Aktuelle Publikationen

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We investigate strategic voting at German Bundestag elections. The common intuition about strategic voting holds that supporters of small party candidates split their ticket and cast a constituency vote for the candidate of a viable large party. We show that there is more potential for strategic voting than previously admitted. Based on the multiparty calculus of voting framework, we formulate a decision-theoretic model that allows us to take the full range of situations into account, that voters may encounter in their local constituencies. Applying this model to survey data from the 1998 and 2002 federal elections, we find that voters make use of sophisticated balloting, given the chance to influence the outcome of the constituency election. While the focus of this paper is on Germany, the approach we take is applicable to single seat elections in other countries as well.

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dc.contributor.author: Eder, Christina; Magin, Raphael

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dc.contributor.author: Mosimann, Andrea; Giger, Nathalie

Voters who participate in elections to the European Parliament (EP) apparently use these elections to punish their domestic governing parties. Many students of the EU therefore claim that the party political composition of the Parliament should systematically differ from that of the EU Council. This study shows that opposed majorities between council and parliament may have other than simply electoral causes. The logic of domestic government formation works against the representation of more extreme and EU-skeptic parties in the Council, whereas voters in EP elections vote more often for these parties. The different locations of Council and Parliament are therefore caused by two effects: a mechanical effect relevant for the composition of the Council when national votes are translated into office and an electoral effect in European elections. The article discusses the implications of this finding for our understanding of the political system of the EU and of its democratic legitimacy.

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In this article, we compare bureaucratic change in the European Commission with developments in the public administrations of the member states of the European Union using two standard features of the study of comparative public administration: the degree of politicisation of the higher management and the degree of openness of the career system. The empirical data shows that the Commission started as a public administration in the Continental tradition and over time partially moved towards the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian models. At the same time, the majority of the member states remained rather stable with regard to their position along the two administrative dimensions under study. We argue that none of the mechanisms commonly invoked to explain organisational change-functional adaptation, path dependency, isomorphism or policy windows-can convincingly account for the complete pattern and the magnitude of change that we observe in the case of the European Commission. While we find no convincing support for the relevance of functional adaptation or path dependency, the concepts of isomorphism and policy windows provide a more promising basis for understanding at least some aspects of the empirical development.

Recent formal and statistical research in political science and economics strongly indicates that various forms of political and social polarization increase the risk of violent conflict within and between nation states. The articles collected for this issue explore this crucial relationship and provide answers to a variety of topics: First, contributors address how institutions and other contingent factors mediate the conflict potential in polarized societies. Second, this special issue compares the explanatory power of income polarization with traditional and new measures of inequality. Third, the contributions examine how groups form and coalitions are built in polarized societies and how this affects political decision making. Finally, the special issue analyzes the interconnections between inter-state war, internationalized conflict and polarization. This introduction synthesizes the literatures that have been developed on the issue of polarization and conflict in the various social scientific disciplines. The authors particularly discuss the similarities between economic models of conflict and the so-called crisis bargaining literature which has been mainly developed within political science. The article shows the differences between 'polarization' and 'inequality' and introduces the various measures of diversity that have been used in the study of inter-state and intra-state conflict during the past few decades.

This article tries to provide a theorization and empirical analysis of the politics of gradual transformative change: How are political majorities built? Under what conditions is incremental path-shifting change possible or likely to occur? The results show three points: a) Policies are multidimensional and actors of a same subsystem pursue different goals. b) Actors can combine these different dimensions in ways as to allow for political exchange, and for the formation of variable reform coalitions. And c) the success of such mechanisms of exchange and coalition-building depends on the institutional framework. Empirically, the article analyzes major pension reforms in France, Germany and Switzerland in the 1990s.

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