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"If [voter] turnout was 100%, would it affect the election result?" (Bernhagen and Marsh 2007) is a frequently asked research question. So far, the question has been primarily answered regarding the changes in the distribution of votes. This article extends the analysis to changes in the distribution of seats and government formation. It proposes a method that factors in apportionment methods, barring clauses, size of parliaments, leverage of nonvoters, closeness of election results, and individual characteristics of nonvoters. The method is then applied to German national elections from 1949 to 2005. The application shows that Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD) would have gained from the counterfactual participation of nonvoters, although usually not enough to result in a government change. However by the 1994 and 2005 elections evidence shows that such a government change could have happened.

"In sociology, the appropriateness of national approaches for understanding social inequality in today's societies is being increasingly questioned, and EU-wide approaches are advocated instead. In this paper, we link the growing debate about national or EU-wide approaches to reference group theory, investigating whether comparisons with foreign countries influence levels of individual life satisfaction. Our results indicate that, on the one hand, more people can be assumed to have a national frame of reference than a broader international one, on the other hand, among those who do have an idea of how average people in other countries live, cross-border comparisons certainly influence people's satisfaction with life. Upward comparisons in particular are important: The more people feel personally deprived, relative to other countries, the less satisfied they are with their lives. In contrast, the feeling of relative gratification has a much smaller impact on life satisfaction, and often no impact at all. This leads us to conclude that EU-wide approaches to inequality do make sense, but that there is also no need to jettison national approaches completely." (author's abstract)

"Die Individualisierungshypothese impliziert mit zunehmendem gesellschaftlichen Wohlstand ansteigende Heterogenität von Lebenslagen einerseits, und abnehmende Prägekraft sozialer Klassen und Schichten andererseits. Zur Untersuchung dieser beiden Implikationen wird die Heterogenität und Klassenstrukturierung der 25 Länder der heutigen EU sowie von Bulgarien, Rumänien und der Türkei ermittelt. Diese Werte werden dann in Abhängigkeit vom Bruttoinlandsprodukt dieser Länder untersucht. Dabei zeigt sich, dass die Heterogenität von Lebenslagen in den wohlhabenderen Ländern kleiner ist als in den ärmeren. Bei der Klassenstrukturierung zeigt sich dagegen für einzelne Lebensbereiche das aus der Individualisierungshypothese erwartete Muster. Die Befunde werden dahingehend gedeutet, dass es Individualisierung als umfassenden, alle Lebensbereiche einschließenden Prozess nicht gibt. In einzelnen Lebensbereichen zeigt sich aber eine De-Institutionalisierung, der wahrscheinlich lebensbereichsspezifische Ursachen zu Grunde liegen. Der Aufsatz führt exemplarisch ein bislang zur Untersuchung von Individualisierungshypothesen nicht verwendetes Forschungsdesign vor. Es wird argumentiert, dass dieses Forschungsdesign die Möglichkeit zur Untersuchung vielfältiger Implikationen der Individualisierungshypothese eröffnet." (Autorenreferat) "Individualization implies pluralization of social positions and a decreasing impact of social classes on life chances, behaviors and attitudes. To analyze these implications we calculated the heterogeneity of social positions and the class impact on various dependent variables for 28 countries. The resulting measures were then analyzed regarding the wealth of the nations. Our analysis shows that heterogeneity of social positions does not increase with the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while the class-impact does decrease for at least some dependent variables. Based on our findings, we conclude that individualization cannot be seen as a general social process. Instead there is some deinstitutionalization for specific life spheres, which cannot be explained on the common ground of individualization theory. The article illustrates a new design to analyze implications of individualization theory. It is argued that this new design establishes a possibility to analyze a variety of implications of the individualization theory." (author's abstract)