Aktuelle Publikationen

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Ever since Lazarsfeld and his colleagues (1944) seminal study, it has become common wisdom that election campaigns, if anything, serve the activation of voters fundamental predispositions. However, disagreement emerges on the role of partisan orientations. Although some authors consider them as fundamental predispositions, which are activated during the campaign and subsequently act as filters for incoming information, others argue that party attachments are simple running tallies of political assessments, which are constantly updated in response to campaign events, or decision shortcuts for voters innocent of substantial information. In this study, we scrutinize the role of partisan orientations in a direct-democratic campaign using data from a panel survey fielded during the run-up to the 2006 Swiss asylum law referendum. We find that, as voters accumulate knowledge in the course of the campaign, vote intentions dramatically converge on pre-campaign partisan orientations. Moreover, voters, whose earlier issuespecific and partisan orientations collide, tend to resolve their ambivalence in favour of their partisan leanings. These results corroborate the view of partisanship as a fundamental predisposition.

This paper evaluates, by drawing on Barry's distinction between 'power' and 'luck', the predictive accuracy of competing bargaining models. We explore whether models that take various facets of political power into account predict legislative outcomes more precisely than purely preference-based models like the Nash Bargaining solution (NBS). Our empirical examination compares how well different formal models predict the outcome of 66 legislative decisions made within the European Union (EU). A model that considers the saliency actors attach to a contested issue performs best among all the models under examination. Although resource-based models provide less accurate forecasts at the average, they offer relatively precise point predictions. The analysis also shows that domestic constraints are not a particularly important bargaining resource in legislative decision making.

This article reviews emergent literature on the effects of Eastern enlargement on EU decision-making. After recalling pre-enlargement hypotheses we inspect empirical findings on that issue. Whereas some authors stress a ‘business as usual’ reading of post-enlargement decision-making, others point out changes. In order to better understand the processes of post-enlargement governance we draw on three sociological group theories – oligarchization, formalization and adaptation – and assess their applicability to the case of the EU. While we present only preliminary evidence for each of these theories, our secondary literature analysis underlines that the complexity of enlargement demands a widening of the theoretical scope. In such a perspective enlargement research can contribute to more general debates about decision-making in the EU.

The objective of this article is to clarify the extent and the conditions under which the European Union (EU) induces changes in the policy arrangements of its member states. For an accurate measurement of our dependent variable, we distinguish between EU-induced policy expansion and EU-induced policy dismantling. We argue that the extent to which European requirements lead to an expansion or dismantling of national policy arrangements is crucially affected by the respective governance logic underlying the regulatory activities at the European level, that is: (1) compliance with EU rules; (2) competition between national administrative systems to achieve EU requirements; and (3) communication between regulatory agents across national levels arranged in an EU legal or institutional framework. To illustrate our theoretical argument, we develop hypotheses on the likelihood and direction of national policy change under these three modes of governance, in addition, providing empirical examples from different policy areas.

This article applies Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to examine how sub-national education systems affect the extent of social inequality in education within the German federal states. Variations in educational outcomes between the federal states can be primarily attributed to the strict educational decentralization in Germany. We examine four conditions of regional education systems presumed to be relevant for the extent of social inequality in education: the availability of early childhood education, the development of all-day schools, the onset of tracking to different school types, and the degree of tripartition in secondary education. Altogether, we find systematic relationships between the variation of sub-national education systems and the extent of social inequality in education. The results indicate that well-developed early childhood education is necessary for a low degree of educational inequality. However, educational inequality is not directly related to partisan and socioeconomic determinants.

Compulsory voting (CV) undoubtedly raises electoral turnout. Yet does it also affect individual party choices and aggregate election outcomes? Previous studies have focused on partisan or 'directional' effects of CV in favour of, for example, social-democratic or anti-establishment parties. These effects are usually small, however. Using survey data from the Belgian General Elections Study, this article finds that CV primarily affects the consistency, rather than the direction, of party choices. In particular, the analyses suggest that CV compels a substantial share of uninterested and less knowledgeable voters to the polls. These voters, in turn, cast votes that are clearly less consistent with their own political preferences than those of the more informed and motivated voluntary voters. Claims that CV promotes equal representation of political interests are therefore questionable.

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