dimensions of domination. In an economic dimensio…
Berliner Luftmenschen: Osteuropäisch-jüdische Migranten in der Weimarer Republik, by Anne-Christin SassVerfolgt von Land zu Land: Jüdische Flüchtlinge in Westeuropa 1938–1944, by Insa Meinen and Ahlri…
Migration history has come a long way in the past decades. Long gone are the days when population movements, particularly those across national boundaries, were regarded as exceptional phenomena, precipitated by particular crises, and analysed overwhelmingly on the macro level through such processes as assimilation and integration into the receiving societies. Instead, drawing on insights offered by Eugene M. Kulischer and others as early as the …
States of Division: Border and Boundary Formation in Cold War Rural Germany, by Sagi Schaefer
Until about two decades ago, the standard Western narrative of the history of the ‘Iron Curtain’ in Cold War Europe used to be a straightforward story. The Communist East had imposed the barrier actively and unilaterally, and the West had reacted by consistently denouncing and opposing it. More recently, a revisionist historiography has emerged to challenge this interpretation. According to the new scholarship (the most prominent example of which…
Germany and the Aftermath of the Second World War
peerReviewed
Different Germans, Many Germanies: New Transatlantic Perspectives
This far-ranging edited volume is constructed around an ambitious intellectual agenda. As Konrad H. Jarausch and Harald Wenzel explain in the introduction, the intention is to challenge prevailing Anglo-American perceptions of modern Germany, particularly an excessive preoccupation with Nazism, war and genocide, which has left many scholars ‘trapped in a negative perception of the past’ (p. 1). To widen the parameters of mainstream trans-Atlantic…
Europe and refugees: 1938 And 2015–16
Ahonen attempts to provide some historical contextualization for the refugee crisis that has dominated much of European public and political debate since 2015. He draws comparisons between the crisis-ridden present and the decade of the previous century that was particularly laden with anticipation of disaster and doom: the 1930s. More specifically, his article explores parallels in public discussions of refugees by European political leaders and…
Jeffrey Herf. Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967–1989
nonPeerReviewed
Political science (30 works) · Law (27 works) · Politics (21 works) · Sociology (18 works) · History (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Economic history (14 works) · European history and politics (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · History (10 works)