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This paper investigates whether the presence of gender quotas makes political parties likely to ask their female members to run for elective office. Based on an original mail survey of over 1000 local party leaders in Germany, this paper finds that female members in German parties are no less likely than male members to have been asked by their parties to run for elective office. Furthermore, this result is also observed in political parties without gender quotas and in and places where state and local electoral systems are not compatible with the use of quotas, indicating that, in this case, quotas have a contagion effect. They have created a normative expectation that parties nominate female candidates even in instances when there is no official quota in place. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper points out the importance of party competition as an explanatory factor in comparative welfare state research that is neglected by standard theories. The argument is applied to explaining the differentiation of social rights, and, more specifically, to the case of unemployment compensation in post-war Germany. The party system and the dynamics of competition that it generates determine which voters are most considered in the policy decisions of parties. Together with the structure of the labour market and the existing policies, which condition the interests of voters, this political logic shapes policy changes. Accordingly, the paper shows how centripetal party competition in Germany helps to explain the establishing of a clearly stratified but relatively inclusive system of unemployment benefits in the post-war phase of welfare state expansion. By contrast, during welfare state retrenchment centripetal competition has contributed to an increase in segmentation between benefits. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand political leadership it is crucial to understand if politicians act as leaders in their respective constituencies and parties. Although little work has been done on this topic from a political science perspective there exists established literature on a comparable topic, the roles of managers as leaders in business. This paper examines whether a theory on business leadership proves to be robust for political leadership. In 2002 W. Bennis and R. Thomas proposed a theory of leadership that attributed to leaders common biographical situations and common attitudes. This study tries to ascertain if those common characteristics could also be found among political leaders in a different cultural context and of a different generation. For this purpose 19 qualitative interviews with young Hessian politicians were conducted. They all executed leadership positions in the youth organizations of their respective parties. Although the major claims of the 2002 theory could not be corroborated the results of this study suggest that management theory can serve, if not as a source for robust hypotheses, than at least as a guideline for the design of studies on leadership behavior of politicians. ..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]

Does the economy explain the long-term trend of party membership? This paper will examine the long-term relationship between the economic conditions and the party membership trends of British Labour Party and German Social Democratic Party,1950-1994. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests electoral balancing models using data from German state election. The main finding - midterm losses in German state elections only occur under unified government - supports electoral balancing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent have changes in party finance laws transformed party organizations in Germany and Austria? This paper adopts a rational choice - institutional approach in order to answer this question. That is, the ability of party elites to change their party organization is constrained by institutional rules such as party finance laws. Hypotheses regarding fundraising, bureaucratic professionalism, fundraising, and membership relations are developed from this theory. These hypotheses are tested via interviews, survey data and financial reports of political parties from 1980 to 2000 on the national and sub-national level in Germany and Austria. Results indicate that parties in Germany are becoming sophisticated in their fundraising techniques, although their methods are not as advanced as those used by parties in the U.S. Furthermore, parties in both countries are becoming increasingly professional and bureaucratic. However, despite their growing party offices, parties are not increasing membership recruitment or communications with current members. The implications of these findings for party democracy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are certain people drawn to anti-immigrant movements? And more generally, why do some individuals feel deeply threatened by immigration, while others do not? For answers I examine household panel data from Germany through the years 1993-2002. In addition to factors traditionally associated with extreme right support, this paper investigates the impact of social capital and parental household characteristics on the likelihood of extremism among young people. Analyses at the micro- and meso-levels paint the following picture: young German adults are more or less likely to express extreme intolerance toward immigrant groups based on factors that lie on a level deeper than their pocketbooks. Regular interaction with other members of society is important, and factors stemming from the parental household experience have lasting effects. Young people with strong social networks, and whose parental households were characterized by similar networks when they were growing up, will be less predisposed to accept the scapegoating of immigrants found in the appeals of extreme xenophobic groups. Interestingly, however, parents? subjective feelings of attachment to the local community or region, regardless of their actual level of social participation, is strongly and positively associated with right extremism among youth, offering support for group identity theories of intolerance. [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]

How do the fundamental institutional rules of a political system evolve or change? When can they be altered, and by whom? Basic constitutional rules like federalism belong to the meta-rules that structure the political game in advanced democracies. As such they are hard to change because they usually are subject to large set-up costs, involve multiple constituencies, and are conditioned by the entrenched interests of a variety of powerful key actors. The (failed) reforms of a federal system thus present opportunities to examine whether and how the basic rules of the game can be changed.Theories about constitutional and institutional change can be divided into normative, interest-based, and non-rational explanations. They fit quite neatly into current divisions within the new institutionalism in political science, between historical-institutionalism, rational choice and sociological institutionalism (Hall and Taylor 1996). Historical-institutional explanations emphasize path dependence, stickiness, and "lock-in" effects, whereas rational choice underscores the contested nature of institutional development and the distribution of power and strategic interactions of key actors in society. Sociological explanations highlight the non-rational effects of political discourse and the impact of the recognition heuristic (Immergut 2006).After German unification and the creation of the European Union in the early 1990s, federalism became widely regarded as at least partially responsible for the German "Reformstau" or "reform gridlock". This paper briefly examines the evolution and the repeated efforts to reform the federal system of (West) Germany. The main focus is on the work of the "Federalism Commission" from 2003 to 2004 and the final adoption of its proposals to reform the German federal system in May 2006. Utilizing historical-institutional, rational, and sociological explanations, the paper will assess whether the changes of federalism in Germany represent primarily the (un-)intended consequences of prior normative commitments and path-dependent development of institutions, whether they are the results of deliberate choices and self-interested utility maximization of powerful key actors in German politics and society, or whether they are the non-rational outcomes of political discourse, cognitive framing and recognition heuristics among decision makers, or perhaps a combination of all three. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Germany's widely regarded dual system of vocational education and training has undergone significant change since the 1970s. While the framework of formal institutions has largely stayed intact, significant processes of change take place beneath the surface. In particular, instead of proceeding directly from school to training to employment, young people increasingly have to complete various educational loops and there are indication that a significant minority completely fails to get access to training and employment. The factors contributing to change are structural changes in the economy (from manufacturing to services) and the erosion of the dual sector model of training, where the crafts sector supplied semi-skilled labour for industrial firms. The paper concludes with an attempt to capture the process conceptually. It is argued that the German case is an example of liberalization through an increased involvement of the state. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the politics of higher education policy in advanced industrial states, examining both partisan preferences over spending and three different institutional forms of higher education provision: the Anglo-American, Continental, and Scandinavian models. The paper applies the well-known ‘trilemma’ framework developed by Iversen and Wren (1998) to the area of higher education policy. I demonstrate that the logic of the trilemma can be extended to a three-way trade-off between the extent of coverage, the degree of subsidization, and the overall cost of higher education. The Anglo-American model leads to a mass, partially private, and publicly inexpensive system. The Continental model leads to an elite, fully public, and inexpensive system. Finally, the Scandinavian model leads to a mass, fully public, but highly expensive system. This set of choices facing both governments and voters is modeled formally and the derived trade-offs tested on a panel dataset of OECD states from 1990 to 2000. Three case studies, of the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany are then analyzed in greater detail to show the dynamic partisan trade-offs facing states as they expand higher education. The paper concludes by offering some suggestions about the long-term impact of these decisions on the likely success of newly-elected Continental right wing parties in achieving their education and labor market goals. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until now, politics of foreign affairs and defense in Latin America have been controlled almost exclusively by the executive power and some other organizations such as the Institute of National Defense. This presenter introduces the synthesized vision of the actors and the working systems related to the Chilean legislative agenda, and proposes some initiatives in order to facilitate a discussion of how to strengthen the legislative function and promote major intervention by society in the determination of foreign policy. It will offer detailed descriptions on the legislative agenda in Chile, the actors who participate and so forth, based on primary sources (interviews, surveys, etc). Furthermore, the German system will be used as a model for ways to improve the professional work and the quality of output of Chilean Congress in foreign relations and defense. This presentation will introduce new discussions on the proposal to adapt standards, work forms and tools observed in the parliamentary system and possibly adapted to the presidential system, namely the proposal to improve the performance and effectiveness of foreign policy by increasing intervention by the National Congress and the civil society. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Will the future of hegemonic politics resemble the past? In the post-Cold war world, emergence of new actors will likely reshape hegemonic politics and potentially reconfigure the balance of power. As the world shifts from one era to another, the behavior of emerging actors like China will have far reaching implications. As the post-Cold war world's emerging hegemonic power, China presents the most challenging questions for scholars of international politics. This study draws from historical patterns detected from the behavior of two key hegemonic powers of the past fifty to a hundred yearsâ??Germany 1866-World War 11 and the United States 1898-end of the Cold warâ??in order to understand and to better predict China's behavior in the next fifty to a hundred years. Most scholars of hegemonic politics in the twenty-first century believe that it is essential to understand China's emergence and its implications for the international system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I ask whether gender quotas have led to an increase in political ambition among German women. I surveyed over 1000 members of German political parties and found that a gendered gap in political ambition persists despite the use of gender quotas. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the influence of federalism on educational performance in the sixteen German Laender. It examines the impact of political, demographic, economic, and school characteristics on achievement scores and graduation rates cross-sectionally and over time (1992-2002). Germany presents a unique opportunity to understand how the established tradition of federalism in the ?old? Laender versus new institutional arrangements in the ?new? Laender affect educational performance. The research offers one of the first comparisons of educational performance between the East and the West. It finds that political factors influence school performance variations overall, but they are particularly powerful in the West. Many scholarly works have dealt with German federalism or German education separately, but there has been no attempt to fully consider how federalism affects educational performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany, I offer an analysis of voter behavior in federal contexts. Using data from German federal and Länder elections between 1965-2002, I establish voting patterns in state elections and their relationship to voting in federal elections. The institutional design of the German system by which electoral cycles are unsynchronized both across states and between states and federal levels allows for a particularly interesting comparative analysis. I first demonstrate that unless elections are concurrent, the party holding the chancellery systematically loses seats in state elections, and that the extent to which voters withdraw their support from the party holding the chancellery depends on the timing of the elections with respect to the federal cycle. Following these finding, I then sample particular elections and employ a micro-foundational analysis based on survey data from these elections. I show that voters engage in vertical institutional balancing, using state institutions to counterbalance the federal government. Finally, I use these insights to reinterpret the ongoing debate between the directional and proximity models of voter choice. [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]

The ideas held by decision makers with regard to international politics, or their worldview, has an important effect on their policies. While territorial expansions and contractions have gained increasing scholarly attention lately, one of the most intriguing and consequential changes of territorial policy remains understudied. Germany have lost almost one fourth of its territory in WW-II (mainly to Poland). Up until the late 1960s West Germany adamantly rejected calls for recognizing these new borders. Within two years of the establishment of the SPD/FDP government, however, the Federal Republic signed aggreement with the Soviet Union and Poland that assured its official recognition of the new borders. This paper explains this change of policy as a consequence not simply of different worldviews held by different leaders, but of different realist worldviews of Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt, which led to the recognition of the Oder-Neisse line as Poland's western border. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a research design that traces siblings' preferences for postmaterialistic values in Germany over two decades, this paper provides new evidence on the origins of value preferences. Focusing on Inglehart's thesis of value change, we test the socialization and the scarcity hypotheses against rivalling accounts of value preference formation. Hierarchical regression models show that the shared preadult environment indeed exerts lasting effects on the permanent component of preferences for postmaterialistic policies. Beyond shared experiences of socioeconomic scarcity, however, we find that the intergenerational transmission of post-materialism--disregarded by Inglehart's original thesis--does play a significant role in the similarity in siblings' value preferences. Considering the importance of the intergenerational persistence of post-materialistic values, our findings suggest a decelerated value change by cohort replacement, in contrast to Inglehart's original claim. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores business associations in the information and communication industries in five OECD countries in a complex systems perspective. It seeks to understand, how such associational orderes are structures and how these associations participate in political processes. The analysis is based on a unique data set of the cooperative and competitive relations, thus applying social network analysis to interest groups research. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines German reunification and the Eastern enlargement of the EU as two opposite types of political integration that occured after 1989 in Europe. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifteen years after unification, the many efforts to address the East German past are over presenting scholars with an opportunity to review and analyze what happened. The criminal trials of former high-ranking East German elites are complete and two parliamentary commissions of inquiry have written an official history of the GDR. An important lingering issue concerns the appropriateness of permitting individuals who may have collaborated with the secret police and/or committed acts of political repression to be employed in the public sector. Since the process of vetting began in the early 1990s, significant differences have emerged. Some states (Laender) were more unyielding (e.g. Saxony), others more lenient (e.g. Brandenburg), and some exhibited a mixture of both (e.g. Berlin). This paper is a deeper exploration of vetting as one possible course of action under the more general rubric of transitional justice. In the specific case of post-unified Germany two questions are paramount: First, why were vetting policies across the Laender so markedly different? Second, why were there differences across professions both within and between states? For example, police in Berlin faced greater scrutiny when examined by vetting commissions compared to their colleagues in the neighboring state of Brandenburg. Is it simply because more East Berlin police were more compromised by their pasts than those in Brandenburg? Or do other variables explain the discrepancies? To account for these differences, I suggest that Germany’s federal system of government may have, a priori, established a structural dynamic that inadvertently generated these varied outcomes. By decentralizing the process, the particular social and political contexts of implementation became paramount. The agents responsible for executing the policies acted on the basis of cues and support from state level political leaders and administrative authorities about how stringently or how leniently the measures should be drafted and implemented. Geography coupled with political agendas at the state level mattered. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The elites in post-imperial Austria, Germany, Soviet Union/Russia, and Turkey chose radically different approaches in institutionalizing ethnicity in the 1920s. This paper investigates the reasons for the persistence of these institutions of ethnicity until today. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that the compensatory features found in Mixed Member Proportional electoral system and its analogues (such as those found in Hungary and Italy, until recently) provide incentives for strategic voting that has not received much scholarly attention: away from large parties in favor of small parties. This exists because the compensatory mechanisms cause list votes for larger parties come to be "wasted" if the party outperforms a minimum threshold in the nominal tier and the provisions for "overhang" seats in the MMP electoral system rewards a party that does well on the nominal tier for performing poorly on the list tier. The tendency, we suggest, is reinforced as the electoral environment becomes more fragmented. We uncover evidence from German Bundestag elections in the 1994-2005 period that suggests that this phenomenon is indeed known to the German voters and parties and that a nontrivial amount of strategic voting along the lines we propose does indeed take place. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [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]

We identify party incumbency as a new source of contamination in mixed electoral systems. We argue that party incumbency not only boosts SMD vote shares; it also has a positive effect on vote shares in the PR tier of mixed electoral systems. This effect has been overlooked in the contamination literature so far. We test our hypothesis with data from German federal elections and employ a regression-discontinuity (RD) design in order to overcome some of the obstacles to reliable causal inference in observational studies. The RD design exploits the random variation in party incumbency status that occurs when a district race is close and thus allows for causal inference under a weaker set of assumptions than the regression models commonly used in the electoral systems literature. We find that party incumbency results in a gain of about 1 to 1.5 percentage points in PR vote share, which is potentially suffcient to trigger significant shifts in Bundestag majorities. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]