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In this paper we suggest new measures that gauge how district level party systems can be aggregated to the national level within a country. These can be used as measures of party linkage across districts. The degree of party linkage, which is the extent to which parties are uniformly successful in wining votes across districts, is an important but neglected issue to understand the nature of national level party system formation. We build on the party system inflation index introduced by Cox (1999), which measures the inflation from the district level to the national level party system size that occurs in the process of party system aggregation. We show that the Cox measure has undesirable properties and offer alternative measures. We first examine the concept of party linkage, followed by the discussion of Cox’s inflation index and its limitations. We then introduce our suggested inflation measures, and compare them with the Cox index by numerical simulation. We then apply our measures to the cases of Germany, India, Italy and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American studies have pointed to a dramatic increase in negativity on campaign Web sites. Thus far, however, it is unclear, whether this growth of virtual mudslinging reflects either a national trend due to the competitive and highly personalized voting system, or rather an international process in the ongoing professionalization of political communication. In order to explore this question, this paper examined the use of virtual attacks on German party Web sites in two state elections, one national election, and one European parliamentary election by a quantitative content analysis. The results show that online negativity has affected German e-campaigns on all levels of the political system, with patterns similar to those found in the United States. This includes the amount and frequency of the attacks as well as their differential usage by incumbents and challengers, their respective sources, and the subject dimensions of the assaults. Only with regard to the thematic context and the targets of the attacks did German and American e-campaigns vary in their style of online negativism. These findings support the notion of a global standardization effect in Web campaign practices brought about by the general professionalization process in politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries use U.S. insider trading doctrine as a model, in part as a result of historical and political factors and in part because the United States is seen as a market leader--an early adopter with a well developed, disaggregated, public securities market. Yet, despite these convergent beginnings and a general agreement on the nature of the regulated conduct (i.e., prohibiting securities trading by insiders possessing material nonpublic information), operative insider trading rules in the United States (as a rule originator) have evolved to protect different interests and regulate different specific market activities than insider trading rules in other countries. Using existing insider trading law and regulation in the United States, Germany, and Japan, this paper (a) identifies the common roots and divergent evolution of insider trading doctrine in these nations, (b) articulates ways in which differences in current insider trading doctrine may be meaningful, and (c) isolates possible reasons for the existence and persistence of the observed doctrinal divergence. Divergent political, economic, and societal histories, and differences in legal systems and traditions, are at issue in the analysis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American studies have pointed to a dramatic increase in negativity on campaign websites. Thus far, however, it is unclear, whether this growth of virtual mudslinging reflects either a national trend due to the competitive and highly personalized voting system, or rather an international process in the ongoing professionalization of political communication. In order to explore this question, this paper compares the use of attacks on German party websites in two state elections, one national election, and one European parliamentary election with recent American evidence. The results show that online negativity has affected German e-campaigns on all levels of the political system, with patterns similar to those found in the United States. This includes the amount and frequency of the attacks as well as their differential usage by incumbents and challengers, their respective sources, and the subject dimensions of the assaults. Only with regard to the thematic context and the targets of the attacks did German and American e-campaigns vary in their style of online negativism. These findings support the notion of a global standardization effect in web campaign practices brought about by the professionalization process in politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the central concepts in political science is representation. It has been studied under theoretical as well as empirical lines of inquiry, both developing their own notions of the subject. Largely missing, however, is the actors' own perspective on this subject: how do politicians and citizens conceptualize political representation? In this paper, I will outline in what ways complex ideas like political representation can be studied empirically by discussing, first, general features of political concepts understood as cultural concepts. Second, I will ask how they match the methodology and methods of interpretive political science. Third, by using parts of my own study on actors concepts of political representation in Germany and the United States, the potentials of this approach will be considered. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past several decades, political parties throughout the developed world have transformed their approach to election campaigning. This transformation manifests itself not only in campaign activities (market research, media management, internet campaigning, etc) but also in campaign organization. Specifically, campaign functions have increasingly been "outsourced": transferred away from party organizations and their full-time staffs into the hands of individuals and firms outside the political parties. In thus re-organizing their campaigns, parties are also re-organizing themselves. This paper turns to economic theories of the "boundaries of the firm" to suggest a theory of the determinants of the "boundaries of party" - that is, a theory of the outsourced campaign. It draws on evidence from campaigns in Germany, Britain, and the United States in assessing the plausibility of its account. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German government needed to gain support from a majority in the Bundesrat to pass parts of the tax and retirement reform packages that were dependent on Bundesrat approval. However, the opposition parties opposed the reforms and sought to kill the bill in Bundesrat. Since the ruling coalition and opposition parties could not agree on compromises, the government made financial offers to a few state governments ruled by coalitions to change their voting behavior and thus secure a majority in Bundesrat. Not surprisingly, this strategy was quickly compared to U.S. style pork barreling. This article takes up this comparison and comes to the conclusion that the government used the prevalent Parteienlogik to secure passage in Bundestag. In Bundesrat, however, the federal government’s strategy of distributive politics providing pork projects to state coalition governments ran counter to the Parteienlogik. This dual strategy has serious potential of undermining two fundamental institutions in German politics - consensus-orientation of the system as a whole and objectivity (Sachorientierung) in Bundesrat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes to government responsibilities are compared in Sweden, eastern and western Germany, and the US, 1990-2006, using data from the International Social Survey Program. A substantial convergence in attitudes is found for the period 1996-2006, since Americans become more positive in their attitudes towards state intervention, while opposite trends are found for Sweden and eastern Germany. While attitudinal differences between countries diminish, class differences are fairly stable, as are the differences between men and women and between different labour market status categories. It is speculated that the 'great risk shift' from employers to employees may be part of the explanation for changing attitudes towards redistributive public policies in the US. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the United States has declared war on terrorism and restricted the role of criminal courts by detaining some individuals indefinitely without filing criminal charges, Germany has chosen to fight terrorism within its existing criminal justice framework. Despite the fact that the two countries have adopted different strategies to combat terrorism, the German government has repeatedly reiterated its strong commitment to cooperating with the United States. While Germany strongly questioned the efficacy and legitimacy of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it responded to 9/11 by enacting its own anti-terrorism legislation, strengthening ties between German and American law enforcement agencies, and by deploying troops to Afghanistan. However, these cooperative efforts mask an underlying tension in the transatlantic relationship. The source of that tension is the Bush Administration's decision to employ tactics that violate international treaty obligations as well as domestic law. This decision, which led to the indefinite imprisonment of foreign nationals at Guantanamo Bay and the loosening of the prohibitions against the torture of prisoners, reflects a fundamental disagreement between the United States and its European allies about the rules of the game that govern the fight against terrorism. While there has been widespread debate about the wisdom of U.S. policy, opponents have not been able to identify significant concrete costs of it, beyond a decline in respect for America abroad. This paper provides tangible evidence of the costs of the U.S. terrorism policy. Critically, it shows how the actions of the American government hamstrung Germany's prosecution of two individuals suspected of providing logistical support to the 9/11 terrorists. This paper argues that the U.S. government's refusal to grant the German courts access to key witnesses in both cases undermined the ability of German prosecutors to convict these individuals. While one cannot draw a definitive conclusion about the counter-productiveness of U.S. policy from the outcome of only two cases, these cases illustrate how the American government's decision to operate at the boundaries of the law may have unanticipated consequences. These consequences possess the potential to challenge the future effectiveness of international cooperation. To set the stage for that claim, this paper first briefly reviews the sequence of key events that transpired during the prosecution of these cases. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a draft of a chapter that will be included in the forthcoming edited volume entitled, "The Social Construction of Climate Change." The chapters in the volume present a number of potentially fruitful avenues for analyzing the "social construction of climate change." This paper focuses on the early framing of climate change as a political problem at the international level and the associated normative debates that emerged related to how states should respond to the threat. It then evaluates how the international framing of the problem and the normative debates were translated into the domestic political processes of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The early domestic framing of the problem had profound effects on the political debates in all three countries and played a major role in shaping the degree to which emergent international norms were translated into the domestic policy debates. The paper seeks to explain how and why the political framing of climate change evolved at the international and domestic political levels and explores the consequences of these changes for climate policy in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines comparative jurisprudence and minority rights through the broader lens Aquinas' ethics enunciated in the Summa Theologiae. In the notion of the first principles, basic moral precepts are self-evident. While some of these are accessible only to the educated, the most basic are accessible to all human beings. Among those accessible to all is "to dwell in society" (I, II, 94, 2). All that pertains to this inclination also belongs to natural law: among these things is the need to shun ignorance and to avoid offending those among whom one has to live. In this vein, I assert that legal or institutional discrimination constitutes a violation of natural law. Toward this end, I proceed in a graduated manner, working through each of the three country cases, paying special attention to the explicit content, as well as the legal implications, of the various jurisprudence. The guide in the conduct of this study is Alexander George's method of structured, focused comparison. First, why compare the three countries? South Africa, Germany, and the United States are all federal systems. They all have supreme courts of constitutional review, that also possess the power to render void aspects of legislation. They have also all in the past ten years been compelled to confront questions either related to homosexual rights of private conduct or the right to civil union/marriage access, or both. The consideration of this issue occurs at multiple levels of government in the case of the United States. At the federal judicial level, the Supreme Court has considered the issue of homosexual conduct, and ruled in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) that its prior decision, in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which sustained a Georgia sodomy statute, be overruled. At the federal legislative level, in 1996 the Congress and the President signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) into law, which prohibited the federal government from granting legal recognition to either same-sex or polygamous unions. It also provided that no state could be compelled to acknowledge (under the full faith and credit clause) a same-sex union performed in another state. For this reason, brief consideration of various state-level legal regulations, including the recent spate of marriage amendments and the Massachusetts decision to permit same-sex marriage, ought to be considered. However, they should not be considered on the same level that is afforded to Bowers, Lawrence, or the DOMA. In Germany, two seminal cases will be considered, depicting Germany's evolving body of jurisprudence and legal guidelines. In the 1957 Homosexuality case (6 BVerfGE 389), the Court ruled, as the US Supreme Court did in Bowers, the criminalizing of homosexual conduct did not constitute a violation of the Basic Law. Similar to the passage of the DOMA (which has thus far been rejected for review by the US Supreme Court), the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled in 1979 in 53 BVerfGE 224 that marital union consists of one man and one woman (and that only this form of union was accorded protection under the marriage article (6. 1) in the German Basic Law. However, the Court subsequently ruled in 1990 in 82 BVerfGE 6 that lawmakers were free to grant legal recognition to same-sex couples, so long as this recognition occurred within the boundaries defined by Article 6. In 105 BVerfGE 313 (2002), the Civil Partnership case, the Court ruled that the law in question was, indeed, such a permissible means, not violating the spirit, intent or content of the "special protection" granted the marriage institution under the terms of Article 6. In South Africa, in CCT 11/98, National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality and another v. Minister of Justice, the Constitutional Court ruled that the inclusion of sodomy as a common law offense was unconstitutional... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the discussion about the interplay of trade and conflict and provides a detailed examination of trade patterns from 1931 to the end of World War II. Based upon a novel data set, I am able to establish that trade volumes rose before and during the war for all major European powers and the U.S., casting serious doubt both on the view that increased trade has pacifying effects and the widespread---yet still unproven---notion that trade levels fall during large-scale wars. In addition, I argue that an aggressor state's trade follows a unique pattern and test this view with monthly data on Nazi Germany's imports and exports. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accounts of the post-war occupations of Germany and Japan typically stress the importance of positive incentives in gaining cooperation and deterring resistance. Yet few of these accounts examine occupation policy as it was initially conceived prior to the defeat and enacted during the initial period of surrender. As such, it remains unclear whether U.S. policymakers believed in 1945 that positive incentives would be sufficient to gain compliance. This study therefore examines the overall plans for peace as well as the specific measures to enforce that peace as detailed in occupation handbooks and manuals. I argue that the positive incentives designed to win hearts and minds so often associated with the occupations came secondary to strategies emphasizing the strategic use of violence to deter post-war resistance. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are Green Parties locations of power for women in terms of political interests and party participation? I compare the success of Germany's Green Party to that of the U.S. Green Party in improving access to political participation. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]