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Which issue-related motives underlie voters’ decision to switch parties at the polls? Do switchers stick to the newly chosen party, or do they oscillate in a short-term way at intermediate elections? Relying on the behavioral theory of elections, we assumed aspiration-based voting of boundedly rational voters. We elicited issue-related switch and stay motives in an open-ended survey question format to identify the individual dominant aspirational frame. We traced the respondents’ voting trajectories over three consecutive elections, including two state (2013 and 2018) elections in Bavaria (Germany) and one German federal election (2017). We focused on one of the most polarizing and salient issues in these elections, namely immigration. The case of reference is the 2018 Bavarian state election. Here, the incumbent majoritarian center-right party Christian Social Union tried to deter the entry of the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany by adapting to it on the immigration issue in tone and position. The selected case allows assessment of the impact of issue-based adaptive behavior of the incumbent party at the level of the voters’ switch or stay choices. We estimated the direction and number of voter flows for two interelection sequences of different lengths between different types of polls (federal and state). Our transition estimates are based on the hybrid multinomial Dirichlet model, a new technique integrating individual-level survey data and official aggregate data. Our estimates uncover substantial behavioral differences in the immigration issue public.

In this paper, we use a censored regression model to investigate data on the international trade of small arms and ammunition provided by the Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers. Taking a network-based view on the transfers, we do not only rely on exogenous covariates but also estimate endogenous network effects. We apply a spatial autocorrelation gravity model with multiple weight matrices. The likelihood is maximized employing the Monte Carlo expectation maximization algorithm. Our approach reveals strong and stable endogenous network effects. Furthermore, we find evidence for a substantial path dependence as well as a close connection between exports of civilian and military small arms. The model is then used in a ‘forensic’ manner to analyse latent network structures and thereby to identify countries with higher or lower tendency to export or import than reflected in the data. The approach is also validated using a simulation study.

Although often conjectured, there is a lack of empirical evidence whether international inflows of military technology render intrastate conflicts more violent. We address this question and argue that expansions in governments’ ability to fight aggravate the lethality of intrastate war. However, we expect this effect to be conditioned by rebels’ military endowments and their choice of tactics. Where rebels are weak, they avoid open combat, and additional governmental arms imports have no effect on the number of casualties. In contrast, governmental arms imports cause human losses to multiply when rebels have achieved military parity or superiority and, as a consequence, use conventional combat tactics. This hypothesis is tested on the number of battle-related deaths in intrastate conflict, 1989 to 2011, using, for the first time, data on governmental imports of both major conventional weapons and small arms. Results support our propositions and are robust to instrumenting for imports of both types of weapons.

Die elektorale Volatilitat zwischen den Bundestagswahlen (BTW) 2013 und 2017 ist die hochste seit 1953 (vgl. Emanuele 2015). Gerade bei so ausergewohnlichen Dynamiken, die zudem zu strukturellen Veranderungen von Parteiensystemen fuhren – wie in diesem Falle zum Neueintritt der rechten Partei Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) in den Bundestag –, stellt sich drangend die Frage nach den zugrunde liegenden Wahlerwanderungen auf der Ebene von Individuen. Diese sind nicht aus den Prozentpunktdifferenzen der Parteienverluste und -gewinne abzulesen, auch nicht auf noch so feiner territorialer Gliederungsebene. Daher mussen entweder surveybasierte Verfahren zum Einsatz kommen oder Schatzverfahren, die von speziellen Annahmen abhangen und auf aggregierten Wahlergebnissen basieren. Die wissenschaftliche Grundlagenforschung zur validen Bestimmung entsprechender Ubergangsmatrizen war, auch international, immer schon erstaunlich dunn gesat.

Accurate and interpretable forecasting models predicting spatially and temporally fine-grained changes in the numbers of intrastate conflict casualties are of crucial importance for policymakers and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Using a count data approach, we propose a hierarchical hurdle regression model to address the corresponding prediction challenge at the monthly PRIO-grid level. More precisely, we model the intensity of local armed conflict at a specific point in time as a three-stage process. Stages one and two of our approach estimate whether we will observe any casualties at the country- and grid-cell-level, respectively, while stage three applies a regression model for truncated data to predict the number of such fatalities conditional upon the previous two stages. Within this modelling framework, we focus on the role of governmental arms imports as a processual factor allowing governments to intensify or deter from fighting. We further argue that a grid cell's geographic remoteness is bound to moderate the effects of these military buildups. Out-of-sample predictions corroborate the effectiveness of our parsimonious and theory-driven model, which enables full transparency combined with accuracy in the forecasting process.

As Covid-19 spreads around the world, international actors, including the United Nations, have called for a stop to armed conflict to facilitate efforts to fight the pandemic. At the same time, coronavirus may also trigger and intensify armed conflict due to its negative economic consequences and by offering windows of opportunity to opposition movements to attack distracted and weakened incumbents. We use real-time data on the spread of Covid-19, governmental lockdown policies, and battle events to study the causal short-term effect of the pandemic on armed conflict. Our results suggest that both the spread of Covid-19 and lockdown policies exhibit a global Null effect with considerable regional heterogeneity. Most importantly, governmental lockdowns have increased armed conflict in the Middle East. In contrast, reported combat has decreased in Southeast Asia and the Caucasus as the pandemic has spread.

In this article, we analyse dependence structures among international trade flows of major conventional weapons from 1952 to 2016. We employ a Network Disturbance Model commonly used in inferential network analysis and spatial econometrics. The dependence structure is represented by pre-defined weight matrices that allow for correlating flows from the network of international arms exchange. Three dependence structures are proposed, representing sender-, receiver- and sender–receiver-related dependencies. The appropriateness of the presumed structures is comparatively assessed using the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). It turns out that the dependence structure among the arms trade flows is complex and can be represented best by a specification that relates each arms trade flow to all exports and imports of the sending and the receiving state. Controlling for exogenous variables, we find that the trade volume increases with the GDP of the sending and the receiving state while the impact of geographical distance, regime dissimilarity and formal alliance membership is rather small.

Since few states are able to produce all of their own military hardware, a majority of countries’ military systems rely on weapon imports. The structure of the international defense technology exchange network remains an important puzzle to understand, along with the factors that drive its evolution. Drawing on a political economy model of arms supply, we propose a new network-oriented explanation for the worldwide transactions of major conventional weapons in the period after World War II. Using temporal exponential random graph models, our dynamic approach illustrates how network dependencies and the relative weighting of economic versus security considerations vary over time. One of our major results is to demonstrate how security considerations started regaining importance over economic ones after 2001. Additionally, our model exhibits strong out-of-sample predictive performance, with network dependencies contributing to model improvement especially after the Cold War.

Is there a substitution effect between arms exports and military spending? Do arms producing countries use weapon deliveries as a means to affect their external security? Whereas free-riding in alliances is extensively discussed by researchers and practitioners, the literature has surprisingly neglected the effect of transfers in defense goods on domestic military budgets. We develop a formal theoretical framework that conditions a country’s budgeting calculus on its arms trade decisions. The general conclusion is that exports lead to domestic cuts in military spending—provided suppliers expect positive security externalities. We use an innovative measure for external security based on UN voting records and regime type to test our model predictions on data covering both the Cold War as well as the post-Cold War period. Our results strongly suggest that democratic and non-democratic countries behave very differently. We find a clear substitution effect only for arms transfers by democratic states to other aligned democracies during the post-Cold War years. No such effect can be found for the Cold War era. There is no evidence for a substitution effect in either period for non-democratic suppliers.

Do governments’ military build-ups foster the outbreak of intrastate violence? This article investigates the impact of governments’ arms imports on the onset of intrastate conflicts. There is scant empirical research on the role of the external acquisition of coercive technologies, and even fewer studies explore the respective causal mechanisms of their consequences. We argue that the existing literature has not adequately considered the potential simultaneity between conflict initiation and arms purchases. In contrast, our study explicitly takes into account that weapon inflows may not only causally induce conflicts but may themselves be caused by conflict anticipation. Following a review of applicable theoretical models to derive our empirical expectations, we offer two innovative approaches to surmount this serious endogeneity problem. First, we employ a simultaneous equations model that allows us to estimate the concurrent effects of both arms imports on conflict onsets and conflict onsets on imports. Second, we are the first to use an instrumental variable approach that uses the import of weapon types not suitable for intrastate conflict as instruments for weapon imports that are relevant for fighting in civil wars. Relying on arms transfer data provided by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for the period 1949-2013, we provide estimates for the effect of imports on civil war onset. Our empirical results clearly show that while arms imports are not a genuine cause of intrastate conflicts, they significantly increase the probability of an onset in countries where conditions are notoriously conducive to conflict. In such situations, arms are not an effective deterrent but rather spark conflict escalation.

Do norms constrain states’ foreign policies even in the face of strong economic incentives to ignore them? Arms exports provide an excellent opportunity to examine this question more closely. They regularly spark fierce political debates on whether to trade goods that buyers might deploy with devastating effects. We use the case of German arms exports to provide an in-depth statistical analysis of the behavior of a major arms exporter that claims to follow high normative standards. In particular, we investigate to what extent domestic, supranational, and international rules and norms shape German decisions about the destination and volume of major conventional weapon deliveries. Using panel data for the period 1953–2013, we employ a Heckman selection model to capture the two-step nature of the decision-making process. We find that German arms export policies often fail to comply with standards that prohibit exports to countries embroiled in military conflicts, civil wars, or with strong human rights violations. Furthermore, we discover, however, that the country fully complied with multilateral arms embargoes after 1990. We conclude that the noneffectiveness of certain rules and norms stems from both the ambiguity of norms and the opacity of decision-making processes.

Our objective is the estimation of voter transitions between two consecutive parliamentary elections. Usually, such analyses have been based either on individual survey data or on aggregated data. To move beyond these methods and their respective problems, we propose the application of so-called hybrid models, which combine aggregate and individual data. We use a Bayesian approach and extend a multinomial-Dirichlet model proposed in the ecological inference literature. Our new hybrid model has been implemented in the R-package eiwild (= Ecological Inference with individual-level data). Based on extensive simulations, we are able to show that our new estimator exhibits a very good estimation performance in many realistic scenarios. Application case is the voter transition between the Bavarian Regional election and the German federal elections 2013 in the Metropolitan City of Munich. Our approach is also applicable to other areas of electoral research, market research, and epidemiology.

We propose a novel tie-oriented model for longitudinal event network data. The generating mechanism is assumed to be a multivariate Poisson process that governs theonsetandrepetitionof yearly observed events with two separate intensity functions. We apply the model to a network obtained from the yearly dyadic number of international deliveries of combat aircraft trades between 1950 and 2017. Based on the trade gravity approach, we identify economic and political factors impeding or promoting the number of transfers. Extensive dynamics as well as country heterogeneities require the specification of semiparametric time-varying effects as well as random effects. Our findings reveal strong heterogeneous as well as time-varying effects of endogenous and exogenous covariates on theonsetandrepetitionof aircraft trade events.

What determines the volumes of international weapon transfers? And why do countries establish such arms trading relationships in the first place? We propose an innovative statistical strategy that builds on the gravity approach and combines a Heckman model with a network analysis. This allows us, for the first time, to analyze the impact of network structures on both the extensive and the intensive margins of the international arms trade simultaneously. We argue that the structure of the arms transfer network conveys important information for exporting and importing countries. Therefore, past topological properties of the trade network play a central role in its future evolution. Using data on the trade of major conventional weapons between 1955 and 2018, our estimation results and out-of-sample predictions show that network structures have considerable explanatory power with respect to the creation of trade links. They are far less relevant for the explanation of trade volumes, which are mainly determined by demand factors.

This paper analyzes the impact of arms imports and exports on national military expenditures. The recent literature on the determinants of military expenditures has mainly focused on countries’ external security environments and their regime type. Based on existing theoretical work, we argue that, in addition to these factors, arms trade flows may have an important role to play. First, we show that rising imports of major conventional weapons do not necessarily translate into higher defense spending. Rather, this relationship depends on political, economic, and contract conditions that influence different choices of financing imports. Therefore, the effect should be very heterogenous. Second, exports may have both a negative or a positive impact depending on regime type and the perceived impact of exports on national security. We empirically test these expectations for 156 countries from 1949 to 2013 using arms trade and new military expenditure data provided by SIPRI. Employing static and dynamic...

The profitability of nuclear power plant investment is largely determined by the construction duration, which directly impacts discounted cash flows, debt and interest payments, as well as variable costs, such as labor. This paper analyzes the key drivers of construction duration using survival models. We focus especially on the strategic expectation formation of private and public utilities engaging in such highly risky megaprojects. Using a balanced dataset of explanatory variables and the IAEA/PRIS dataset of reactor construction starts between 1950 and 2013 we find that the expectation of rising oil prices and higher economic growth, along with the higher per capita GDP of a country tend to reduce the time needed to grid connection. We also identify the reactor models with the fastest construction duration.

The analysis of voter transitions is an important area of electoral studies. A main strategy is to use aggregate data provided by the offices of statistics regarding districts, precincts, communities etc. and to rely on ecological inference. Ecological inference, however, is plagued by the well-known indeterminacy problem. In this article, we present the so far most extensive systematic empirical comparison of commonly used approaches for ecological inference of the analysis of voter transitions. Our evaluation is based on diverse simulations for multiple assumptions and scenarios. Based on recent election data for the German metropolitan city Munich, we are able to show that an application of the hierarchical multinomial-Dirichlet model, which is implemented in the R-library eiPack, exhibits the best overall estimation performance. Other prominent approaches frequently used by practitioners, e.g. the Thomsen logit approach, proved to be inconsistent. Furthermore, we demonstrate that appropriate data preprocessing is crucial for achieving reliable results.

The increased usage of discrete choice models in the analysis of multiparty elections faces one severe challenge: the proliferation of parameters, resulting in high-dimensional and difficult-to-interpret models. For example, the application of a multinomial logit model in a party system with J parties results in maximally J−1 parameters for chooser-specific attributes (e.g., sex and age). For the specification of alternative-specific attributes (usually: positions on issues and issue distances), maximally J parameters for each political issue can be estimated. Thus, a model of party choice with five parties based on three political issues and ten voter attributes already produces 59 possible coefficients. As soon as we allow for interaction effects to detect segment-specific reactions to issues, the situation is even aggravated. In order to systematically and efficiently identify relevant predictors in voting models, we derive and use Lasso-type regularized parameter selection techniques that take into account both individual- and alternative-specific variables. Most importantly, our new algorithm can handle for the first time the alternative-wise specification of the attributes of alternatives. Applying the specifically adjusted Lasso method to the 2009 German Parliamentary Election, we demonstrate that our approach massively reduces the models' complexity and simplifies their interpretation. Lasso-penalization clearly outperforms the simple ML estimator. The results are illustrated by innovative visualization methods, the so-called effect star plots.

In this paper, we analyse the network of international major conventional weapons (MCW) transfers from 1950 to 2016, based on data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The dataset consists of yearly bilateral arms transfers between pairs of countries, which allows us to conceive of the individual relationships as part of an overall trade network. For the analysis, we extend the separable temporal exponential random graph model (STERGM) to account for time-varying effects on both the network level (trade network) and the actor level (country effects). Our investigation enables the identification of potentially differing driving forces that influence the formation of new trade relationships versus the persistence of existing ones. In accordance with political economy models, we expect security- and network-related covariates to be most important for the formation of transfers, whereas repeated transfers should prevalently be determined by the importers’ market size and military spending. Our proposed modelling approach corroborates the hypothesis and quantifies the corresponding effects. Additionally, we subject the time-varying heterogeneity effects to a functional principal component analysis. This analysis serves as an exploratory tool and allows us to identify countries with exceptional increases or decreases in their tendency to import and export weapons.

There is widespread agreement within academic literature that the NSDAP systematically and effectively targeted the rural areas beginning with the Agrarian Crisis in 1927/8. However, one issue is left unresolved: were specific levels of agricultural strata differently attracted to the Nazis, and if so, how? In light of the economic and political incentives offered to German peasants with differing farm sizes, we expect that regions characterized by middle peasants were most likely to have electorally swung in a distinct, asymmetric and relevant way towards the Nazis. In order to test this hypothesis, we have used a country-wide data set, which includes the original categories of ‘parcel peasants’ (0–2 ha), ‘small-sized’ (2–5 ha) and ‘medium-sized’ farmers (5–20 ha). These specific classifications were introduced and behaviorally legitimated by the Statistical Office of the Weimar Republic at that time. We present the first analysis applying generalized additive models (GAM) for the assessment of ecological relations. In order to account for the construction of political spaces – and therefore of spatial dependencies, we offer a new mechanism based on stipulations of the electoral system. Even after controlling for pre-established impact factors (Protestantism, urbanization, etc.) and for spatial effects, we identify a clear impact of the agrarian middle classes (5–20 ha) on the Nazi vote beginning with the election in July 1932.

This volume investigates nuclear energy policies in Western Europe over the entire post-war period, but with special attention to the two most recent decades. The comparative analytical perspective draws on the interplay between voters' attitudes, challenging movements, party competition, and coalition formation. Spanning more than 60 years and 16 countries, the researchers examine the underlying causal processes leading to the observed varieties of Western European nuclear energy policies. Based on a mixed methods approach using both structured case studies as well as quantitative analyses, the study shows that the nature of party competition under given institutional contexts is a key-driver for, as a rule, tactically motivated governmental policy changes and stability, respectively. Part I introduces the practical and theoretical relevance of the topic. It outlines the reasoning of the major scientific contributions with regard to nuclear energy policies, and offers a theoretical alternative to the previous literatures that has been predominantly movements-oriented. Additionally, it provides core economic and political indicators of the changing role of nuclear energy in the countries. Part II consists of seven in-depth case studies where the outlined theoretical perspective is applied. Part III consists of a general summary, short narratives of the countries not covered in case studies, qualitative comparison and an assessment of the factors for policy change from multivariate analysis.

Governments deciding to use nuclear energy as part of their country׳s energy mix are faced with long-term planning efforts and huge investments. As nuclear power plants constitute one of the socially and politically most contested technologies, the question arises, which time horizons companies as well as politicians have to consider for the accomplishment and grid-connection of individual and whole fleets of reactors. Unfortunately, there are no large-N studies investigating the time for completion of such large-scale projects. For the first time, we statistically explain the duration of the construction of all initiated nuclear plant projects so far. Based on the International Atomic Energy׳s comprehensive Power Reactor Information System (PRIS) we assess the impact of demographic, economic, and political preconditions of a country, at the same time accounting for different types of reactor technologies. To account for non-linear relationships, we apply non-parametric survival models with P-splines. A main result of our analysis is that time of connection to grid increases over the years indicating increased societal sensibilities, respect for higher security standards, and increased project complexities. The Harrisburg and the Chernobyl disaster did not induce a separate additional delaying effect.

Why do states choose to join and form international governmental organizations (IGOs) that regulate energy policy? In this article we make three specific contributions to the literature on international cooperation and diffusion. First, we show that countries form and join energy IGOs in response to memberships previously gained by direct competitors among oil and gas producers and consumers. Moreover, we demonstrate that energy IGOs diffuse among countries that share oil and gas pipelines. Finally, we provide evidence that the institutional design of established energy IGOs impacts the development of their membership network. To test these hypotheses, we rely on original data on oil and gas pipelines and the design of energy IGOs as well as on a newly compiled dataset that includes 152 countries and covers 38 years (1970–2007). We employ both network analysis and spatial econometrics.

Das Buch entwickelt ausgehend von einem interdisziplinaren Lehrprojekt neue Verfahren zur Analyse von Wahlerwanderungen und erprobt diese praktisch. Dazu wurde eine Nachwahlbefragung bei der Landtagswahl und der Bundestagswahl 2013 in Munchen durchgefuhrt und ausgewertet. Es wird eine ausfuhrliche Analyse der Wahlerwanderung im Vergleich zu den vorherigen Wahlen und zwischen den beiden Wahlen, die innerhalb einer Woche stattfanden, inklusive der Grunde fur Parteienwechsel prasentiert. Weiter werden methodische Neuentwicklungen, sogenannte Hybridmodelle zur Analyse der Kombination von Befragungsdaten und offiziellen Wahlergebnissen der einzelnen Stimmbezirke aufgezeigt. Diese Form der Analyse hat ein hohes Potential fur die valide Schatzung von Wahlerwanderung.

Nachdem sich in dem vorausgegangenen Kapitel das von uns neu entwickelte Hybrid-Modell ‚eiwild‘ auf der Basis des Multinomial-Dirichlet-Modells entsprechend der Ergebnisse von Simulationsverfahren als das beste herausgestellt hat, wird es nun zur Identifikation der Wahlerstrome herangezogen. Wir bestimmen separat die Ubergangsmatrizen zwischen den Landtagswahlen 2008 und 2013, den Bundestagswahlen 2009 und 2013, und nutzen die ausergewohnliche Moglichkeit, die Wahlerstrome zwischen der nur durch eine Woche getrennten Landtagswahl 2013 und Bundestagswahl 2013 zu schatzen.

Zunachst wird auf eine erstaunliche Forschungslucke hingewiesen: Aggregatdatenbasierte Wahlerwanderungsanalysen weisen ein schwerwiegendes Identifikationsproblem auf, surveybasierte glaubwurdige Wahlerwanderungsanalysen sind derzeit nur mit auserst aufwandigen Exit Poll-Analysen durchfuhrbar. Daten und Analyseverfahren der wenigen kommerziellen Anbieter sind fur die Forschung allerdings in der Regel nicht zuganglich. Daher wird hier ein neues Untersuchungsdesign fur eine eigene Exit Poll-Analysen in einer Metropole vorgeschlagen. Zudem wird ein neues Verfahren der Kombination von Individual- und Aggregatdaten entwickelt, das eine effizientere Stichprobengestaltung und Schatzung ermoglicht. Anschliesend werden die wahlrechtlichen Grundlagen der Landtags- und Bundestagswahlen in der Metropole Munchen beschrieben. Schlieslich werden die vorausgegangenen und die aktuellen Wahlergebnisse bei der Landtagswahl und der Bundestagswahl 2013 dargestellt.

This paper examines typical “energy paths”, i.e. the intertemporal development of the energy mixes of the member states of the European Union over 1971–2010. We apply model-based clustering to detect major energy profiles and their compositional dynamics. The seven identified clusters show typical combinations of energy carriers dominating the primary energy consumption of a country. We find that countries tend to take a path towards higher quality energy mixes over time, however path inertia and dependencies arise from both infrastructure and resource endowments. Higher energy quality profiles are usually associated with higher national income and energy use per capita, providing some evidence of the existence of a national-level energy ladder. We also find convergence in energy intensity over time, and a relationship between a country's own resources and import dependency.

The European Union (EU) is a regional cooperation regime with a specific and still fluid governance structure. It constitutes the world’s largest and institutionally most deeply integrated system of international relations with supranational features. As a consequence, the literature on the EU often emphasizes informality, multilevel aspects, and its “network governance” character. Network analysis is therefore a promising perspective for the systematic investigation of complex networks of formalized actor relations as well as of informal and implicit political structures and processes in the EU. Applied network analysis is meanwhile used for the investigation of multi-level policy preparation, of collective decision-making in the political system in the EU, and of the implementation process of EU policies in the Member States.

How successful are ministries in achieving their jurisdictional goals in intergovernmental negotiations? And is it more valuable for them to network domestically as compared with transgovernmental networking? For the first time, we provide a quantitative assessment of the relative impact of inside versus outside networking efforts of ministerial bureaucracies – simultaneously controlling for their formal organizational rights. The evaluative benchmark will be their returns from intergouvernmental negotiations. Our application case is an European Union intergovernmental conference. In order to separate the respective effects of outside against inside networking, we propose to disaggregate the nation-state into its ministerial jurisdictions. For the estimation of the value of networking, we measure ‘negotiation returns’ by comparing the ideal points of 140 governmental subunits with regard to 46 negotiation issues with the final treaty stipulations. Owing to the complex cross-classified order of the data, w...

Figure 2 on page 57 was erroneously duplicated in Figure 3 in the typesetting process. Actually, Fig. 3 should have been rendered as follows.

Does proportional representation imply incentives for strategic voting? This article investigates whether adherents of the major German parties voted against their preference in order to increase the chance of a majority coalition between their favourite party and the pre-electorally 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 random utility 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.

Does the European Union (EU) represent a new political order replacing the old nation-states? The assessment of the real character of political orders requires the identifi- cation of political key actors and of the specific structure of their interactions. Transgovern- mental networks have been considered to be one of the most important features of EU integration. Unfortunately, the network structures, processes and the impact of these infor- mal horizontal inter-organisational relations between nation-states are mostly unknown.The main objective of this article is to measure and explain the selective pattern of informal bilateral relations of high officials of the EU Member States' ministerial bureaucracies on the occasion of an EU Intergovernmental Conference. The quantitative data used rely on standardised interviews with 140 top-level bureaucrats. The statistical estimation of network choices is based on recent developments of exponential random graph models.

This article describes selective results of a large-scale study of within-governmental coordination processes and international negotiations. We examined a European Union intergovernmental conference (IGC), the so-called IGC 1996, which led to the Amsterdam Treaty, from a quantitative negotiation analysis perspective. Our focus of attention has been the embeddedness of international negotiations within formal governmental organizations and within informal communication networks. We have identified the relative impact on negotiation dynamics and on negotiation performance of each of the parties by using various statistical techniques. We argue that such insights can be used for a research-based consulting in which social scientists respond to practitioners’“what-if” questions with evidence-based simulations and scenarios.

Im Rahmen einer quantitativen Beschreibung untersuchen wir die informellen transgouvernementalen Koordinationsbeziehungen zwischen den aquivalenten Ministerien der EU-Mitgliedstaaten bei der Vorbereitung der Regierungskonferenz 1996. Ausgangspunkt dieser Analyse ist die These einer zunehmenden Bedeutung transnationaler und transgouvernementaler Beziehungen als Ursache und Resultat der europaischen Integration. Wahrend diese proklamierten Tendenzen im Hinblick auf okonomische Verflechtungen und transnationale Verbindungen von gesellschaftlichen Akteuren als umfassend untersucht gelten durfen, wurde den Beziehungen der politisch-administrativen Eliten weniger Aufmerksamkeit zuteil. Mittels diverser Konzepte der Netzwerkanalyse identifizieren wir die bisher latenten Strukturen dieser Beziehungen. Das so ermittelte Gefuge des Gesamtnetzwerkes weist eine Zentrum-Peripherie-Struktur aufder Basis kohasiver Blocke auf. Die graduelle Zentrum-Peripherie-Struktur wird gebildet zwischen der Trias der „Machtigen“ (Deutschland-Frankreich-Grosbritannien) und den kleineren Staaten. Sie wird charakterisiert durch eine eindeutige Nord-Sud-Dimension. Die Kosten einer informellen Koordinierung werden v.a. von den grosen „Fuhrungsstaaten“ und „Maklern“ (BeNeLux und Finnland, Schweden, Osterreich) in Kauf genommen.

Die Wissenschaft von den internationalen Beziehungen (IB) verfugt uber wenig empirisch fundierte, quantitative Erkenntnisse bezuglich der Prozessablaufe und Dynamiken komplexer internationaler Verhandlungen. Wir pladieren deshalb fur eine an der empirisch-analytischen Sozialwissenschaft orientierte Vorgehensweise. Dabei konzentrieren wir uns auf die Analyse eines ausgewahlten Aspektes von Verhandlungsprozessen: des strategischen Signalisierens von Verhandlungspositionen zu Beginn und im Verlauf von Verhandlungen. Wir beantworten die Frage, ob und wie prazise die Mitgliedsstaaten der Europaischen Union bei der Regierungskonferenz 1996 eine Ausgangsposition deklarierten. Auserdem bestimmen wir auf der Grundlage eines Opportunitatskostenansatzes Grunde fur den jeweils unterschiedlichen Grad schriftlicher Interventionstatigkeit wahrend der Verhandlungen. Fur die Analyse verwenden wir Modelle diskreter Entscheidungen. Hauptergebnis ist die Bestatigung der 'riskanten' Hypothese eines kurvilinearen Zusammenhanges zwischen Signalisierungshaufigkeit und der wahrgenommenen internationalen Konfliktkonfiguration

Are voters’ choices influenced by parties’ position-taking and communication efforts on issues during a campaign? And if so, do voters’ reactions to issues differ across parties? This article outlines a research design for the statistical identification of party-varying issue reactions within the established paradigm of the Spatial Theory of Voting. Using a special feature of conditional logit and probit models – i.e. the estimation of alternative-specific coefficients instead of fixed ‘generic’ issue distance effects – it is possible to detect asymmetrically attached issue saliencies at the level of the voters, and hence at the demand-side of politics. This strategy opens a new way to systematically combine insights obtained by saliency approaches with the Spatial Theory of Voting. An application to the German parliamentary elections from 1987 to 2009 demonstrates that it is predominantly parties taking polar positions – and, more specifically, niche parties taking polar positions – that induce such asymmetric issue voting.