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The Social Democratic-Green coalition government’s revision of Germany’s citizenship law marked a significant shift in the boundaries of German national membership. The introduction of jus soli (the principle of territory) has enabled children born of non-ethnic German parents to become German nationals at birth, thereby breaking the dominance of jus sanguinis (principle of descent) in German nationality law. This paper traces the origins of this shift, examining debates over the integration of post-WWII "guest workers" from the 1960s onward. The paper argues that the path to nationality reform is best understood as the unravelling of an institutionalized policy regime in the face of changed socio-political conditions and new principled ideas. The high degree of politicization that accompanied the amendment of Germany?s citizenship law reflects the continuing resonance of descent-based membership among a segment of German political actors and the difficulty of pursuing reforms in lieu of cross-party political consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on a specific category of institutions that are, it has been suggested, characteristic of Germany?s ?semisovereign state?, namely ?parapublic institutions?. Parapublic institutions are a heterogeneous group, united by the fact that they bridge the gap between the public and private sectors, and that they carry out important policy functions. Furthermore, they combine a high degree of autonomy in policy making (under a general supervision of the government, which rules out interfering in details), with a high level of expertise. The paper asks how these institutions have coped with the double challenges of German unification and European integration over the 15 years since Katzenstein?s original analysis. Three detailed case studies of parapublic institutions that have been centrally affected by these changes form the core of the paper: they are the Treuhandanstalt (the agency charged with the task of privatisation of the East German state-owned economy), the Bundesbank (the central bank that lost many of its former tasks to the European Central Bank) and the Federal Employment Office (which was challenged substantially after a policy scandal in 2002). The case studies form the basis for assessing the performance of parapublic institutions in a changing environment and help to answer the question whether they can still fulfil their function as ?shockabsorbers? in the political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of the paper ? European gender equality policy and its implementation in the United Kingdom and Germany ? provides a window on social policy making at the interface between EU and domestic politics. The paper examines the evolution of EU social policy in regard to gender equality in the labor market and analyzes how the British and German governments have implemented EU directives and EU guidelines of the European Employment Strategy into national legislation. The central question of the paper is twofold: How are policy input (EU directives and EU guidelines) and policy output (national legislation) linked differently in the UK and Germany? Under what conditions can welfare state resistance and resilience to reform be overcome in the traditional and new community methods? To explain variation in policy change through EU law the paper focuses on institutional and cognitive veto points and domestic actor strategies evolving around them. To achieve significant policy change through EU resources, i.e. change that does not leave domestic legislation predominantly intact, domestic political actor mobilization evolving around institutional veto points of the EU legal system or new cognitive veto points of the open method of co-ordination (OMC) are essential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper asks whether Peter Katzenstein’s model of ‘semisovereign’ governance, first published in 1987, can still adequately account for policy developments in immigration and integration policy in Germany. It finds that although the policy field has evolved considerably, and that the institutional configuration has changed dramatically, policy outcomes remain incremental, in that policy change is rare and gradual. The paper also asks whether semisovereign governance is an asset in this field, as originally postulated by Katzenstein, or whether it has become a liability, [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In already completed papers (Zuckerman, Dasoviæ, Fitzgerald, and Brynin 2002 and Zuckerman, Fitzgerald and Dasoviæ 2002), we show that partisanship is bounded -most everyone never supports one or the other of the major parties prefers its main rival at varying rates. Decisions about partisanship reflect the logic of appropriate behavior, which is torn between processes of social conformity and individualization, and the principles of out-group homogeneity. In this paper, we demonstrate that those who are just entering the electorate also display the characteristics of bounded partisanship. As would follow from studies of social networks and political socialization, the partisan preferences of their parents strongly influence the characteristics of bounded partisanship among the young. As would follow from the logic of appropriate behavior, young persons do not automatically and routinely follow the partisan examples of their parents. For them too, political interest and reinforcing social contexts facilitate the recognition of appropriate behavior. At the same time, our analysis provides very little evidence of young persons taking partisan stances that depart from those of their parents. In the established democracies of Britain and Germany the partisanship of the young tends to follow that of their parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores varieties of state intervention in corporatist political economies. Focusing on recent reforms in social policy, labor-market policy, and wage policies in Germany and the Netherlands, it suggests that the neglect of the role of the state in corporatist systems has led to a failure to capture important dimensions of how they adjust to shifting political, economic, and social challenges. Furthermore, it argues that the state’s role in promoting needed institutional and policy reforms has been particularly important during the contemporary period of fiscal austerity, slow growth, and intense pressures on inherited policy arrangements. In some policy areas, the Dutch and German states have worked within existing corporatist frameworks, while, in others, they have suspended, by-passed, or even dismantled them in order to secure urgently needed reforms. The paper concludes that the character of state intervention not only varies with the challenges posed by particular policy areas, it has also been shaped in important ways by the national institutional frameworks within which corporatist institutions are embedded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the theory-building portion of a larger project inquiring into the effects of war on the tendency of international rivalries to persist or terminate. The research design of the larger project, a comparative cases design focusing on the rivalry profiles of three different states (Germany, the United States, and Argentina) is discussed. Selected preliminary findings from the Argentine case are utilized in an effort to refine extant hypotheses regarding war and rivalry termination in an effort to build more nuanced theory in this area. The paper concludes with a discussion of one possible direction: a new categorization of rivalries, where different hypotheses regarding war and termination are expected to apply to different rivalry types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines two competing sets of assumptions about parties' priorities regarding political finance regulations. The central difference between these is whether parties view revenues as a means to a political end, or whether they instead view fund-raising as an end in itself. Each view yields slightly different predictions about the types of reforms various parties are likely to endorse under different political circumstances. The paper examines how well these propositions compare with actual party behavior during party finance reform debates over the past half century in Germany, a country where the issue has repeatedly surfaced. Experiences here suggest that even when scandals lend the issue of party finance high salience, parties are seldom willing to sacrifice sure economic gains for possible political payoffs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two parts. The first presents empirical evidence documenting the transformation of the German financial and corporate governance systems. The second part of the paper explores this case from a path dependency theoretical framework. It is argued that both institutions systems (finance and corporate governance) have moved onto new institutional paths (trajectories). The paper explores in particular the issue of exogenous versus endogenous sources of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the origins of national consumer protection regulation in France and Germany during the formative period from 1970 to 1985. Consumer protection appeared at the time as an entirely new area of public policy for both countries. Three different models for consumer protection ? information, protection, and negotiation ? set the terms of an intensive political conflict over the appropriate regulatory response. What strategy was eventually adopted depended on the way in which consumer and producer interests were organized in the country. As a result of this conflict, Germany adopted the information strategy of protection, in which consumers use accurate product information to make wise product choices. France adopted the protection strategy, in which state policy and legal norms work to insulate consumers entirely from product-related risk. The paper suggests ways in which these different policies may drive divergent product market strategies in the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network services reforms in the EU have stimulated a large new political science literature which tracks changes in national or sectoral institutional structures or policy making processes. This literature is strangely silent concerning the impact of these changes on the regulated firms. Taking its starting point in the telecommunications sector this paper examines whether the divergent administrative structures of Oftel and RegTP result in differences in market access and consumer protection in the German and UK telecommunications sectors. The paper concludes that these markets operate in a similar fashion because of the implementation of detailed EU directives. However, EU telecommunications directives do not regulate takeovers, which constitute a key aspect of telecommunications trade. Access to foreign telecommunications markets frequently takes place through takeovers. Divergent market structures in Germany and the UK shape very different perceptions of what an EU takeover directive should contain. Germany has changed some of its legislation to become more like the UK but these changes have made Germany more vulnerable to takeovers and to threats to its traditional ways of structuring its market. Germany’s new sense of vulnerability put a damper on Germany’s enthusiasm for an EU takeover directive while the UK wholeheartedly supported the proposal [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the political consequences of the electoral system of the Federal Republic of Germany, recently taken as a model for electoral reforms -or proposal for reform- in several democracies. In the analysis, particular attention is devoted to the political conditions typical of the different phases of evolution of the party system after 1949, with the purpose of inserting the ‘mechanical’ and ‘psychological’ effects of the electoral system in the broader political context. In fact, although the manipulative impact of the electoral system per se on the party system is undeniable in some historical circumstances, exogenous factors proved to be of great importance in enhancing the capability of the electoral system to give shape to the party system. Among such factors could be mentioned the strategies of the bigger parties vis-?-vis the smaller ones during the 1950s, with the parallel implementation of electoral reforms and the formation of ‘strategic’ alliances, as well as the repressive politics against extremists in the same years, the internal changes in the larger parties a few years later, the ‘learning’ process of the effects of the electoral law by the electorate in the subsequent years, etc. The historical analysis is of crucial importance for the correct understanding of the current phase of the German party system and the role of the electoral system in the near future, to which the second half of the paper is devoted. The national reunification of 1990 has brought about higher levels of electoral and parliamentary fragmentation, as well as an increased territorial differentiation of voting behavior, which stand in stark contrast with the stability and defragmentation of the German party system in the previous three decades. In this situation, the electoral system has regained political importance, both for its actual and potential manipulative effects, and for the revitalization of some of its features that had fallen into irrelevance during the previous decades, such as the alternative threshold and the surplus seats mechanism. The analysis of the post-reunification phase of the German party system against its historical background shows however that in the near future the electoral system is unlikely to contain, let alone to reverse, the current fragmenting trends of the party system, should these continue in their present form. The political conditions for electoral manipulation (strength of the PDS and existence of the alternative threshold, opposition of the Constitutional Court to a higher threshold of exclusion, increased influence of the surplus seats on the political equilibrium, etc.) are remarkably different now from those of the past, which leads to think that the near future for Germany will either be one of continuing party system fragmentation and more complicated coalition-building, or of sweeping electoral reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains variations in state compliance with the 1997 OECD "Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions."? In an initial phase of follow-up monitoring to evaluate each country's implementing legislation, this Convention's peer-review monitoring group found a surprising variation in the compliance records of the OECD's four largest members. While Germany and the United States 'satisfactorily' complied with the Convention, France only 'sufficiently' complied and the United Kingdom did not comply. Why did some states comply and others not? Given the Convention's optimal design, function, and normative basis from the point of view of compliance theory, this outcome is particularly surprising. Employing evidence from research in the fours countries, and focusing on the U.K. case in particular, the paper assesses three alternative explanations for the observed variations in compliance: unintentional non-compliance; strategic trade; and norms related to transnational bribery. The analysis finds that none of the explanations initially suggested by the evidence is complete, but that a combination of strategic trade interests and normative factors is at play. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study for compliance theory in IR, and theories of international politics in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the differential impact of media coverage on representatives' behavior across different electoral systems. Taking advantage of an original data set on newspaper circulation, of exogenous variation in spatial congruence between media markets and constituencies, and of the mixed electoral system in Germany I answer two questions: First, what is the extent to which media coverage influences the roll call voting behavior of politicians? Second, how does this effect differ between systems of majoritarian and proportional representation (PR)? I find that a one unit increase in the level of congruence between media markets and constituencies decreases a direct MP's propensity to vote in line with his/her party leadership by an average of 4 to 7 percentage points, while it has no effect on list MPs. I do not find an effect of congruence on absenteeism or committee membership. This paper makes two main contributions. First, it uses a new identification strategy to estimate the responsiveness of representatives elected through PR and majoritarian rules to media coverage. Second, it presents an original, highly disaggregated data set on newspaper circulation and MP behavior in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses an often neglected question in labor market research: to which extent do outcomes aggregated on the national level disguise occupational diversity in employment conditions? In particular, how and why do occupational groups differ with regard to the incidence of non-standard employment? To explore these questions, the paper derives a detailed occupational scheme from the literature, capturing the variety of labor market outcomes within countries. In a second step, the scheme is theoretically linked to the topic of non-standard work. It is argued that different degrees of skill specificity across occupational groups produce diverging incentives for flexible and long-term employment, respectively. This leads to the expectation of (some) service-sector occupations showing stronger tendencies towards non-standard employment than those in the industrial sector. Based on European and German micro data, the categorization is used to decompose various labor market indicators. The results clearly demonstrate the unequal incidence of non-standard employment along the lines of the suggested categorization. Moreover, the longitudinal perspective suggests that traditionally functioning occupational groups will be crowded out by more destandardized ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many realist explanations of French and British appeasement policies in the 1930s, including our own, assume or imply that policy was closely informed by intelligence assessments. One potential threat to these interpretations is the possibility that instead of intelligence shaping policy, the policy preferences of political leaders may have shaped intelligence, either through the politicization of intelligence or perhaps through the motivated biases of political leaders. In an earlier paper we demonstrated that the reports of British intelligence agencies in the 1930s were not politicized. In this paper we turn to French intelligence assessments of Nazi Germany in the 1933-39 period. Our general finding is that French military intelligence was consistently accurate in its assessments of Nazi intentions, but that until 1938 it consistently overestimated German capabilities relative to those of France. In terms of the politics of intelligence, we find very little evidence of French military intelligence assessments being significantly shaped by pressure from top political leaders for "intelligence to please." We find some evidence, however, that French military leaders deliberately inflated assessments of German capabilities in struggles to increase military budgets after years of neglect, that top political leaders were aware of this, and that they discounted some of these estimates. At many critical times, however, French intelligence assessments had a decisive impact on French policy, including the shift towards increasing reliance on Britain in the mid-1930s and the shift towards a more confrontational policy toward Germany after the Munich conference in 1938. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advanced democracies, it is commonly argued, are unable to prevent the permanent settlement of migrant workers because of the normative, legal, and economic constraints of liberalism. This paper seeks to qualify these claims by examining the politics of recruitment and settlement in two of Europe's archetypical guestworker countries, West Germany and Switzerland. While both countries responded to comparable labor market pressures with the establishment of migrant recruitment systems, guest worker settlement in Switzerland proceeded in a much slower manner than in West Germany. The paper's findings present a threefold challenge to our existing understanding of guestworker politics. First, the design of each recruitment system had an independent impact on settlement outcomes. Second, normative and legal constraints on the enforcement of anti-settlement measures were not significant in the Swiss case, and mattered in West Germany only subject to important qualifiers. Third, in both countries, economic imperatives were important, but not deterministic, factors in accounting for mass recruitment. To account for the findings of cross-national variation in settlement, the paper argues that each guestworker system was fundamentally shaped by two factors. First, program design varied depending on whether or not political elites could draw policy lessons from past experience with temporary worker programs. Where past recruitment had resulted in unwanted settlement, as had been the case in Switzerland, political elites sought to adopt policy provisions designed to prevent the past from repeating itself. Where past policy failure was absent, as was the case in West Germany, policy makers were less concerned with preempting permanent immigration. As a second critical variable, program design reflected the degree to which policy makers were able to operate autonomously from cross-cutting interests. Whereas the West German government could pursue recruitment relatively insulated from both business and popular pressure, Swiss policy makers had to repeatedly accommodate both sets of actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deindustrialization is regularly invoked in studies of advanced capitalism, yet a consideration of both its historical causes and its differential impacts on political outcomes in countries over time remains elusive. Adopting a historical institutional approach, this paper seeks to link the origins and effects of deindustrialization in Britain and Germany since the 1960s. These two countries are widely seen as reflecting different political approaches towards deindustrialization, with the former embracing and even accelerating the shift to a more service-oriented economy and the latter seeking to minimize the impact of such changes. The paper argues that variation in the British and German outcomes has been crucially shaped in the past half-century by the countries' respective political economic institutions and their contrasting national policy discourses on economic competitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many papers use regression discontinuity (RD) designs that exploit "close" election outcomes in order to identify the effects of election results on various political and economic outcomes of interest. Several recent papers critique the use of RD designs based on close elections because of the potential for imbalance near the threshold that distinguishes winners from losers. In particular, for U.S. House elections during the post-war period, lagged variables such as incumbency status and previous vote share are significantly correlated with victory even in very close elections. This type of sorting naturally raises doubts about the key RD assumption that the assignment of treatment around the threshold is quasi-random. In this paper, we examine whether similar sorting occurs in other electoral settings, including the U.S. House in other time periods, statewide, state legislative, and mayoral races in the U.S., and national and/or local elections in a variety of other countries, including the U.K., Canada, Germany, France, Australia, India, and Brazil. No other case exhibits sorting. Evidently, the U.S. House during the post-war period is an anomaly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration policy is shaped by the legacies of the past. Historical legacies not only mould fundamental attitudes and institutions, but also leave behind national ideologies of immigration that delineate the range of legitimate and viable policy responses. Is it the case, then, that policy choices must conform to a given immigration ideology even long after its first emergence? What is the scope for meaningful policy choice within a policy legacy's substantive bounds? This paper grapples with these questions by examining the relationship between Germany's legacy of postwar guest worker recruitment and subsequent policy choices on foreign labor recruitment in the 1990s. The failure of the postwar system to prevent immigrant settlement left behind a no-immigration ideology that precluded the future pursuit of permanent economic immigration. The ability of government officials to resume guest worker recruitment in the 1990s, I argue, critically hinged on their ability to devise a recruitment system that could credibly commit to the prevention of immigrant settlement. Policy makers succeeded in doing so by devising a system that - in contrast to past policy - was premised on worker rotation, the denial of family unification, and the absence of labor market integration. These policy features reflected a process of failure-induced policy learning that sought to avoid the past from repeating itself. The paper thus shows that policy legacies do not only have constraining, but also enabling effects. By providing opportunities for policy learning, legacies can create opportunities for policy innovation even within the constraints of paradigmatic path dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper theorizes antisemitism as a form of positive thought in the Marcusean sense. According to Herbert Marcuse, positive thought consists in the affirmation of the social and political order, the desire to perpetuate and intensify that order, and the concomitant repudiation of all negative forces perceived as undermining the positive order. In Germany, Marcuse shows, positive thought emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in response to the negative, critical thrust of Enlightenment and Hegelian philosophy. This paper argues that racial antisemitism is directly continuous with this tradition of positive thought. Antisemitism regards the Jews as the ultimate origin and quintessential embodiment of all forms of negativity threatening to disrupt, undermine, and destroy the national-racial order. The main elements of the negativity imputed to the Jews and surveyed in this paper are national and racial non-identity, parasitical existence, rootless nomadic life, and dissimulation. The vast literature on antisemitism-including the work of critical theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer, Detlev Claussen, and Moishe Postone-has often pointed out the antisemitic association of the Jews with one or more of these characteristics; but it is the concept of positive thought which best captures the common logic underlying all these different aspects. This thesis is illustrated by an analysis of the writings of Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933), one of the most prominent and prolific antisemites in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century and an important predecessor of Nazism. In addition to its contribution to our understanding of antisemitism, the paper also highlights the vitality of Herbert Marcuse's ideas for the development of a critical history of political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Never waste a good crisis! This has become the mantra of politicians and civic leaders facing fallout of the recent financial crisis. It declares that crisis can prove fertile ground for positive change, opportunity can spring from ruin, and that infrastructure, processes and institutions can be rebuilt. Financial downturns affect municipalities and regional economies especially acutely. This paper investigates the responses of metropolitan regions to crisis and its effect on collective action to the "opportunities" of crisis. To what degree does a common challenge provoke or strengthen collective action and cooperation between governments in metropolitan regions? To what extent, and under what conditions, does it exacerbate tensions and increase fragmentation? To answer these questions this paper explores the experiences of three city regions - Toronto, Canada; Frankfurt, Germany; and Detroit, USA - in previous recessions as well as the current downturn. These cases exhibit different patterns of regional and local responses and an analysis of these experiences will inform a hypothesis about the effects of crisis on cooperation and metropolitan governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of preventive war predict that states are most likely to undertake military action in response to a rising state if they expect that the rising adversary will surpass them in military strength and then engage in hostile behavior, which induces fear of the future and better-now-than-later logic. The most significant anomaly for the theory is British and French inaction when confronted with the rapid rise of Germany in the 1930s. In our previous work on the Rhineland Crisis of 1936 and the Czechoslovak Crisis of 1938, we demonstrated that the British and French non-response is not at odds with the theory of preventive war theory. French leaders were willing to stand up to Germany, even at a high risk of war, but only with British support. British leaders believed that it was too late to fight because Germany had already grown too strong, leaving Britain and its French ally with no good options. This interpretation begs the question of why Britain and France did not respond more firmly to the rise of Hitler and to German rearmament before 1936, either through military buildups of their own, a containment strategy based on alliances, or perhaps through coercive threats or preventive military action. In this paper, we address this important question with an analysis of British government documents and private papers. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for the theory of preventive war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship abounds on the importance of the city-region in the global economy, national and regional prosperity, the socio-economic implications of territorial rescaling and state restructuring, different forms of collaborative arrangements. But little is known about the implications of their emergence in a multilevel governance context, or their capacity to function as effective, legitimate, and robust policy actors. This paper begins to address the large question of what determines the governance capacity of city-regions. It focuses on sources of horizontal capacity as a function of the strength of intermunicipal partnerships. Intermunicipal cooperation is a form of regional governance that unites the participatory concept of regional governance with functional flexibility of cooperative networks. Research suggests a variety of determinants of the strength of intermunicipal partnerships from rational choice to institutional perspectives. This paper acknowledges the contribution of these approaches to understanding intermunicipal dynamics, but argues that none of the sets of variables presented to date can alone explain observed variations in the strength and capacity of city-regional partnerships. Instead the paper presents an alternative theoretical framework that reimagines and combines existing approaches, and introduces the concept of civic capital as a critical determinant of governance capacity. This theoretical framework is applied across three issues areas related to regional economic development in the Toronto (Canada) and Frankfurt Rhein Main (Germany) city-regions. These cases demonstrate that in the absence of an overarching formal regional level of government the capacity to function as a regional actor - to formulate, articulate, and act on shared interests - rather than simply exist as a functional space will vary significantly across cases and issue areas. The cases also suggest a link between civic capital and the strength of intermunicipal partnerships, and therefore horizontal governance capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between increases in unemployment and levels of economic inequality in Germany since the 1990s and support for the far Left, in particular Die Linke, or "The Left Party." Though the aftermath of German reunification in 1990 marked the definitive end of the "Economic Miracle" for the country as a whole, the effects of the climate of economic austerity have been particularly severe for certain groups. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which these groups within the German electorate support Die Linke and its interventionist and economically redistributive policies. Using data drawn from the 2006 and 2008 German General Social Surveys (ALLBUS), we investigate the relationship among voters' social characteristics, attitudes, and favored policy positions, on the one hand, and support for Die Linke, on the other. We find that support for Die Linke does not appear to be based solely on ideological extremism or economic pessimism, but also on beliefs about economic inequalities and the government's efforts to redress them. This evidence contradicts elements of conventional accounts that supporters for the far Left are simply "the losers" from economic modernization and suggests fruitful avenues for research on the relationship between economic decline and support for the Far Left across the advanced industrial world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For nearly four decades, coordinated market economies (CMEs) reigned in much of continental Europe and its most hegemonic exemplar was the Federal Republic of Germany. However, for the past twenty years conventional wisdom argued that this institution-based form of capitalism was exhausted and that neoliberal economic models were much more appropriate. But the 2008 international financial crisis and world wide recession have put a brake on calls for more neoliberalism. The paper argues that the rush to neoliberalism ignored deeper and much more basic issues: Why were these German and continental European organized capitalist institutions created in the first place? What ideas created and sustained them? What purpose did they serve? Which actors and social forces embodied them? The institutional and philosophical core of the creation of this model in the 19th century and its successful resurrection under more democratic auspices in the post-WWII years have powerful foundations. These CME institutions were founded at moments of economic crisis, precisely because liberal markets had failed or were woefully inadequate. Once activated, they were based upon the capacity to mobilize physical and human resources and to find comparative advantage without neglecting social infrastructure (Thelen 2004). Are these no longer relevant policy goals in the 21st century? To investigate more fully whether Germany and the EU nations with similar CME models would be wise to embrace their recent turn to neoliberalism rather than attempting to rebuild the spirit - but not the letter - of earlier forms of coordinated market policies, I will test the theory of path-dependent comparative historical institutionalism to ask whether a deeply embedded set of institutional structures, founded on a set of ideas requiring broad-scale and coordinated action that have twice before during the past one hundred and fifty years grown and then faltered, can do so again. The paper probes a question crucial not only for Germany and its role as the economic engine of the EU, but for industrialized democracies more generally. Is this form of organized capitalism - with deep, sticky and path-dependent late-19th century roots - capable of producing a 21st century political economy framework within the EU that can approximate the sustained economic growth, democratic political accountability, and social security and commitment to equality that characterized the developed democracies of western Europe in the second half of the 20th century? Put differently, is this a path toward a renewed European social model? The purpose for using this path-dependent historical institutional analysis is to discern if the institutional logic (comprising durable institutional structures and flexible visionary ideas) from these two earlier periods that could be resuscitated and/or reinvigorated to serve as foundations for a 21st century organized capitalist regime. The answer is not yet clear. In that sense, this inquiry is also joining a forty year old theoretical debate about whether institutions are sclerotic impediments to change (Olson 1965) or whether they can be imbued with properties of dynamic adaptation (Hirschman 1970). The specific indicators to be identified from these two earlier periods are those that comprise an institutional logic that built and reinforced the organized capitalist regimes and pre-empted and/or rejected dominant laissez-faire patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about leadership in the European Union is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including French-German cooperation, working in tandem with the European Commission, and the Union's relations with third countries.

A conference paper about economic reform and political radicalism in France and Germany is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including the emergence of Die Linke party on the national political stage in Germany, and the failure of France and Germany to reform their economies.

A conference paper which addresses the variance in the loss of functional control among states, citing Germany and the U.S. as example is presented. It gives focus on the outsourcing of military functions, which is said to be accompanied by a loss of control over the use of force. The strategies formulated by both countries resemble each other particularly when it comes to addressing the functional dimension of control on the political and social levels.

This paper utilizes survey data from the 1999 European Value Study to conduct a quasi-experimental analysis of the relationship between ideological consistency and policy preferences of Germany's mass public. Given Germany's division until 1990 it is plausible that respondents from East and West Germany grew up with different socializations in both systems, albeit a common language and cultural background. This paper models the influence of this diverse experience on ideological thinking, and examines the effects on the understanding of political issues. We argue that respondents' stances on policy preferences can be predicted from their left-right self-placement. The findings suggest that huge differences do exist in the ideological coherence and attitude structuring of respondents. Citizens in the East seem to understand the term 'left' quite well compared to Western Germans who lack giving consistent answers to a 'left' ideological position. On the other hand, Eastern Germans face difficulties in applying the term 'right' in a meaningful way. These results have crucial implications for recent debates about the structuring of beliefs and relevance of ideological thinking in the mass public, the use of ideological labels in the elite discourse as well as political communication. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an analysis of recent pension reforms in France and Germany, this paper argues that the advent of a climate of economic austerity has driven shifts in both the character of political bargaining and the substance of policies in the two countries. Not only have France and Germany continued to reform their pension systems, in contrast to popular conceptions of "frozen" continental European welfare states, the very political arrangements that many scholars have blamed for policy sclerosis in the two countries—dysfunctional statism in France and moribund neocorporatism in Germany—have likewise continued to evolve. More generally, the paper calls into question the common claim that pension reform tends to take place through negotiation and consensus. It argues instead that successful pension reform has followed an approach of "strategic unilateralism," which involves government imposition of reform but in ways that account for the political assets and liabilities created by the institutional and political contexts in question. The paper concludes that formal distributions of political authority may provide very misleading guidelines for both understanding political dynamics and predicting policy outcomes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Eric Voegelin's use, in his 1964 lecture series on "Hitler and the Germans" given at the University of Munich, of novelist and essayist Robert Musil's concept of "intelligent stupidity," from Musil's 1938 lecture "On Stupidity." The paper indicates that Voegelin found this concept peculiarly useful in describing how leaders and followers could have succumbed to the aims and governmental policies of the National Socialists. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of authors have argued that the decentralized nature of (Sunni) Islam combined with traditional religion-state institutions emphasizing corporatist structures have prevented the successful integration of Muslims into Western European polities. Muslim groups will not establish organizations along corporatist lines because they fear a loss of autonomy. Here it is useful to distinguish between corporatism as a system of interest representation and a policymaking mode. I question this claim focusing on four concrete issues in German debates on the place of Islam in German politics: the recognition of Islam as a corporation under public law, Islamic religious instruction in public schools, Islamic burial, and Halal slaughter. Toward the end of the paper I extend the discussion to Austria and Switzerland. I argue that institutional and structural arguments cannot account for the observed variation across countries and issues. In all three countries there is a corporatist bias in religion-state institutions. In Austria this bias is stronger than in Germany. Yet, in Austria Muslims in the 1970s took up the opportunity presented by legal recognition and established the officially recognized Islamic Religious Community in Austria. The decentralized and nonhierarchical nature of Islam did not present an insurmountable obstacle. At the same time Muslim organizations in Germany have made more progress on a number of issues than in Switzerland.Besides variation across countries I also show variation across issues. In all three countries issues surrounding Islamic burial have been resolved more easily than the other issues discussed in this paper. The lack of recognition as a corporation under public law prevents the establishment of purely Muslim cemeteries in most German Länder, but Länder, cantons, and local communities have found pragmatic solutions to most Muslim concerns. The case of halal slaughter in Germany also shows that the traditional practice of conditioning some religious privileges on corporatist organizational structures can be broken. Thus, corporatist organizational structures, or the lack thereof, present less of a problem for the integration of Islam than is frequently assumed. At the same time, the limited success of round tables shows that corporatist policymaking may not be much of a solution to the existing problems either. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes policies to raise the age of retirement in the period from 1995 to 2005 in three industrialized countries: Canada, Germany and South Korea. Over the next five decades, the populations of advanced industrialized countries are expected to age. As a result, governments are confronted with important policy challenges: how to provide income security, and how to cover large increases in pension spending. Retirement age increases are one of the key policy responses to these challenges, since raising the average pension age by only 2 or 3 years would enable governments to finance most of the costs of population aging. In this paper, we will analyze cross-national differences in governmental policies designed to raise the age of retirement, such as increases in statutory retirement ages, reductions of the generosity of benefits or closure of the pathways to early retirement. In order to explain differences among Canada, Germany and South Korea, we focus on the roles of the state, market and the family in pension provision and on the role of pension policy legacies. The three countries differ significantly along these dimensions: in Canada, the market plays a key role, in Germany, the state, and in South Korea, the family. In addition, they differ with regards to eligibility conditions, benefit levels and the existence of pathways to early retirement. We argue that these differences significantly conditioned the policy choices that governments made. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties seek power in order to accomplish their goals. Raw electoral power is commonly used as an indicator of political party power. However, such a distinction fails to capture the complexity of how parties move from setting goals to achieving them. Scholars such as William Riker (Riker 1962) and Michael Leiserson (Leiserson 1968) view political parties as power-seekers, yet power for them is not limited to electoral results or votes but extends to the overall picture of parties holding positions of influence both in the foreground of representative government but also importantly in the background as strategists, advisors, agency chiefs, and other appointed positions. Parties and their members often work to occupy a variety of positions that may appear less than prominent as they work behind the scenes at building their social capital and enabling their policy agenda. Even though scholars have traditionally presented policy-seeking as a supplementary goal to office or vote-seeking (Axelrod 1970; Lijphart 1984; Luebbert 1986), this paper suggests that policy and outcomes are frequently the focus of parties as they realize that back channels can provide the ability to accomplish policy goals. This paper examines the role of power and positioning as parties work toward goal attainment. It considers both intra-party competition and cooperation as parties work toward their desired policy outcomes. It argues that effective parties are critically aware of their relationship to other parties in their party system as they craft their platform and strategy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the welfare state literature implicitly assumes that labor movements everywhere would choose roughly the same set of institutions if only they possessed the power resources to do so. Sweden is implicitly or explicitly seen as the model, with a large public sector providing comprehensive social services and income maintenance during sickness, unemployment, and old age. That countries such as Germany and the Netherlands fell short of achieving this standard is typically attributed to the inferior power resources of labor movements in these countries (i.e. they had to share power with strong Christian Democratic and/or Liberal Parties) and/or an unfavorable institutional context. An issue which has received less attention is whether labor movements in Germany and the Netherlands even wanted to follow a more "Swedish" strategy. In short, labor movements have developed their own, nationally distinct understandings of the role of the state in the provision of social welfare and regulating the market. This paper asks how labor movement visions of "the good society" in Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany shaped their responses to pressures for welfare state restructuring in the 1990s and 2000s. To do so, the paper first compares and contrasts the ideas, norms and cognitive understandings embedded in the Swedish, German and Dutch social democratic cognitive framing of the welfare state and asks how these understandings shaped welfare state restructuring processes in the 1990s and 2000s. What were the core values that social democratic parties and unions sought to defend when faced with pressures to reform? How did the embeddedness of norms and cognitive understandings in specific welfare state institutions shape labor's approach to restructuring? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the German political parties' strategies towards immigrant constituencies in the Bundestag elections from 1998 to 2005. Ever since Germany became a country of immigration in the 1970s, two parties have silently profited from the immigrant vote while polarizing the electorate over immigration-related issues: while the Social Democrats (SPD) relied on the working-class Gastarbeiter vote, the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) received a large share of the ethnic German Aussiedler vote. The liberalization of the German citizenship regime in 1999, however, led to an enlargement of the immigrant electorate and changed its long-time equilibrium. Recent years have witnessed an increase in the number of Gastarbeiter and their descendants acquiring German citizenship, while Aussiedler immigration from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union keeps falling. This paper hypothesises that the 1999 citizenship reform has produced a new mobilization scenario, with the parties now actively trying to get electoral support from immigrant constituencies. In order to achieve this, they avoid immigration-related issues and increasingly nominate immigrant candidates in their platforms. Empirical candidate evidence from the IMMCANDS database shows that the German political parties indeed started moving from a polarization to an incorporation strategy in the aftermath of the 1999 citizenship reform. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent German parliamentary elections produced two parties claiming victory, the inability to form a government, and Germany's second post-war grand coalition government. This paper explores the contemporary dynamic of the German party system in an attempt to account for the present dilemma. It considers the strategy and motivation of parties and the effect of party competition. A key focus of this paper is to revisit and evaluate the predictive power of Otto Kirchheimer's "end of ideology" proposition as applied to the contemporary German case. On the one hand, Kirchheimer seems correct as mainstream, "catch-all" parties seem to be converging at the ideological center across Western Europe. At the same time, some party polarization within the party system is evident as more marginal parties such as those of the far left and far right have gained votes at the expense of the mainstream parties in recent elections. Perhaps marginal parties have become less marginal because of too much convergence. A third possibility is that both of these circumstances have produced a political void with voters becoming increasingly apathetic and non-ideological toward politics by the end of the twentieth century. This paper uses case study analysis as well as some quantitative analysis to evaluate the three propositions in the German case. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents empirical results from a study of the transformation of corporate governance regulation in Germany. The German corporate governance regime used to be the prototype of a network-oriented "insider" system. In light of the internalization of trade and finance, the efforts of the European Union to create a harmonized legal framework for the single market and the changing strategies of big corporations and institutional investors, political and economic actors find themselves under increasing pressure to move towards a market-oriented, Anglo-Saxon model. In our paper, we trace the patterns and driving forces of change in two areas of corporate governance regulation, namely internal governance, in particular the composition and the functioning of a company's board, and accounting/auditing. In both cases, we observe a substantial transformation as regulation has been brought more into line with Anglo-Saxon norms and practices. Yet, the comparison of the two regulatory fields reveals significant differences in terms of the outcomes of transformation as well as the driving forces and mechanisms. In accounting and auditing, processes of multilevel coordination entailed a high degree of convergence towards Anglo-Saxon standards and regulatory requirements. Moderate convergence and a much greater stability of the domestic institutional framework can be seen in the case of internal governance, where rule competition instigated regulatory adaptation at the national level. While the two relevant strands of political economy, Comparative Political Economy and International Political Economy, offer important insights for analyzing these changes, both fail to account for the different patterns of convergence and divergence in the two cases. Therefore, we argue that the political economy approaches have to be combined with a policy analysis perspective so as to capture the sectorally distinct interplay of national and transnational actors which was crucial for shaping the processes and the results of regulatory regime transformation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the game-theoretical dominant player concept and power indices, this paper introduces a re-conceptualization of single-party dominance that we consider to be more intuitive and less dependent on ad hoc criteria than standard operationalizations of the phenomenon. This operational definition is then used in the presentation of a few descriptive inferences on the incidence and nature of single-party dominance in the subnational jurisdictions of four federally organized parliamentary democracies, namely, Canada, Australia, Germany and Austria. The paper also reviews extant hypotheses on the rise and fall of dominant party regimes and discusses their plausability against the backdrop of our cases. We conclude that there are few, if any, individually necessary or sufficient causes of single-party dominance. Instead, nationally and perhaps even regionally specific configurations of factors seem to account for the rise and fall of dominant party regimes - a finding that underlines the necessity of further multi-method research on the topic. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the problem of explanation in comparative politics. Accepting the principles of methodological individualism, the analysis equates social mechanism with the general class of explanatory principles. Successful explanations join social mechanisms with rigorous empirical analyses. Advances in statistical modeling allow the application of these methods of detailing and defending the validity of the empirical claims to complex, reciprocal, and multi-level political phenomena, the stuff of comparative politics. The paper illustrates these general principles. It offers theoretical support for reciprocal political influence in households and it tests this interpretation against alternative social mechanisms, matters of importance in the politics of Germany and Britain, and it employs appropriate statistical methods to model these complex reciprocal relationships. More generally, seeking to demonstrate the power of the explanation offered -and not just to offer a plausible account or a story in line with theoretical principles the explanatory power of its claims -the analysis insists on the need of both social mechanisms and rigorous empirical tests. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the adoption of e-government reforms, particularly by local governments (cities and counties) in Germany. The paper attempts to answer the question: What factors do elites in the policy network believe are important to explain the adoption and implementation of e-government reforms in Germany? The research uses survey data and interviews with elites in the policy process. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Germany and Switzerland are both countries with a corporate governance system that is usually classified, in opposition to the ?market-centred? corporate governance systems of Anglo-Saxon countries, as belonging to the continental European ?Insider? or ?bank-centred? model. During the last twenty years, in a context of increasing international pressures (mainly linked to the liberalisation of financial markets), the regulatory framework of the two countries? corporate governance systems (company law, financial market regulations and accounting standards) have been considerably reformed towards a more liberal and market-oriented corporate governance system. In this paper, we analyse the political processes that led to these regulatory changes, which are not automatic adjustment and responses to new economic circumstances, but involve policy debates between the economic and political actors. In such a perspective, we can observe that even if the evolution of the regulatory frameworks went in the same direction in both cases, the political processes that led to these policy outcomes were quite different. In Switzerland, with its broad and encompassing political decision-making processes, power relations are very stable and consensual agreements between the major political actors are necessary in order to achieve policy change. Therefore, regulatory reforms in Switzerland were less far-reaching in comparison to the German ones. Regulatory reforms were made possible only because preferences concerning liberalisation of the Swiss corporate governance system of a considerable part of centre-right MPs, with close ties with economic interests, changed at the end of the 1980s strengthening, thus, the ? until then ? mostly social-democratic ?transparency coalition?. In Germany, on the other hand, the preferences of the major political parties and economic actors remained much more stable during the last two decades concerning corporate governance issues: the SPD and the FDP were favourable to liberalisation whereas the CDU defended the traditional system. In this context, changes were made possible not by changing coalitions, but by changing power relations. Once the SPD, acceded to governmental power, quite far-reaching changes were possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British, German, and French states have recently stepped up their actions against racist violence. There are significant policy similarities across the countries, but equally meaningful differences. In relative terms, Britain has focused more of its energies on reforming the police and the judicial process for prosecuting racially aggravated offences; Germany has delegated power and resources to civil society groups for developing programs against right-wing activities; and France has taken high-profile symbolic actions and has begun adapting its educational policies to address racist violence. This paper maps the policy terrain within each country. It also assesses the effectiveness of different policy approaches. It demonstrates that raw statistics on racist violence are inadequate measures of success, and argues that policies must be judged by how societal groups perceive them and therefore by the extent to which they foster national cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines developments in immigration and citizenship policymaking and politics in Canada and West Germany in the immediate post-WWII era. I argue that key events related to the war and its aftermath led to a reappraisal of prewar attitudes toward race and ethnicity both internationally and within the respective countries. I also demonstrate that this reappraisal was limited by the continuing influence of prewar policy regimes. In line with a key postulate of historical institutionalist theory, policymakers in Canada and West Germany reached back to earlier solutions to the migration-membership dilemma when confronted with the challenge of resuming mass migration to meet postwar labor market needs. Although the most egregiously discriminatory elements of past practices were pruned and offensive language in statutes modified, postwar solutions bore an uncanny resemblance to those enacted in the early twentieth century. Thus, Canada sought to facilitate mass migration while simultaneously endeavoring to limit entry as much as possible to whites, while West Germany resumed temporary labor recruitment and restored its descent-based citizenship regime, effectively shutting the door to national membership for foreign "guest workers" and their descendants. Critics of postwar policies took advantage of changed normative conditions to frame their protests. Canada and West Germany?s commitment to ascendant liberal democratic principles put policymakers in an awkward position when confronted with evidence of hypocritical conduct. The discrediting of integral nationalism and scientific racism and rise of human rights granted reformers a powerful discursive grammar with which they could phrase challenges. Thus, while the period was marked by evasion and a good deal of policy continuity, it also gave rise to reform initiatives that would ultimately advance very different answers to the migration-membership dilemma. As such, it truly stood between two worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effectiveness of voluntary gender quotas in German state legislatures between 1990 and 2000. It finds that while quotas did indeed increase the number of women present in state legislatures, quotas did not meet with equal success across the Laender. The political culture of a given state, over and above its political system, best explains the success or failure of voluntary gender quotas in this case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of social movements theories, this paper seeks to uncover the determinants of protest mobilization. During the ups and downs of protest cycles various political factors are so intertwined that it is not unambiguous to explicate what are the driving forces behind the rise and fall of social movement mobilization. To solve this problem, I derive a set of competing hypotheses from established theories of social movements and conduct an empirical test based on a pooled cross-section time-series analysis with a negative binomial random-effects model by using Kriesi et al.?s protest event data on New Social Movements (NSMs), which covers four Western European countries ? France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland ? from 1975 to 1989. Empirical results demonstrate that the more Left government partisanship is associated with the less protest mobilization over time and that the institutionalization of a social movement decrease the likelihood of further protests, but in situations where the government becomes more conservative, an institutionalized social movement leads to a higher level of political protests. This finding implies how we can operationalize the murky term ?political opportunity? in comparative social movement studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory: Majoritarian and proportional visions of democracy value party competition and coalition government differently. The majoritarian vision puts a premium on decisive, accountable one-party government; the proportional vision emphasizes the better representativeness attained by coalitions. Data: Using election and survey data from German and Spanish regions, this paper compares coalitions to one-party cabinets and different coalition governments to each other. Ideological polarization within cabinets is measured using expert scores. Results: The analysis demonstrates that citizens of German and Spanish regions evaluate one-party governments more favorably than coalitions, all else equal. In the German case, citizen satisfaction also correlates negatively with cabinet polarization. Conclusion: The findings imply that government effectiveness and cohesion matter more than ideology and interest representation at the regional level, and supports the theory of a trade-off between representativeness and implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political professionalization on the national and regional level are already rather well studied phenomena. Increasingly, however, we find indications of professionalism on the local level, at least in bigger cities. The actual development on the local level is characterized by increasing complexity and an increasing amount of time the honorary politicians have to spend on politics. Regarding these changes, there is, to a large extent, consensus in theory and practice, that a mandate in the city council of big cities is not compatible with a "normal" job anymore. On the other hand public opposition to political professionalism on the local level continues to be strong. Here the democratic ideals of the ‚citizen politician’ and of self-government are still dominant which is reflected in recent attempts to improve the public standing of honorary positions. Being in this difficult position, one can notice that local politicians develop and use different strategies to cope with this situation. Thus, the central question is what attempt at overt or hidden professionalization have been undertaken in the recent past and how this has affected local politics. In the paper, I analyze these developments and strategies of local professionalism by looking at the current city councilors in four German cities (Frankfort, Hanover, Nuremberg and Stuttgart). The research is based on a questionnaire to all 290 city councilors in these cities, qualitative interviews and basic information of the development in all major German cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important ingredient in democratic politics is the realization of political disagreement through patterns of social communication and political discussion. If people fail to encounter contrary viewpoints, their own political views are never challenged, they are never forced to reconsider initially held preferences or opinions, and they are effectively excluded from democratic deliberation. This paper examines patterns of agreement and disagreement within the political communication networks of citizens in Germany, Japan, and the United States. Several questions are addressed. Are there cross-national differences in the patterns of agreement and disagreement that occur among citizens? To what extent are these patterns subject to individual characteristics, opinions, and attitudes? Are they dependent on the structure of citizens’ communication networks? Finally, to what extent are patterns of political agreement and disagreement affected by the levels of aggregate support for a citizen’s political preferences and opinions? The empirical analysis is based on cooperative election surveys conducted in each of the countries during the early 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]