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Despite growing interest in direct democratic institutions, the empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional design and the actual use of popular rights remains rather sparse. The authors use a novel data set on institutional openness and test its link to the number of popular initiatives in the German Länder for the period of 1997 2005. Their empirical analysis reveals a strong and robust negative effect of higher institutional requirements on the number of popular initiatives in the 16 German Länder; whereas other factors appear to be of minor importance. They thus come to the conclusion that the comparatively high institutional hurdles in the Länder impose costs of initiation, thereby limiting the number of popular initiatives.

Dieser Aufsatz dokumentiert die Entwicklung der Politik der beruflichen Bildung seit den 1970er Jahren unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rolle der Sozialpartner. Im Sinne eines qualitativ-historischen Ansatzes wird dabei auf umfangreiche Primär- und Sekundärquellen sowie Erkenntnisse aus leitfadengestützten Interviews mit maßgeblichen Akteuren der Berufsbildungspolitik zurückgegriffen. Auch wenn weit reichende Reformen in der Berufsbildungspolitik kaum zu beobachten sind, lässt sich signifikanter Politikwandel identifizieren, etwa durch graduelle Präferenzwechsel der relevanten Akteure und durch die Herausbildung neuer Akteurskonstellationen und Koalitionen. Zum einen wird der Politikwandel durch die Auswirkungen der Veränderungen des Berufsbildungssystems auf die Politik ausgelöst. Zum anderen wird im vorliegenden Aufsatz der Frage nachgegangen, ob die parteipolitische Färbung der Bundesregierung darüber hinaus eine Rolle spielt. Hier wird argumentiert, dass Regierungsparteien durch gezieltes "agenda setting" und die Prägung korporatistischer Entscheidungsprozesse maßgeblich die Herausbildung neuer Akteurskonstellationen beeinflussen können.

In this article, the authors evaluate the origins of generalized trust. In addition to examining individual-level determinants, the analytic focus is on the political-institutional context. In contrast to most of the analyses to date, the authors conduct hierarchical analyses of the World Values Surveys (1995-1997 and 1999-2001) to simultaneously test for differences among respondents in 58 countries and for variations in levels of trust between countries with different institutional configurations. In addition, the authors extend the institutional theory of trust by introducing the power-sharing quality of institutions a rather neglected institutional dimension hitherto. With regard to the most important contextual factors, the authors find that countries whose authorities are seen as incorruptible, whose institutions of the welfare state reduce income disparities, and whose political interests are represented in a manner proportional to their weight have citizens who are more likely to place trust in one another.

In this paper we examine the transposition of European Union (EU) legislation in the twelve 'new' member states during the post-accession stage. To this end, we scrutinize the number of formal notice letters received by the new member states in the period from 2004 to 2007. Our analysis shows that there is considerable variation in the transposition behaviour. While Lithuania, Hungary as well as Slovenia are the best performers, the transposition of EU legislation is less effective in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and particularly Romania. The comparatively high number of transposition shortcomings by this latter country group clearly indicates that even the process of incorporating European provisions into domestic law is far from unproblematic, which suggests the existence of even more substantive problems with the practical side of implementation. The results of our descriptive analysis show that transposition failure is predominantly related to the degree of trade with the EU, bureaucratic capacity and pre-accession policy alignment. We conclude that in the intermediate-term increasing bureaucratic capacities and stronger economic ties with the EU may help to reduce transposition failures.

Review of Felix Kolb's book "Protest and Opportunities: The Political Outcomes of Social Movements" (Campus Verlag, Frankfurt/M. and New York, 2008, 341 pp., e37.90, ISBN 978-3- 5933-8413-9 (pbk))

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This paper studies the impact on public education spending of social democratic participation in government. By means of a pooled time-series analysis of spending in OECD democracies, it is shown that social democrats have increased public spending primarily on higher education. This finding is at odds with simple class-based models of partisan preferences (Boix) that predict a preference for non-tertiary education. As an alternative, the notion of a 'new politics of public investment in education' (Iversen) is presented. From this perspective, political parties are not merely transmission belts for the economic interests of social classes, but use policies and spending strategically to attract and consolidate voter groups. By increasing public investment in tertiary education, social democrats cater to their core electoral constituencies (for example, by expanding enrolment) and, at the same time, new middle-class constituencies to escape electoral dilemmas and reforge the cross-class alliance with the middle class.

The inauguration of Germany s grand coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) raises questions about the public policy performance of a coalition of ideological opposite. This paper turns attention to influence of coalition governments on the size of government in the German Laender from 1992 to 2005. We investigate whether grand coalitions at the sub-national level in Germany systematically affect government spending for education (including cultural affairs) and internal security. The article argues that the effects of grand coalitions on the size of the public sector are moderated by partisan politics but sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, government spending in the field of education is reduced when leftist parties are powerful in the Laender.

Social network analysis has been a particularly hot area across the social (and some non-social) sciences. How has this growth, in turn, affected the field of social network analysis within sociology, the discipline which has served as the primary home of social network analysis over the last several decades? In order to answer this question, we examined the citation patterns of the social network papers in the two leading general sociology journals, the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology, from 1990-2005, focusing on the body of literature that was cited by at least two social network papers in a given year. We produced two network snapshots of the social network canon during this period. These analyses reveal a combination of great change and substantial continuity. There was a substantial increase in interest in social networks in sociology throughout this period, and, in particular, an enormous rise in interest in small world issues, coupled with the abrupt entry of mathematicians and physicists into the sociology social network canon. However, during this entire period Granovetter’s work remained squarely at the center of the canon, with Granovetter (1973) as the most cited piece at both the earlier and later snapshots.