Aktuelle Publikationen

Während der ideologische Raum für den Parteienwettbewerb in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland oft als zweidimensional charakterisiert wird, zeigen manche empirisch geschätzte Parteipositionen eine Eindimensionalität. Dies gibt angesichts gängiger räumlicher Modelle des Parteienwettbewerbs ein Rätsel auf, da die Parteien den Modellen zufolge die Zweidimensionalität ausschöpfen sollen, um den Stimmengewinn zu maximieren. Dieser Beitrag versucht - im Rahmen der Modelle bleibend - die eindimensionale Ordnung der Parteien zu erklären. Zu diesem Zweck werden die Annahmen der räumlichen Modelle überprüft und einige davon aufgehoben oder abgeändert. Vor allem lässt es das hier entwickelte Modell zu, dass die Parteien einerseits auf der Basis der Wählerpräferenzen ihre Position optimieren und andererseits die Salienz und die Nicht-Separabilität der beiden Dimensionen zu beeinflussen versuchen, damit die Nutzenfunktion der Wähler zu ihren Gunsten ausfällt. Die Simulationen zeigen, dass sich die stimmenmaximierenden Parteien zugunsten einer gewissen Ungleichheit der Salienz oder Nicht-Separabilität der Dimensionen koordinieren können, was zu einem gewissen Niveau an Eindimensionalität führt.

Fostering team innovation is increasingly an important leadership function. However, the empirical evidence for the role of transformational leadership in engendering team innovation is scarce and mixed. To address this issue, the authors link transformational leadership theory to principles of M. A. West s (1990) team climate theory and propose an integrated model for the relationship between transformational leadership and team innovation. This model involves support for innovation as a mediating process and climate for excellence as a moderator. Results from a study of 33 research and development teams confirmed that transformational leadership works through support for innovation, which in turn interacts with climate for excellence such that support for innovation enhances team innovation only when climate for excellence is high.

Bills adopted by the Bundestag hardly ever fail. Even under divided majorities in the two chambers legislative failure is a rare phenomenon. This fact has long been accepted as evidence against the popular complaint about legislative stalemate in the German bicameral system. However, it is not at all clear why we should expect to see bills fail in the first place: Rational political actors should anticipate a veto and refrain from initiating bills which are doomed to failure. The question then is why some bills do fail. Building on recent advances in Congressional research, we address this question both theoretically and empirically. We discuss two possible explanations for bill failure both rooted in the rational choice approach: incomplete information and mixed motivations. From each we deduce hypotheses about the conditions under which bills are likely to fail. We test these hypotheses using multilevel logistic regression and a novel dataset which covers legislative decision-making over almost 30 years.

Academic discussions have increasingly attested to the fact that state governments in the German Bundesrat represent partisan interests more than state-specific interests. This view seems to be confirmed by recent developments in which opposition parties exploit the Bundesrat to block the projects of the federal government. This contrasts with the behaviour of state governments in the earlier years of the Federal Republic, which were characterised to a greater extent by more heterogeneous interests. Using roll-call vote data in the Bundesrat, this article investigates to what extent preferences of the state governments are heterogeneous. More concretely, item response models are utilised to examine the dimensionality of the policy preference constellation. The results show that, besides the partisan left–right dimension, there was another dimension at work in the 1950s. The analysis of the roll-call data after German reunification shows, by contrast, the strong growth of relevance of the first partisan dimension.

Post-conflict societies face two distinctive challenges: economic recovery and reduction of the risk of a recurring conflict. Aid and policy reforms have been found to be effective in economic recovery. In this article, the authors concentrate on the other challenge – risk reduction. The post-conflict peace is typically fragile: nearly half of all civil wars are due to post-conflict relapses. The authors find that economic development substantially reduces risks, but it takes a long time. They also find evidence that UN peacekeeping expenditures significantly reduce the risk of renewed war. The effect is large: doubling expenditure reduces the risk from 40% to 31%. In contrast to these results, the authors cannot find any systematic influence of elections on the reduction of war risk. Therefore, post-conflict elections should be promoted as intrinsically desirable rather than as mechanisms for increasing the durability of the post-conflict peace. Based on these results, the authors suggest that peace appears to depend upon an external military presence sustaining a gradual economic recovery, with political design playing a somewhat subsidiary role. Since there is a relationship between the severity of post-conflict risks and the level of income at the end of the conflict, this provides a clear and uncontroversial principle for resource allocation: resources per capita should be approximately inversely proportional to the level of income in the post-conflict country.

Das Titelbild von Jochen Clasen und Nico Siegels Sammelband „Investigating Welfare State Change: The ‚Dependent Variable Problem 'in Comparative Analysis “ist treffend gewählt: Das halb-volle (oder halb-leere?) Wasserglas steht symbolisch für das Erreichen eines Scheidepunktes in der quantitativ ausgerichteten, vergleichenden Wohlfahrtsstaatenforschung. In den letzten Jahren hat sich die Datenlage zu Sozial-und anderen Staatsausgaben dank der Anstrengungen von OECD, Eurostat und anderen ...

How can the seemingly contradictory trends of international convergence of ethical standards and persistent differences in the shape and quantity of ethics measures be explained? This article presents a framework that combines explanatory factors for both trends and shows that they can very plausibly coexist. The framework is based on the logic of a principal-agent relationship as applied to the democratic system of representation and accountability and on institutionalist considerations of path dependency. Empirical evidence is gained from a structured-focused comparison of two case studies—Germany and the United States—which are described systematically according to the elements of an ethics infrastructure. As a result, it can be shown that the international convergence of ethical standards is mediated by institutional path dependency and specific administrative and legal traditions.

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For more than 14 years, one of the worst civil wars in Africa raged in Liberia. The fighting ended in August 2003. Since then, Liberia has enjoyed peace. But while many things have improved in the country, the political situation is anything but stable. The article gives an outlook on the situation in Liberia in 2007.

Scholars have argued about the impact of fiscal decentralisation on public spending for a long time without coming to any firm theoretical and empirical conclusions. In contrast to earlier studies, this paper looks at the impact of fiscal decentralisation across different types of spending. The conventional wisdom of a “race to the bottom” in taxes and spending as a consequence of fiscal decentralization is juxtaposed to the recent literature on expenditure competition, which posits that expansive local competition results in higher spending in fiscally decentralized countries. We argue that the effects of fiscal decentralization should be seen most clearly for those types of policies which are provisioned mainly on the local/regional level. Empirically, we find a robust and positive association between fiscal decentralization and aggregate levels of education spending. However, when looking at public policies provided at the national level (e.g. pension policies), fiscal decentralisation is associated with lower levels of aggregate spending. The argument is tested empirically by means of cross-sectional regressions as well as a pooled time series analysis of education, pension, social and total public spending in OECD countries from 1980 to 2001.

This article analyses the relationship between decentralization and the extent of fiscal discipline in the Swiss cantons between1984 and 2000. From a theoretical point of view, decentralization and federalism can be associated with both an expansive and a dampening effect on government debt. On the one hand, decentralized structures have been argued to lead to a reduction of debt due to inherent competition between the member states and the multitude of veto positions which restrict public intervention. On the other hand, decentralization has been claimed to contribute to an increase of public debt as it involves expensive functional and organizational duplications as well as cost-intensive, often debt-financed, compromise solutions between a large number of actors that operate in an uncoordinated and contradictory way. Our empirical results show that in periods of prosperous economic development, the architecture of state structure has no impact on debt. However, the degree of decentralization influences debt in economically poor times: In phases of economic recession, administratively decentralized cantons implement a more economical budgetary policy than centralized Swiss member states.

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One controversy in the study of civil war relates to the role that institutions play in ethnically diverse societies. 'Constitutional engineers' advance various institutional arrangements, ranging from democracy in general to specific constitutional and electoral rules as those mechanisms that help divided societies to resolve disputes peacefully. Political sociologists, by contrast, maintain that political institutions are largely an epiphenomenon. Synthesizing the two conflicting schools of thought, the authors examine how different institutions in conjunction with three forms of ethnic diversity fractionalization, dominance and polarization affect the risk of civil war. It is argued that groups perceive institutions as a constraint and that they consider the usage of political violence if they cannot achieve their goals peacefully. The examination of these conditional institutionalist hypotheses for the period between 1950 and 2000 shows in accordance with recent theoretical work that fractionalization can indeed be linked to low-intensity civil wars and that this effect is particularly strong in democracies in comparison to autocracies. Interacting the measures of diversity with different democratic institutions, the authors confirm that rules that encourage power-sharing lower the risk of war in diverse societies. The event history models moreover show that the combination of fractionalization and majoritarian voting forebodes badly for the internal stability of a state. Within the set of democratic regimes studied in this article, presidential systems are the most war-prone institutional setting.

In 2006, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf took office in war-ravaged Liberia as Africa s first freely elected female leader. She quickly turned into a darling of Western donors. But the transformation from failed state to stable country might require more perseverance than Liberians and the international community can muster.