Aktuelle Publikationen

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In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir das Abstimmungsverhalten der Länder bei namentlichen Abstimmungen im Bundesrat im Zeitraum von der deutschen Wiedervereinigung 1990 bis zum Ende der Regierung Gerhard Schröders 2005. Wir gehen der Frage nach, ob und wenn ja, wann und in welchem Ausmaß der Bundesrat parteipolitisiert ist. Analytisch geht es um die Frage, wie ein durch originär sachpolitische Interessen motiviertes Verhalten von einem solchen unterschieden werden kann, das sich ausschließlich am strategischen Wettbewerb der Parteien um Wählerstimmen orientiert. Wir entwickeln dazu eine Analysemethode, mit welcher der Zusammenhang zwischen sachpolitischen Länder- respektive Parteiinteressen und parteipolitischer Motivation, also etwa dem Druck, der durch die Parteilager ausgeübt wird, aufgelöst werden kann.

How can the differing levels of voter participation in sub-national parliamentary elections be explained? To answer this question I start from the current literature on cross-national comparative research, and apply explanatory approaches from this literature to the analysis of electoral turnout in sub-national units. I focus on two competing influential assessments in the literature, institutionalism and cultural modernization. The first assumes that formal political institutions generate important incentives and habits that are capable of shaping and constraining voting behavior. In contrast, a cultural modernization approach predicts that cross-sectional differences in turnout are determined by cultural habits arising from the socialization process and societal modernization. The systematic examination of electoral democracy in the Swiss cantons shows that the differing rates of electoral participation in these sub-national units are primarily attributable to the strength of political Catholicism. In this vein, rather than differences in turnout being a function of institutional and electoral procedures, they reflect cultural norms in the Swiss cantons. Moreover, the findings suggest that cultural conditions may be more significant for electoral behavior on a sub-national than on an international level.

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Since the publication of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), scholarly interest in analysing the effectiveness and performance of education policy has risen again. The present article follows this path and presents the first empirical evaluation of the influence of national education policies on educational inequality in the European Union member states. We examine whether the availability of preschool education, an all-day school tradition, tracking during secondary education, a large private school sector, average class size and education expenditures moderate the relationship between individual social background and educational success. As a main finding, our multi-level analyses show that education policy affects educational inequality very differently, an outcome that is most visible when comparing West European and post-communist countries.

Anticipating the future is both a social obligation and intellectual challenge that no scientific discipline can escape. The field of international studies is no exception to this, and we believe that few other disciplines reflect so deeply about their own capacity to provide accurate forecasts and to deliver useful early warning schemes.

Political scientists have increasingly focused on causal processes that operate not solely on mean differences but on other stochastic characteristics of the distribution of a dependent variable. This paper surveys important statistical tools used to assess data in situations where the entire distribution of values is of interest. We first outline three broad conditions under which stochastic process methods are applicable and show that these conditions cover many domains of social inquiry. We discuss a variety of visual and analytical techniques, including distributional analysis, direct parameter estimates of probability density functions, and quantile regression. We illustrate the utility of these statistical tools with an application to budgetary data because strong theoretical expectations at the micro- and macrolevel exist about the distributional characteristics for such data. The expository analysis concentrates on three budget series (total, domestic, and defense outlays) of the U.S. government for 1800–2004.

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Der Artikel untersucht, welche Faktoren den Berufserfolg von Karrierediplomaten im deutschen Auswärtigen Dienst bestimmen. Ausgehend vom Sozialisations- und Rational-Choice-Ansatz konstruieren wir zwei Modelle, deren Erklärungskraft wir anschließend anhand von Daten aus vier Berufseinstiegskohorten (Attaché-Lehrgänge 1970 1973) evaluieren.
Die statistische Analyse einer systematischen Befragung zeigt, dass der Berufserfolg stärker durch Aspekte des Karrierekalküls, wie etwa Netzwerkarbeit und Konformismus, als durch gruppenspezifische Charakteristika, wie den Amtskindbonus oder die Parteimitgliedschaft, beeinflusst wird. Auch wenn die unterschiedlichen Erklärungsmodelle schwer voneinander trennbar sind, erweisen sich die rationalistischen Faktoren für den monetären Berufserfolg erklärungsmächtiger als jene Faktoren, die wir dem Sozialisationsmodell zugeordnet haben.