Vom ungeliebten Störenfried zum akzeptierten Paradigma? Zum Stand der (Neuen) Politischen Ökonomie in Deutschland

This contribution presents the German state of the art of economic approaches to politics. First, the basic model, the research areas, and the analytical tools used by these approaches are briefly introduced. Second, for each sub-field of political science, the German contribution is presented in relation to the international state of the art. While German scholars hesitated to engage in public choice and positive political theory in the beginning, we nowadays find many contributions from this perspective in the fields of electoral studies, the European Union, and veto player analysis.     

How parties compete for votes: A test of saliency theory

Saliency theory is among the most influential accounts of party competition, not least in providing the theoretical framework for the Comparative Manifesto Project – one of the most widely used data collections in comparative politics. Despite its prominence, not all empirical implications of the saliency theory of party competition have yet been systematically tested. This article addresses five predictions of saliency theory, the central claim of which is that parties compete by selective issue emphasis rather than by direct confrontation. Since a fair test of the theory's assumptions needs to rely on data that measures party issue saliency and party positions independently, this article draws on new manifesto data from the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES). Analysing all manifestos issued for the 2002, 2006 and 2008 general elections, it shows that saliency theory correctly identifies some features of party competition. For instance, parties disproportionally emphasise issues they ‘own’. Yet, the core assumption of saliency theory that parties compete via selective issue emphasis rather than direct confrontation over the same issues fails to materialise in the majority of cases.     

Food Intake and the Role of Food Self-Provisioning

This article investigates the role of food self-provisioning for the intake of nutrients of households in Mongolia. We analyse nutritional outcomes within and across urban wage employees, rural households with small herds, and pastoralists with large herds. Food self-provisioning significantly affects dietary quality and quantity. Farming food crops improves the nutrient intake. In contrast, animal husbandry increases the intake of calories and nutrients from animal sources, while it decreases the intake of carbohydrates and nutrients from vegetal sources. This finding suggests household-specific market failures due to remoteness exist. Last, exposure to a weather shock does not affect households’ calorie intake.     

Empirical Modeling of Policy Diffusion in Federal States: The Dyadic Approach

Policy diffusion is a common phenomenon in federal states: indeed, one of the normative justifications of decentralized policy making is that it permits the development and spread of best practices. Following Berry and Berry (1990), event‐history analysis has been the method of choice for the quantitative investigation of policy diffusion, but Volden (2006) has recently introduced a dyadic variant of this method in which units of analysis are not states but, instead, pairs of states. This article discusses the dyadic approach with a particular focus on the diffusion of policies in Switzerland. The goal is not to introduce a new method, but rather to provide a practical overview for researchers interested in using it. The article shows how the method has migrated from the international relations literature to the policy‐diffusion literature, describes the typical structure of a dyadic dataset in a diffusion context, and discusses several modeling issues. The usefulness of the dyadic approach is illustrated empirically with the example of health‐insurance subsidy policies in Swiss cantons.     

What determines UN approval of greenhouse gas emission reduction projects in developing countries?

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), established by the Kyoto protocol, can generate substantial rents for project participants via the sale of Certified Emission Reductions. For this reason, supposedly technical decisions about the approval of CDM methodologies and about the registration of projects may be driven by benefits to specific countries or interest groups. Our econometric analysis of data for about 250 methodologies and about 1000 projects discussed by the CDM Executive Board (EB) so far, suggests that indeed, along with formal quality criteria, political-economic variables determine the final EB decision.     

The Individual-Level Determinants of Exiting German Parties

With respect to explaining declining party membership, the question who leaves political parties and why has so far been neglected. This article aims to fill this gap by applying Hirschman’s theory of “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” to both current and former party members, and at combining it with the resource model of political participation. We find that neither individual resources nor reasons for discontent are sufficient to explain the different reactions to discontent, but that the exit-voice-loyalty model has a certain explanatory power.