Die Bekämpfung der Unsicherheit: Politikerkarrieren und Karrierepolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Political Careers differ from other professional careers in several regards, but most significantly in the peculiar degree of insecurity they impose. This insecurity is due to the democratic accountability to voters, which includes the possibility of electoral defeat and deprofessionalization. Therefore a continuous career is rendered much more difficult than in other occupations. This calls for specific strategies of access to and staying in political positions, which may be subsumed under the rubric of “career politics”. This article deals with political careers in the Federal Republic of Germany and the elements of individual career politics that may be reconstructed from these careers. The analysis is based on a dataset comprising the political biographics of all 1948 German state legislators with the date being taken from the official legislative handbooks. The features that are most interesting here are the succession and the cumulation of different political offices. Four strategies of career politics can be distinguished: a local politics, a party politics, an interest group, and a fourth strategy, that proceeds via staff positions. In analyzing these strategies the article wants to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between political careers and career politics.     

Climate risks,climate economics,and the foundations of rights-based risk ethics

In this article, I argue that climate ethics must basically be risk ethics. But risk ethics is still an underdeveloped field of normative ethics. For example, rights-based ethical theories, the attractive features of which are outlined in this article, tend to prohibit all risk impositions. Such inability of rights-based theories to deal convincingly with risks could be a reason why the standard approach of climate economics, which as I try to show is based on questionable normative presuppositions, is still as influential as it is. I propose a solution to the problems rights-based moral theories have with risks and outline the basic criteria of permissible and impermissible risk impositions. Finally, I indicate that this will enable us to tackle climate risks in a promising way. The main aim of the article, however, is not to contribute to concrete questions of climate ethics but to the improvement of its normative foundations.     

Editorial

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Europa als besonderer Kommunikationsraum

This paper develops a sociological perspective on the process of social integration that has been initiated in the course of the evolution of European political institutions. This perspective wants to avoid the pitfalls of normative diagnoses (which complain about what is not there) as well as the pitfalls of national comparisons (which do not see more than national similarities and national differences). A more abstract notion of social integration is presented as providing an analytical framework for understanding and explaining the process of socially integrating a culturally heterogeneous Europe. The key concept is that of a transnational space of communication and its discursive closure (with recourse to Deutsch and Bourdieu). The central theoretical idea is to use communicative density as the criterion of the emergence of a communicative space in which two different types of experience make possible its discursive closure: the experience of being treated fairly by the others inhabiting this space (the cognitive capital of a community) and the construction of a common memory frame resulting from the confrontation of differing national (and subnational) memories in this space (the narrative capital of a community). Thus two mechanisms can be identified which explain discursive closure. This model leaves open whether this will happen, but it offers a strategy for identifying the extent and the causes of such processes without recourse to normatively motivated wishful thinking.     

Der Schweizer Rechtsextremismus im internationalen Vergleich

Der Gegenstand des Beitrags ist der schweizerische Rechtsextremismus im internationalen Vergleich. Auf breiter Datenbasis wird gezeigt, dass der Umfang des rechtsextremen Potentials in der Schweiz bestenfalls nur geringfügig unter dem Durchschnitt anderer westeuropäischer Länder liegt. Für die geringe Grösse des rechtsextremen Potentials und das Fehlen einer starken und stabilen rechtsextremen Partei oder Organisation lassen sich mindestens fünf Gründe angeben: Die bisherige Vermeidung von Verunsicherungen durch schwere Wirtschafts- und Beschäftigungskrisen und durch Globalisierungsprozesse; die politische Kultur der Schweiz, die sich anderen Ländern gegenüber besonders durch die breite Unterstützung der Grundrechte auf eigene Sprache und Kultur auszeichnet; die direkte Demokratie, in der rechtsextreme Einstellungen temporär politisch relevant werden können, ohne dass sie institutionell stabilisiert würden; das System der etablierten bürgerlichen Parteien, die den grössten Teil des rechtsextremen Potentials politisch integrieren; die programmatische Ausrichtung der potentiell rechtsextremen Parteien, die sie daran hindert, zum zeitlich stabilen organisatorischen Zentrum eines starken schweizerischen Rechtsextremismus zu werden.     

Bizarre impalement fatalities--where is the implement?

Two fatalities due to unusual impalement injuries are reported. (1) A large branch broken off during a storm had entered a passing car and perforated the chest of the driver and the back of the seat. The chest organs were grossly lacerated. The car was subsequently stopped by another tree and this second impact removed the wood from the body. (2) A man suffered anorectal impalement by the leg of a stool turned upside down. He had introduced one stool leg into his anus for sexual stimulation and fell onto it. This resulted in a wound channel 36 cm long including perforation of the rectum, urinary bladder, mesentery, transverse mesocolon and liver. Before autopsy, the mode of death was unclear because the man had removed the stool leg himself, his wife had hidden the stool from the scene, and there were no relevant external injuries. In both cases, a reliable reconstruction required investigation of the scene and consideration of extremely unlikely circumstances or of bizarre human activities.     

Besprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung