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While the literature highlights the relevance of informal rules for candidate selection, empirical research has mainly focused on formal rules and procedures. This article contributes to our understanding by investigating how the informal rules employed by political parties impact on intra-party competition. Using the example of district nominations in Germany, and based on a longitudinal mixed methods design, the inductive analysis reveals five central informal rules: the Incumbency Rule, the Information Rule, the House Power Rule, Fairness Rules and Power-sharing Rules. These rules shape the expectations and behavior of those involved in candidate selection and have a significant impact on various aspects of intra-party competition. They decrease the number of aspirants, reduce intra-party conflict and emphasize the role of local party leaders in organizing and controlling intra-party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Auto industry incumbents use a delay strategy to thwart environmental policies. • The strategy is not temporal, as others argue, but pressure sensitive. • Our study introduces new resistance tactics deployed by incumbent actors. • Both industry and government use the EU-level to influence the other side. Most serious environmental and health problems caused by the transport sector stem from the automobile. While other sectors have reduced emissions, transport emissions have increased and the sector's sustainability transformation seems stalled. Why is that? And what role do incumbent automobile industry actors play? Relatively few scholars have focused on the behavior of these incumbents. Our study contributes towards filling this gap by analyzing two case studies of how the German automobile industry has reacted to environmental policy initiatives. Our analysis allows us to make several contributions to the literature. First, we demonstrate how industry and policy makers attempted to outmaneuver each other. Second, we illuminate several tactics employed by incumbents to resist change. And third, our analysis reveals a pattern of behavior that we argue is linked to the degree of pressure placed on incumbents. Most other attempts to identify patterns have prioritized the temporal dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the strategic goals behind actors' involvement in emerging technological innovation systems (TISs) for sustainable technologies and the way they contribute to the development of the TIS functions. Based on six expert interviews with firms within the biorefinery sector in Germany, we observe four different strategic goals driving firm-actors' involvement: (1) exploiting new markets and businesses, (2) learning about the potential of new markets and businesses, (3) developing new technologies and (4) building up new market applications. We also differentiate between three firm-actor types: (1) a leading type of incumbent firm highly contributing to the TIS functions; (2) a learning type of incumbent firm with lower contribution; and (3) a 'fill the gap' type of SME or start-up producing complementary knowledge or connecting other TIS actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies suggest that Uber and other tech start‐ups disrupt markets through regulatory entrepreneurship. This practice describes how such companies operate outside of regulation or in legal gray areas before mobilizing their customers in support of regulatory change. Financial technology (FinTech) is sometimes called the "Uber of banking," but banking reveals different political dynamics than the car‐for‐hire sector. Exploring the rise of online‐only banks in the UK and Germany, this article finds that start‐ups such as Starling, Monzo, and N26 challenged incumbents without breaking or remaking regulation. The regulatory entrepreneurship approach, which sees FinTech as a difficult case, and the state world of regulatory innovation, which views policy‐makers as seizing the opportunity created by new technology to reassess their relationship with incumbents, help to explain these findings. Its conclusions have relevance for wider debates about the governance of health care and legal services and the politics of disruption more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been overlooked that factions of finance such as banks and insurers can have opposing policy interests. This paper is concerned with the preferences and strategies of private financial actors in the context of private prefunded pensions. To capture the "tug of war" among these actors, this paper identifies their different financial business models (insurance- and investment-orientation), political roles (financial incumbents and challengers), and levels at which infighting may occur (political and product-market level). For the German case, it shows that product-market competition among financial incumbents and challengers over retirement savings products only turned into competition politics during the 1990s, when shifting political winds provided an opening to insert path-shaping instruments in line with the program of finance capitalism. Financial actors' preferences are not a derivative of economic or functional incentives, but socially embedded in that they are crucially shaped by interactions with their competitors and the political environment. The analysis disentangles the complex web of competition, cooperation, and ownership among factions of finance and discerns their genuine preferences from those strategically adjusted to context. This sheds doubt on functionalist explanations of (pension) financialization and enhances our understanding of how financial actors form and pursue their preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incumbent firms' competitiveness largely depends on the ability to develop digital innovation as novel combination of digital and physical components. This paper provides a better understanding of value creation through digital innovation, focussing on market offerings from incumbent firms. Based on the insights of an exploratory multiple case study with seven cases from the automotive, machine engineering, and consumer goods industries in Germany, we explain the multi-sided changes required for the development and management of digital innovations. Afterwards, we contribute to the further theorization of digital innovation. According to our empirical findings, we decided to discuss the applicability of the resource-based and competence-based approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Top candidates of political parties are increasingly identified as a preeminent factor in electoral campaigns and with regard to winning governmental office; yet they have always been important to a deeper understanding of party competition. This article looks into German and Austrian post-war chancellor candidates, that is, the parties' lead candidates reaching out for the top job in the executive branch. The more particular focus is on the political profiles and track records of non-incumbent candidates challenging a sitting chancellor. The study proceeds from a brief discussion of German and Austrian 'peculiarities', judged against the established parameters of Westminster-style politics, to a comparative empirical assessment. Of the four hypotheses developed (relating to constitutional features, parties and party families, opportunity structures for female candidates and 'personalisation'), only one is supported by our empirical findings. However, the notable problems of relating empirical patterns to theoretical propositions may not all be caused by political contingency. To some extent, it seems, they rather reflect the strategic choices of challenging parties specifically designed to generate the impression of 'freshness', and to take incumbents by surprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the relationship between new business formation and the level of competitive pressure that is perceived by manufacturing incumbent establishments. The perceived pressure of competition is stronger when entry in the respective industry is higher. This relationship holds not only for start-ups that are located in the same region of the incumbent, but also for start-ups across all regions of Germany. Additionally, we find that particularly small, low-productivity incumbents—as well as incumbents that are located in highly populated regions—are more likely to associate new business formation with high levels of competitive pressure. We also identify other incumbent characteristics that influence the overall level of perceived competitive pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of studies recently have investigated party position-taking in multilevel polities. Given the attempts of federally organized parties to tailor their messages to their audiences, we investigate the voter side of the equation: Are voters sufficiently politically sophisticated to pick up on highly differentiated policy signals? Following common conceptions of political preferences, we argue that citizens have a heuristic view of party competition that is shaped by ideological and valence factors, where the latter are much less challenging to process than the former. Accordingly, citizens are able to differentiate only between the national and the regional party on the valence dimension. We argue that a valence delta between different party branches is most likely to be perceived in contexts of high media exposure, particularly when parties are in government. Results from an analysis of survey data covering 21 German state-level elections support those expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the literature on ambidexterity, organizations can use structural or contextual approaches to simultaneously explore novel opportunities and exploit existing ones. So far, however, we know very little about what induces organizations to focus on structural versus contextual ambidexterity, or how they combine the two approaches to maximize organizational learning. To shed more light on these questions, we investigate how the environment shapes a firm's use of structural and contextual ambidexterity. Drawing on a comparative, longitudinal case study of the four largest electric utility companies in Germany, we show that firms focused on structural ambidexterity whenever they perceived emerging opportunities in the environment as requiring organizational culture and capabilities fundamentally different from their own. Contextual ambidexterity, on the other hand, became particularly important when opportunities in the environment were both numerous and uncertain, requiring the organization to leverage the distributed attention and expertise of its frontline employees. We show that environments characterized by opportunities that are numerous/uncertain and require novel culture and capabilities lead organizations to invest in initiatives that combine elements of both structural and contextual ambidexterity—an approach we label hybrid ambidexterity. Our theory framework synthesizes and complements existing work that has started to investigate the antecedents of structural versus contextual ambidexterity. We challenge the prevailing understanding of contextual and structural ambidexterity as dichotomous categories and reconceptualize them as two ends of a continuum. In addition, we provide initial evidence that firms' ambidexterity approaches are influenced by managers' perceptions of capabilities and opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports the results of a randomized field experiment conducted three weeks before the 2017 federal election in Germany. Four different versions of a letter to the editor were sent to all the German daily newspapers that handle letters to the editor independently. The versions differed in the subject matter of the letter, the chancellor Angela Merkel versus the main challenger Martin Schulz, and in the evaluation of this subject, positive versus negative. The experiment was designed to test for three different types of media bias: political bias, negativity bias, and incumbency dominance. We find no political bias in the decisions to print letters, and no statistically significant negativity bias. We do observe incumbency dominance: letters about the chancellor were 40% more likely to be printed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Six analytical categories for local public incumbents in transitioning infrastructure network industries. • Link of analytical categories to the triple embeddedness framework (Geels, 2014). • Iterative theory building – linking public corporate governance and network industries theory with empirical study results. • Empirical evidence from six urban utility companies in Germany and Switzerland. The understanding of incumbents' behaviour in sustainability transitions in the energy sector is gaining increasing scholarly attention. However, two key structural characteristics of many incumbents in the energy sector are hardly taken into account: they are mostly public companies and they are operating in infrastructure network industries. Furthermore, studies on incumbents in the energy sector do not consider the multi-scalar situation of federal energy governance systems, as in Germany and Switzerland. This paper presents six analytical categories, which reveal the specifics of public energy companies and provide categories for a more precise analysis. They are developed through an iterative theory building process, combining empirical evidence from urban utility companies in Germany and Switzerland and theoretical insights from public corporate governance and network industries literature. Finally, the paper discusses, how these categories can be linked to the triple embeddedness framework (Geels, 2014) and transferred to other infrastructure sectors (e.g. the telecommunication or the railway sector) to enrich the understanding of public incumbents in sustainability transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mixed-member electoral systems are supposed to simultaneously produce coherent parties and ensure the representation of local interests. Whether these goals are achieved depends on the ability of parties and districts to control members of parliament (MPs). We regard the competitiveness of MPs' bids for renomination as a crucial indicator of the degree to which MPs are punished when deviating from the interests of their principals. The theoretical account we develop makes the competitiveness of MP renomination conditional on the characteristics of the electoral system, the candidate selection regime, an MP's parliamentary behavior, government status, and district characteristics. Corroborating our expectations, the analysis of the candidate selection processes in the run-up to the 2013 German Bundestag election shows that an increasing degree of ideological deviation from the party line--as expressed in parliamentary speeches--results in a worse position on the party list for opposition MPs but does not affect the renomination of list candidates from the government camp or district candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the personal vote to be cast in a meaningful way it is a minimal condition that voters recognise candidates. However, from earlier studies we know that there is huge variation in the number of candidates recognised. Little to nothing is known about candidate recognition and its determinants. This study explores the sources of candidate recognition from three different angles: candidates; citizens; and context. Furthermore, it enables the distinction of campaign-related from other factors. A unique multi-level within-subject design was set up for the analyses of the 2013 German Federal Election to ensure a meaningful validation of our theoretical framework. Our results suggest that, indeed, many factors lead to recognition but as well that earlier studies overestimated the effects of political interest or incumbency status. Moreover, we show that a good campaign makes a difference for recognition – as does the context in which it takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides empirical evidence on the party incumbency advantage in mayoral elections in Germany. Using a regression discontinuity design on a data set of about 25,000 elections, I estimate a causal incumbency effect of 38–40 percentage points in the probability of winning the next election. Studying the mechanisms behind this effect, I show that the electoral advantage is larger for full-time mayors, increasing in municipality size, independent of the specific partisanship of the mayor and constant between 1945 and 2010. Moreover, it increases with local spending hikes and it is independent of municipal debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legalizing of agency work in Germany is used as an illustrative case for exploring and theorizing how contests about regulating organizations’ labor practices are played out through the politics of boundary work. By combining the idea of inter-field relations from the theory of strategic action fields with considerations about boundary work within and between organizational fields, this paper explains the recent proliferation of agency work as the outgrowth of a long-term legalization contest. By taking a historical perspective, it illuminates how the boundary work of (former) incumbents and (new) challengers modulates institutional dynamics. Based on qualitative primary and secondary material, the findings reveal how the politics of boundary work facilitate power reversals in organizational fields by allowing defeated parties to survive in a field’s niches, to cross a field’s boundaries, and to rebuild their intervention capacity as well as by making incumbent coalitions erode over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do district incumbents in an election have an advantage, and if so, do these advantages depend on which party is in government? We estimate the incumbency effect for the direct district candidates in German federal and state elections using a regression discontinuity design (RDD). When studying the heterogeneity in these effects, we find that incumbents from both large parties, the center-right CDU and the center-left SPD, have an advantage only if the SPD is in government. This effect is robust and shows even in state elections that are unrelated to federal elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the adoption of candidate gender quotas, women have always fared better in the 'second' or PR tier of Bundestag elections than in the 'first' or plurality tier, where quotas do not apply. This gap, however, has been closing. In the 2009 Bundestag election, 27 percent of the major parties' direct mandate candidates were women compared to almost 30 percent in 2013. All parties experienced an increase in the percentage of women among their nominees for direct mandates between 2009 and 2013. Why have the numbers of female candidates for the 299 directly elected Bundestag constituencies been increasing? This increase is puzzling because gender quotas have not been extended to this tier of the electoral system and candidate selection rules have not changed. This article explores five potential mechanisms that may be driving the observed rise in women nominated as constituency candidates. I argue that the main reasons for these increases lie in the advantages female incumbents incur, the openings presented when male incumbents retire, and the diffusion of female candidates across parties and neighboring Wahlkreise after one woman manages to win a direct mandate. I develop these conclusions by comparing candidate nominations and direct mandate winners in the 2009 and 2013 Bundestag elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models of competition for the market with endogenous market structures show that, contrary to the Arrow view, an endogenous entry threat induces the average firm to invest less in R&D and the incumbent leader to invest more. We test these predictions using a unique dataset for the German manufacturing sector (the Mannheim Innovation Panel). In line with our predictions, endogenous entry threats as perceived by the firms (in survey data) reduce R&D intensity for an average firm, but they increase it for an incumbent leader. These results hold after a number of robustness tests with instrumental variable regressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-world simple plurality elections rarely bear out the strong Duvergerian prediction that, in equilibrium, only two competitors receive votes. Recent advances in strategic voting theory demonstrate that voter uncertainty about competitors' true support levels in the constituency may lead to limited strategic voting, and hence incomplete desertion of trailing parties. This is the first attempt to estimate empirically the impact of uncertainty on incentives to vote strategically. Calibrating a model of strategic voting to voting results from simple plurality elections in German constituencies, it is found that strategic voters operate under high levels of uncertainty. These results support the proposition that uncertainty about party support impedes formation of Duvergerian equilibria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper we demonstrate empirically that incumbency is a source of spillover effects in Germany''s mixed electoral system. Using a quasi-experimental research design that allows for causal inferences under a weaker set of assumptions than the regression models commonly used in the electoral systems literature, we find that incumbency causes a gain of 1.4–1.7 percentage points in PR vote shares. We also present simulations of Bundestag seat distributions to show that spillover effects caused by incumbency are sufficiently large to trigger significant shifts in parliamentary majorities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Does the outcome of the direct election of the head of the government influence the election of the legislative body? We test whether findings from research on divided government, contamination and incumbency effects observed at the national level can be transferred to the local level. In particular, we analyse quasi-presidential local government systems with a directly elected mayor. Our main hypothesis is that the party of the incumbent mayor systematically gains votes at the next council election. For our case of the German state Hesse we find a transferable incumbency effect after the introduction of the direct mayoral elections of about 3.7 percentage points. A more sophisticated model with several interaction effects specifies this incumbency effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politicians' party membership allows voters to overcome incomplete information issues. In this article, we maintain that such 'party cues' in multilevel governance structures also induce voters to incorporate their assessment of incumbents at one level of government into their assessment of incumbents at other levels of government. Moreover, we argue that these assessment 'spillovers' increase in magnitude with voters' level of political information. They become particularly prominent for voters with higher levels of political knowledge and interest as well as during election periods (when information is less costly and more readily available). Empirical analyses using survey data from Germany covering the period 1990 to 2018 corroborate our theoretical propositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of Germany's chosen path towards the energy transition, the regulatory framework has changed considerably. New players have succeeded in entering the market, and renewable energies have become increasingly competitive. Greater electrification of the transport and heating sectors will be needed in the future to achieve national climate targets. Against this background, Germany's big energy companies need to be sure that their sales will increase. However, they were unable to anticipate this development, and made strategic mistakes in the past. The development of sustainable business models in line with the energy transition failed to materialize. Now it is becoming increasingly clear that companies must create new business models to survive in the long term. These business models have to keep with the tradition, whilst meeting the needs of low-carbon power supplies. In this paper, we will examine the past and future challenges of the four energy companies and develop a proposal for evaluating sustainable business models. For this purpose, we use the multi-level perspective to categorize developments in the electricity market over the last 50 years, and then apply a multi-criteria analysis to derive five suitable business models from the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]