Aktuelle Publikationen

This article examines how party discipline and legislators' individual policy goals induced by electoral rules influence the likelihood of defections from the party line in the Bundestag. Using a new indicator based on legislators' explanations of their voting behaviour we find strong evidence that discipline, not policy cohesiveness alone, drives party unity. In particular, the allocation of offices by the party leadership significantly affects legislators' propensity to defect from the position of their party. First, holding an executive office reduces legislators' probability to defect by approximately 19 per cent. Second, parliamentary office also reduces legislators' probability to defect, although the effect is smaller. District legislators are not generally more prone to defect, but their propensity to defect increases if electoral competition increases.

Frank Castles ist es als Herausgeber gelungen, in diesem Sammelband eine Vielzahl von innovativen Beiträgen renommierter Forscher zusammenzutragen, die zudem noch über ein hohes Maß an interner Kohärenz und einen gemeinsamen theoretischen und methodischen Rahmen verfügen. Die Beiträge ergänzen sich gegenseitig in hohem Maße, und unnötige Doppelungen werden vermieden, so dass das Buch umfassende, aber dennoch präzise Aussagen über die Entwicklungsdynamik und die Bestimmungsfaktoren von Staatsausgaben jenseits der Sozialausgaben tätigen kann, die Castles in seinem einleitenden Beitrag (Kap. 1) meisterlich zusammenfasst.

This article reveals that the pan-blue camp has traditionally enjoyed a stable regional stronghold in eastern and certain parts of northern Taiwan. The pangreen camp was scattered but grew to form a considerable southern bloc from 1998 to 2000. Ethnic distribution can partially explain this geographical variation.

The authors focus on spectators judgements on the performance quality in opera. The results of a field study conducted in Dessau Opera House revealed the single components (e.g. orchestra) and the congruency components (e.g. congruency between the music and the staging dimension) which contribute to operagoers overall quality judgements. Spectators individual judgements were found to be highly homogeneous, with only minor differences between experts and non-experts. Implications for the production and the management of opera are discussed.

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Most scholarship on immigration politics is made up of isolated case studies or cross-disciplinary work that does not build on existing political science theory. This study attempts to remedy this shortcoming in three ways: (1) we derive theories from the growing body of immigration literature, to hypothesize about why political parties would be more or less open to immigration; (2) we link these theories to the broader political science literature on parties and institutions; and (3) we construct a data set on the determinants of immigration politics, covering 18 developed countries from 1987 to 1999. Our primary hypothesis is that political institutions shape immigration politics by facilitating or constraining majoritarian sentiment (which is generally opposed to liberalizing immigration). Our analysis finds that in political systems where majoritarianism is constrained by institutional “checks,” governing parties support immigration more strongly, even when controlling for a broad range of alternative explanations.

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If it remains true that the Commission is an essential component within the process of EU policy-making, changes in the organizational basis of this key actor are likely to have broader implications. Adopting this vantage point the article discusses the potential for advancing our theoretical and empirical understanding of the EU policy process by analysing the recent administrative reforms in the European Commission. It is argued that studying internal reform is particularly important as it structures and conditions the capacities and subsequently the impact of the Commission as an actor in EU policy-making. Put simply, organizational changes do affect policy outputs. Hence, studying organizational change in the form of administrative modernization - be it as a dependent or independent variable - should become an important task also for students of EU policy-making.

Clarifying the relationship between organisational reform and reform outcome is a central objective of students of public administration or administrative sciences. The last decades have witnessed intensive research efforts in this area. However, the added value achieved in theory development remains meagre, at best. This article argues that by systematically incorporating policy analysis conceptualisations, the administrative sciences can reduce this deficit and generate more advanced theoretical knowledge. By referring to the recent reforms of the European Commission, this article illustrates the potential of an approach that systematically combines policy analysis insights and public administration research interests. Public administration reform scholars are advised to concentrate their analysis on the nexus between organisational reform and reform output if their aim is to steadily improve the capacity for theory development within this sub-discipline of public administration.

From an international comparative perspective, the stability of autocratic regimes in the countries of the Gulf region is striking. This paper presents historical–cultural as well as economic explanations and proposes that the interaction of both factors constitutes a cultural-economic syndrome accounting for the persistence of authoritarianism. Macro-quantitative analyses demonstrate the significant influence of this syndrome, which operates through a mechanism of mutual reinforcement and substitution. Departing from this diagnosis, potential remedies are discussed: political and economic reform measures pursued in the 1990s are explored, and the Gulf monarchies are classified according to four ideal-typical combinations of reform strategies.