Publications

Il est essentiel de bien comprendre les questions de délégation administrative pour assurer la performance des organisations publiques. Le jeu du contrôle modélise la délégation comme un conflit d’intérêts entre un inspecteur et une personne contrôlée pour agir dans l’intérêt du premier. La présente étude teste des solutions alternatives pour surmonter le fait d’être « tire-au-flanc » présente dans le jeu du contrôle. Plus précisément, nous testons l’effet des incitants externes, tel qu’il apparaît sous l’effet de la solution de la théorie des jeux, par rapport au rôle des facteurs intrinsèques, à savoir la motivation de service public et l’aversion au risque lié à l’emploi. Les résultats d’une expérience en laboratoire ( N = 208) et d’une enquête ( N = 794) montrent que ni l’approche théorique des jeux, qui a inspiré le nouveau management public, ni la motivation de service public, qui en est l’antithèse, ne parviennent à expliquer le comportement des sujets. Au contraire, l’aversion au risque lié à l’emploi renforce le potentiel de contrôle et rend moins probable la possibilité d’être « tire-au-flanc ». Cette constatation laisse entrevoir une vision plus différenciée des attitudes des fonctionnaires en matière de risques en vue d’améliorer la délégation administrative. Remarques à l’intention des praticiens La promesse du nouveau management public selon laquelle les problèmes de contrôle de la délégation administrative disparaissent avec la mise en place d’incitants extrinsèques appropriés est trop simpliste. D’autre part, la motivation de service public, qui a commencé comme une antithèse du bureaucrate intéressé, ne résout pas non plus le problème de « tire-au-flanc » dans la délégation administrative. Au contraire, l’aversion au risque lié à l’emploi semble améliorer la délégation administrative, ce qui constitue un contrepoint remarquable à l’opinion populaire en matière de gestion publique selon laquelle l’aversion au risque est problématique pour les performances des organisations publiques. Plutôt que d’éviter de sélectionner des fonctionnaires averses au risque de manière générale, il conviendrait d’accorder plus d’attention aux domaines de la prise de décision administrative dans lesquels ces traits de caractère peuvent être bénéfiques.

Getting a grip on issues of administrative delegation is key to the performance of public organizations. The oversight game models delegation as a conflict of interest between an inspector and an inspectee to act in the interests of the former. This study tests alternative solutions to overcome ‘shirking’ in the oversight game. Specifically, we test the effect of external incentives, as implied by the game-theoretical solution, against the role of intrinsic factors, namely, public service motivation and job-related risk aversion. Evidence from a laboratory (N = 208) and survey experiment (N = 794) show that both the game-theoretical approach, which inspired new public management, and public service motivation, as its antithesis, fail to explain subjects’ behaviour. Instead, job-related risk aversion makes oversight more and ‘shirking’ less likely. This finding hints towards a more differentiated view of public employees’ risk attitudes to improve administrative delegation.

There is little doubt that supply-side populism associates with radical platforms of the left and the right. However, few empirical analyses have focused on the connection between left-right ideological radicalism and populism at the individual level, even less in countries where populist discourses are not only associated with the radical right. This paper considers the association between populist attitudes and ideological radicalism in two countries where left-wing populist parties exist: France and Spain. For that, it uses an approach to political ideology that distinguishes political-economic issues and political-cultural ones. Main results show that radically minded individuals, located at the left and the right of the ideological axis, display stronger populist attitudes in France and Spain. However, differences between the two countries exist that highlight the relevance of context-dependent associations between populism and other (thick) ideologies in the electoral arena. In France, individuals located at the extreme right of the cultural dimension tend to show stronger populist attitudes than those located at the far left. In contrast, in Spain, individuals located at the extreme left of the economic and cultural dimensions display stronger populist attitudes.

Numerous studies document that better-looking candidates win more votes. Yet the causal mechanisms leading to this advantage remain unexplored. We consider for the first time a potential trigger of the looks–vote association that has previously been suggested but not tested in the literature: exposure to campaign posters of the candidates. We test this explanation with German election survey data, which we augment with ratings—provided by MTurk workers from the U.S.—of the attractiveness and facial competence of about 1,000 district candidates. Confirming previous studies on Germany, we find that attractiveness is positively associated with candidate vote share (1.2 ppts. min–max). At the voter level, we find tentative evidence for the idea that the association is moderated by exposure to campaign posters: effects are in the expected directions and their sizes consistent with what we observe at the candidate level, but we cannot always reject the null hypothesis of no effect. In contrast to attractiveness, we do not find conclusive evidence for an effect of facial competence in the election considered. These preliminary results suggest that inundating voters with candidate posters, as in elections in Germany and many other places, might be a reason for voting based on looks.

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dc.contributor.author: Heisig, Jan Paul; Schaeffer, Merlin

Background: Communicating official public health information about infectious diseases is complicated by the fact that individuals receive much of their information from their social contacts, either via interpersonal interaction or social media, which can be prone to bias and misconception.

Objective: This study aims to evaluate the effect of public health campaigns and the effect of socially communicated health information on learning about diseases simultaneously. Although extant literature addresses the effect of one source of information (official or social) or the other, it has not addressed the simultaneous interaction of official information (OI) and social information (SI) in an experimental setting.

Methods: We used a series of experiments that exposed participants to both OI and structured SI about the symptoms and spread of hepatitis C over a series of 10 rounds of computer-based interactions. Participants were randomly assigned to receive a high, low, or control intensity of OI and to receive accurate or inaccurate SI about the disease.

Results: A total of 195 participants consented to participate in the study. Of these respondents, 186 had complete responses across all ten experimental rounds, which corresponds to a 4.6% (9/195) nonresponse rate. The OI high intensity treatment increases learning over the control condition for all symptom and contagion questions when individuals have lower levels of baseline knowledge (all P values ≤.04). The accurate SI condition increased learning across experimental rounds over the inaccurate condition (all P values ≤.01). We find limited evidence of an interaction between official and SI about infectious diseases.

Conclusions: This project demonstrates that exposure to official public health information increases individuals’ knowledge of the spread and symptoms of a disease. Socially shared information also facilitates the learning of accurate and inaccurate information, though to a lesser extent than exposure to OI. Although the effect of OI persists, preliminary results suggest that it can be degraded by persistent contradictory SI over time.

Quantitative comparative social scientists have long worried about the performance of multilevel models when the number of upper-level units is small. Adding to these concerns, an influential Monte Carlo study by Stegmueller (2013) suggests that standard maximum-likelihood (ML) methods yield biased point estimates and severely anti-conservative inference with few upper-level units. In this article, the authors seek to rectify this negative assessment. First, they show that ML estimators of coefficients are unbiased in linear multilevel models. The apparent bias in coefficient estimates found by Stegmueller can be attributed to Monte Carlo Error and a flaw in the design of his simulation study. Secondly, they demonstrate how inferential problems can be overcome by using restricted ML estimators for variance parameters and a t-distribution with appropriate degrees of freedom for statistical inference. Thus, accurate multilevel analysis is possible within the framework that most practitioners are familiar with, even if there are only a few upper-level units.

A number of studies recently have investigated party position-taking in multilevel polities. Given the attempts of federally organized parties to tailor their messages to their audiences, we investigate the voter side of the equation: Are voters sufficiently politically sophisticated to pick up on highly differentiated policy signals? Following common conceptions of political preferences, we argue that citizens have a heuristic view of party competition that is shaped by ideological and valence factors, where the latter are much less challenging to process than the former. Accordingly, citizens are able to differentiate only between the national and the regional party on the valence dimension. We argue that a valence delta between different party branches is most likely to be perceived in contexts of high media exposure, particularly when parties are in government. Results from an analysis of survey data covering 21 German state-level elections support those expectations.

While the Bayesian parameter estimation has gained a wider acknowledgement among political scientists, they seem to have less discussed the Bayesian version of hypothesis testing. This paper introduces two Bayesian approaches to hypothesis testing: one based on estimated posterior distributions and the other based on Bayes factors. By using an example based on a linear regression model, I demonstrate similarities and differences not only between the null‐hypothesis significance tests and Bayesian hypothesis tests, but also those among two different Bayesian approaches, which are also critically discussed.

This article investigates the deliberative abilities of ordinary citizens in the context of ‘EuroPolis’, a transnational deliberative poll. Drawing upon a philosophically grounded instrument, an updated version of the Discourse Quality Index (DQI), it explores how capable European citizens are of meeting deliberative ideals; whether socio-economic, cultural and psychological biases affect the ability to deliberate; and whether opinion change results from the exchange of arguments. On the positive side, EuroPolis shows that the ideal deliberator scoring high on all deliberative standards does actually exist, and that participants change their opinions more often when rational justification is used in the discussions. On the negative side, deliberative abilities are unequally distributed: in particular, working-class members are less likely to contribute to a high standard of deliberation.

The relationship between legislatures and bureaucracies is typically modeled as a principal–agent game. Legislators can acquire information about the (non-)compliance of bureaucrats at some specific cost. Previous studies consider the information from oversight to be perfect, which contradicts most real-world applications. We therefore provide a model that includes random noise as part of the information. The quality of provided goods usually increases with information accuracy while simultaneously requiring less oversight. However, bureaucrats never provide high quality if information accuracy is below a specific threshold. We assess the empirical validity of our predictions in a lab experiment. Our data show that information accuracy is indeed an important determinant of both legislator and bureaucrat decision-making.

This paper aims to deliver experimental evidence on the dispute between two behavioral models of electoral turnout. Both models share the idea that the subjects’ voting propensities are updated from their past propensities, aspirations, and realized payoffs. However, they differ in the exact specification of the feedback mechanism. The first model has a strong feedback mechanism toward 50 percent, while the other has only moderate feedback. This difference leads to two distinct distributions of voter types: the first model generates more casual voters who vote and abstain from time to time. The latter generates more habitual voting behavior. Thus far, the latter model seemed to be better supported empirically because survey data reveal more habitual voters and abstainers than casual voters. Given that the two models differ in their propensity updating mechanism in dynamic processes, a more direct test of their assumptions as well as implications with survey data is still pending. We designed a laboratory experiment in which subjects repeatedly make turnout and voting decisions. The result from experimental data is mixed, but more supportive of the second model with habitual voters and abstainers.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been a controversial issue in the European Union (EU). A growing number of member states and regions within the member states oppose the EU’s agro-biotechnology policy, resulting in a complex multi-level structure of policy-making. This study is interested in the regional opposition to GMOs and scrutinises the determinants of membership in the European Network of GMO-free Regions. In terms of theory, this study builds on the literature of policy diffusion. For the analytical purpose, we distinguish among four diffusion mechanisms: learning from earlier adopters, economic competition among proximate regions, imitation of economically powerful regions and deviation from national law. Our research questions are the following: How has membership developed since the foundation of the network? Which mechanisms explain the diffusion patterns observed? The empirical findings show that membership in the network has grown substantially between 2003 and 2014, which supports the general expectation that there is a diffusion of GMO-free regions. Yet, most new member regions are located in the same member states as the regions that founded the network. In other words, what is observed is intra-country diffusion rather than inter-country diffusion. The empirical findings provide support for the importance of learning from earlier adopters for the growing of the European Network of GMO-free Regions.

Can voters infer candidates' political orientations from their faces? We report evidence that observers make systematic judgment errors, ascribing their own political views to attractive or competent-looking candidates. Subjects judged headshot images of student candidates running in university elections (Experiment 1), as well as professional politicians from state election races in Germany (Experiment 2), according to whether the person(s) displayed held ideologically leftist or rightist views. While prediction accuracy was above chance level in both experiments, candidate attractiveness (Experiment 1) and perceived competence (Experiment 2) increased a subject's likelihood of attributing her political views to a candidate. These findings suggest that the value of face-based inferences in choosing the candidate who best represents one's views is more limited than previously assumed. They also suggest that good looks may help extremist candidates in presenting themselves as more moderate.

We draw attention to a simple yet underappreciated way of forecasting the outcomes of elections involving two rounds of voting: surveying the voters’ candidate evaluations in first round exit polls, poststratifying the sample proportions of reported votes to official first round election returns, and redistributing the votes for eliminated competitors according to their supporters’ lower-order preferences among the viable alternatives in round two. We argue that the approach is likely to outperform standard pre-election surveys, due to its better coverage and reduced measurement error, and the possibility of correcting for sample selection. We set out the practical details of the method and demonstrate its usefulness by employing a recent German mayoral election as an empirical case. Thirteen candidates were competing in the first round, while there were six candidates in the decisive second round. The runoff result was forecast two weeks in advance with an average absolute error of less than one percentage point.

How should small-n researchers aggregate the information collected during their research in an effort to measure the relevant theoretical concepts with high levels of validity and reliability? This article specifically focuses on the method of triangulation, which is frequently used in process-tracing approaches. We introduce and theorise different aggregation strategies commonly used in triangulation, such as weighted and simple averages or ‘the winner takes it all’ strategy. We then evaluate their performance with regard to their proneness to measurement error using computer simulations. Our simulation results show that averaging different information sources, in general, outperforms other aggregation strategies. However, this is not the case if poorly informed sources are biased in a similar direction; in these situations the 'winner takes it all' strategy shows a superior performance.

Detecting election fraud with a simple statistical method and minimal information makes the application of Benford's Law quite promising for a wide range of researchers. Whilst its specific form, the Second-Digit Benford's Law (2BL)-test, is increasingly applied to fraud suspected elections, concerns about the validity of its test results have been raised. One important caveat of this kind of research is that the 2BL-test has been appliedmostly to fraud suspected elections. Therefore, this article will apply the test to the 2009 German Federal Parliamentary Election against which no serious allegation of fraud has been raised. Surprisingly, the test results indicate that there should be electoral fraud in a number of constituencies. These counterintuitive resultsmight be due to the naive application of the 2BL-test which is based on the conventional v2 distribution. If we use an alternative distribution based on simulated election data, the 2BLtest indicates no significant deviation. Using the simulated election data, we also identified under which circumstances the naive application of the 2BL-test is inappropriate. Accordingly, constituencies with homogeneous precincts and a specific range of vote counts tend to have a higher value for the 2BL statistic.

In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir das Abstimmungsverhalten der Länder bei namentlichen Abstimmungen im Bundesrat im Zeitraum von der deutschen Wiedervereinigung 1990 bis zum Ende der Regierung Gerhard Schröders 2005. Wir gehen der Frage nach, ob und wenn ja, wann und in welchem Ausmaß der Bundesrat parteipolitisiert ist. Analytisch geht es um die Frage, wie ein durch originär sachpolitische Interessen motiviertes Verhalten von einem solchen unterschieden werden kann, das sich ausschließlich am strategischen Wettbewerb der Parteien um Wählerstimmen orientiert. Wir entwickeln dazu eine Analysemethode, mit welcher der Zusammenhang zwischen sachpolitischen Länder- respektive Parteiinteressen und parteipolitischer Motivation, also etwa dem Druck, der durch die Parteilager ausgeübt wird, aufgelöst werden kann.

In this paper, we present a method based on the CMP data to identify parties' ideological signals. Although our approach uses the same data as others, our method is different in that we distinguish the methods for the directional and proximity models which have long been relevant for the theoretical literature. We apply our method for all German Bundestag parties between 1949 and 2005. One problem with policy preferences is that various – and sometimes only slightly deviating – approaches lead to rather different results. Thus, we test our method in terms of its robustness using the Jackknife method. We also show confidence intervals around policy positions.

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dc.contributor.author: Linhart, Eric

Does proportional representation imply incentives for strategic voting? This article investigates whether adherents of themajor German parties voted against their preference in order to increase the chance of amajority coalition between their favourite party and the preelectorally declared junior coalition partner. Focusing exclusively on the PR vote, the authors test whether strategic voting is guided by expectations with regard to the coalition formation stage. To that end they use a two-step estimation procedure to simultaneously predict (in-)complete party preferences and sincere and strategic voting in a andomutility framework. Their results show that voters preferences, rather than mapping directly into party choice, are affected by their expectations on small parties re-entry chances.

This paper proposes an interactive mechanism between both tiers of mixed-member electoral systems to explain high-level linkage in West Germany, that is, the dominance of district races by the candidates of the two largest parties at the national level. The distinctive feature of the model lies in interactive effects in terms of expectation formation. That is, voters under mixed systems are assumed to utilize national-level PR results to form expectations which, in turn, are used to vote strategically in the plurality tier. To sort out the independent effect of these kinds of interactions, this paper develops a computational model and examines its simulation results.

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dc.contributor.author: Linhart, Eric

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.

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.

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.

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dc.contributor.author: Bytzek, Evelyn

Dieser Artikel untersucht die Koalitionsbildung in Österreich nach der Nationalratswahl 2006. Der Koalitionsbildungsprozess war insofern mit Schwierigkeiten behaftet, als keine der möglichen Mehrheitskoalitionen von allen der benötigten Parteien angestrebt wurde. Mit speziellem Fokus auf die große Koalition aus SPÖ und ÖVP, die sich letztendlich bildete, gehen wir den Fragen nach, inwiefern die Schwierigkeiten bei der Bildung durch die Konstellation der Politikpräferenzen der Parteien erklärbar sind, inwiefern diese Koalition ein stabiles Ergebnis darstellt und ob weitere andere Bündnisse über die rein rechnerische Mehrheit hinaus Alternativen darstellen. Wir verwenden für unsere Analyse ein koalitionstheoretisches Modell, das sowohl die Ämter- als auch die Politikmotivation der Parteien berücksichtigt. Ergebnis unserer Analyse ist, dass es keine Koalition gibt, die gemäß der hier verwendeten Koalitionstheorie eine stabile Gleichgewichtslösung darstellt, was die schwierigen Koalitionsverhandlungen erklärt. Unsere Analysen zeigen aber auch, dass die Alternativen zur großen Koalition nur unter unwahrscheinlichen Bedingungen überhaupt rationale Strategien der Parteien darstellen, so dass mangels Alternativen der großen Koalition eine gewisse Stabilität bescheinigt werden kann.

Dieser Beitrag zielt darauf ab, anhand von theoretischen Modellen und empirischen Daten das Ergebnis der Bundestagswahl am 18. September 2005 zu rekonstruieren. Der Sinn dieser Rekonstruktion liegt erstens darin, das Zustandekommen des Wahlergebnisses durch ein theoretisches Modell zu erklären. Hier wird ein Mikro-Modell der politischen Akteure verwendet, sodass ein Wahlergebnis als ein Phänomen auf der Aggregatebene auf die individuelle Ebene zurückgeführt werden kann. Zudem ermöglicht die Rekonstruktion Simulationen mit verschiedenen Kombinationen der Parameter. So können kontrafaktische Wahlergebnisse in hypothetischen Situationen erzeugt werden.

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dc.contributor.author: Pappi, Franz Urban

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Am Beispiel der CDU-Spendenaffäre 1999/2000 und der Flutkatastrophe 2002 wird untersucht, wie sich politische Ereignisse, die ungeplant als externe Shocks auftreten, auf die Popularität von Parteien und Politikern in einer gegebenen ideologischen Grundstruktur des Parteiensystems auswirken. Hierfür wird eine Verbindung zwischen den räumliche Modellen des Wählerverhaltens, die diese Grundstruktur abbilden, und der Berücksichtigung von Popularitätsschwankungen in Folge von Valenzissues hergestellt. Anhand von Skalometerdaten wird ein Politikraum mit ideologischer und Popularitätsdimension durch eine Hauptkomponentenanalyse geschätzt, der sowohl die Positionen der Parteien und Politiker als auch die Idealpunkte der Befragten enthält. Es kann gezeigt werden, dass das Grundgefüge, also die ideologische Anordnung der Parteien, selbst bei so herausragenden Ereignissen wie der CDU-Spendenaffäre bestehen bleibt und die wesentlichen Veränderungen auf der Popularitätsdimension stattfinden. Des Weiteren ändert sich die Bewertung der Parteien und Politiker vor allem bei der Gruppe der Unabhängigen, während die verschiedenen Parteianhängergruppen in ihrem Urteil recht stabil bleiben.

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dc.contributor.author: Pappi, Franz Urban

Eine Normalwahl ist ein hypothetisches Wahlergebnis, das sich einstellen würde, wenn sich nur die lang-oder mittelfristige Voreinstellung der Wähler zu den Parteien auf das Wahlergebnis auswirken würde. Von den Kurzfrist-Einflüssen wie besonders attraktiven Kandidaten oder aktuellen Sachfragen soll abstrahiert werden. Als Messmodell für deutsche Bundestagswahlen wird die durchschnittliche Wahlabsicht von Bevölkerungsgruppen vorgeschlagen, die Teil der deutschen politisierten Sozialstruktur sind, d.h. von Gruppen wie den Katholiken oder katholischen Kirchgängern oder von Arbeitnehmern und Gewerkschaftsmitgliedern, die ein dauerhaftes Bündnis mit einer politischen Partei eingegangen sind. Dieses Messmodell wird mit dem ursprünglich für die USA entwickelten Modell verglichen, wonach der Langfristfaktor durch die Parteiidentifikation erfasst wird. Anwendungsbeispiel sind alle Bundestagswahlen der Ära Kohl, für die jeweils die unmittelbar vorher erhobenen Politbarometer der Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, Mannheim, als Datenbasis dienen. Die aus der politisierten Sozialstruktur folgenden Wahlabsichten werden als mittelfristig stabile Basis einer deutschen Normalwahl nachgewiesen, sodass Normalwahlergebnisse von 1983 bis 1998 berechnet werden können.

Die Personalisierung der Politik wird in diesem Artikel untersucht als die relative Bedeutung von Spitzenpolitikern für die Parteiwahl (Zweitstimme) bei deutschen Bundestagswahlen, wobei die Spitzenpolitiker mit der Bedeutung der Parteien und der früheren Wahlentscheidung verglichen werden. Im Gegensatz zu einigen jüngeren deutschen Studien über den Einfluss spezieller Eigenschaften der Kandidaten wie Kompetenz oder Integrität interpretieren wir allgemeine Bewertungen von Parteien und von Spitzenpolitikern als die für die Optionen auf dem Stimmzettel unmittelbar relevanten Nutzenattribute oder Distanzmaße. Aufder Basis dieser Modellvorstellung, der diskreten Entscheidungsanalyse als statistischer Methode und der Daten der Politbarometer-Befragungen der Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, Mannheim, Schätzen wir die Effekte der Spitzenpolitiker auf die Wahlentscheidung in den drei deutschen Regionen mit leicht unterschiedlichen Parteisystemen (Westdeutschland ohne Bayern, Bayern mit der CSU statt der CDU und Ostdeutschland mit der PDS als der vor der FDP und den Grünen rangierenden Partei). Wir können zeigen, dass die Region für die Personalisierung wichtig ist, dass es keinen Trend zu stärkerer Personalisierung gibt, dass sehr populäre Politiker manchmal ihre Fähigkeit verlieren, Wähler an ihre Partei zu binden oder heranzuführen und dass bei der Interpretation der Effektparameter sowohl die Attraktivität eines Kandidaten für Wechselwähler als auch seine Abstoßungseffekte auffrühere Wähler der Partei in Rechnung gestellt werden müssen.