In search of reliable results: Socialist values and political trust in unified Germany – A comment on Campbell's analyses and conclusions

In a recently published article in this journal, Ross Campbell argues that adherence to socialist values establishes a hitherto neglected factor when it comes to the explanation of differences in East and West German citizens’ political trust. As the results of his study indicate, adherence to socialist values impacts negatively on citizens’ political trust, this effect is more pronounced and more stable over time for East German as compared to West German citizens and is sufficiently strong to eliminate aggregate‐level differences in political trust between East and West Germany. However, this research note suggests that Campbell's article contains several substantial inconsistencies and obscurities that question the reliability and validity of the empirical findings presented. It provides a re‐analysis of Campbell's main arguments and shows to what extent his initial conclusions can be upheld after the shortcomings have been remedied. The results of this re‐analysis suggest that socialist values indeed exhibit a negative impact on German citizens’ political trust, which is relatively stronger for East as compared to West German citizens. However, contrary to Campbell's initial results, the negative effect of socialist values on political trust is robust over time for both East and West German citizens. What is more, there is no empirical evidence confirming that differences in adherence to socialist values between East and West German citizens are sufficiently strong to account for aggregate‐level differences in political trust. In light of these findings, two of Campbell's three main conclusions are dubious and call for further examination.     

How the spending patterns of cities change: Budgetary incrementalism reexamined

Do city governments generally behave in keeping with the assumptions underlying the incremental model when they allocate their resources among competing activities? That is to say, do they try to maintain everyone's historical “fair share” of the budget in order to minimize disputes among rival participants in the decision process? Earlier studies have lacked sufficient data to address this question. However, with data from 105 West German cities, the present study is able to provide an answer. The resource allocation behavior of many of those cities seems to conform with the incremental model's assumptions. Yet for other cities, major changes in expenditure patterns from one year to the next are common. The differences in the variability of expenditure patterns across the cities studied are far from random. They are systematically associated with certain characteristics of the municipal environment. These associations, in turn, offer plausible hints about the process that leads to change in cities' spending patterns.     

Voters' party preferences in multiparty systems and their coalitional and spatial implications: Germany after unification

How should party preferences of voters in a multiparty system be measured, compared and aggregated? We use city block metric of distances between the pairwise comparisons of the five German parties (1995 survey data for West and East Germany). Neither in West nor in East Germany, a party gains the absolute majority of voters' preferences. We derive coalition preferences from the party rankings; the governing coalition of CDU/CSU and FDP is not the winner, compared with other feasible coalitions of the German party system. But the party rankings of the CDU/CSU-FDP coalition leaners are more homogeneous than other groups of coalition leaners. In the second part of the article, we analyze the common structure of all consistent party rankings. Do voters apply the same criteria to evaluate the political parties? Although only a slight majority of individual rankings fit the often used ideological left-right scale, there does not exist a competing one-dimensional order of the parties that would capture more voters. The joint scale of individual party rankings is interpreted as the collective order which facilitates political orientation of voters. This collective order is more pronounced in West than in East Germany where individuals are almost as consistent in their party rankings but where the rankings fit the collective order less well than in West Germany.

     

Short-term factors versus long-term values: Explaining the 2009 election results

This paper examines the way three types of factors influence eastern and western German voters in order to assess the similarities and differences in electoral behavior across the former East-West divide. First, to what extend does the performance of parties and the regime influence party support in the East and the West? Second, how do candidate perceptions affect party support? Third, to what degree do ideological values influence vote choice? The results suggest that even 20 years after unification, voters in the East and the West still follow a partially different logic. While candidate evaluations broadly influence party support similarly, negative performance assessments lead west German voters to support the opposition, whereas eastern Germans tend to either “exit” the electoral arena or support the Linke party. Moreover, ideological values have no affect on party choice in the West, whereas they strongly influence the choice of Die Linke in the East. Theoretically, the results reflect the different East-West experiences, illustrating that voters in newer democracies may base their party choice on a different rationale than voters in more mature democracies.     

Cycles of value change

Abstract. The main focus of this paper is a comparison of results from studies on cycles in value change of the British and West German political systems. While the British data span more than two hundred years and the German data not more than 35 to 65 years, the British data are taken as a reference or constant. The comparison results in the observation that there is no indication of a general cyclical process of value change. This result contrasts with former results of British and American studies, which indicated a common cyclical process for these two nations.     

Race,Islamophobia and the politics of citizenship in post-unification Germany

ABSTRACT

In the immediate aftermath of German reunification, as in the wake of the recent humanitarian crisis, Germany experienced notable ‘peaks’ of racist agitation and violence. In the 1990s, as today, the post-Communist eastern regions of Germany tend to be perceived as the hub of such racism. In this article, Lewicki revisits both ‘peaks’ via an examination of numerical evidence for verbal and physical racist violence in the former East and West of Germany. Rather than conceiving of racism as ‘cyclical’ or a specific legacy of the Communist dictatorship, her analysis suggests that political projects in Germany’s past and present have retained distinct structural incarnations of race. Far-right activists could thus successfully channel animosities resulting from the terms of unification into nationalist and racist resentment: momentarily more so in the East, but increasingly also in the West. The politics of citizenship, Lewicki argues, has provided a key means of perpetuating, reaffirming and cementing racialized hierarchies in the two post-war German states, but also in reunified Germany.     

TAX SHARING IN AUSTRALIA AND WEST GERMANY*

Abstract: Certain aspects of the new Australian tax sharing arrangements are analysed against the background of West German experiences. Emphasis is laid on Federal-State relations in outlining the basic characteristics of the German machinery and the Australian arrangements. Compared to the Australian situation, the tax sharing base in West Germany is much broader and has indeed contributed to the safeguarding of State autonomy to a large extent. On the other hand, the German States have no individual power to legislate on taxes or tax surcharges. Although tax sharing is a powerful instrument in mitigating financial imbalances in a federation, it tends to conflict with the idea of a centrally controlled stabilization and distribution policy. In Germany, tax sharing is complemented by a complex coordination machinery stabilizing joint decision making of the Federal government and the States. In areas such as demand management, financial planning and allocation policies there seems to be need for such complementary arrangements, since tax sharing alone cannot achieve sufficient coordination among the different administrative levels of a federation.     

Expected closeness and turnout: An empirical analysis for the German General Elections, 1983--1994

This paper investigates whether expected closeness had a significant impact on turnout in the different electoral districts of the German General Elections, 1983-1994. We find no closeness effect for the 1983 but a significant positive one for the 1987 election. The 1990 election revealed an asymmetry: In West Germany we find a positive and statistically significant closeness effect, in East Germany a negative but also significant one. This result is lacking a theoretical explanation so far. For 1994 we find a positive significant effect in West and a positive but not significant one in East Germany.     

Altruism and Spite in Politics: How the Mind Makes Welfare Tradeoffs About Political Parties

How much will people sacrifice to support or oppose political parties? Extending previous work on the psychology of interpersonal cooperation, we propose that people’s minds compute a distinct cost–benefit ratio—a welfare tradeoff ratio—that regulates their choices to help or hurt political parties. In two experiments, participants decide whether to financially help and hurt the inparty and outparty. The results show that participants were extremely consistent (>?90%) while making dozens of decisions in a randomized order, providing evidence for tradeoff ratios toward parties. Moreover, participants’ ratios correlated in the expected directions with partisanship, political ideology, and feelings of enthusiasm and anger toward each party, corroborating that these ratios are politically meaningful. Generally, most participants were willing to sacrifice at least some money to help their inparty and hurt the outparty. At the same time, a sizable minority hurt their inparty and helped their outparty. Welfare tradeoff ratios push our understanding of partisanship beyond the classic debate about whether voters are rational or irrational. Underneath the turbulent surface of partisan passions hide precise calculations that proportion our altruism and spite toward parties.

     

German Intelligence History: A Field in Search of Scholars

German historians have so far shown little interest in the history of intelligence services and in the role the craft of intelligence played in national and international politics. The sole exception is found in the historical writings on East Germany between 1945 and 1990, where the Ministry for State Security - or Stasi - has become the subject of dozens of highly valuable studies. This neglect cannot be explained simply by pointing to the difficulties in getting access to relevant source materials. A more plausible explanation is found in the reluctance on the part of most German intellectuals to study the broader questions of war and peace in international politics. Military history has been marginalised in post-1945 German universities. The same is largely true of international security studies, defence studies, studies of insurgency, terrorism and various related subjects. Peace and conflict studies, a discipline established sometime in the 1970s, has mostly avoided both war or intelligence. The deeper reasons for this neglect lie both in Germany's psychological atmosphere and in academic politics. Spy novels and spy movies are as popular in Germany as anywhere but their heroes almost never are Germans. Even those German intelligence officers and spies who worked against Hitler and might therefore be regarded as heroes are barely known in present-day Germany. Those few scholars who are now trying to build up the field of intelligence studies get little help from their government or from private funders. While East Germany publicly revered communist spies like Richard Sorge and Klaus Fuchs, the West German Bundesnachrichtendienst did and does nothing to publicise its achievements.     

Accommodating Islam and the Utility of National Models: The German Case

This article questions the claim that the way German governments have responded to Muslim demands for accommodating Islam fits a German national model. The empirical focus is on Islamic religious instruction in five German Länder. The evidence presented shows that there is not one but several German models. Länder with Christian Democratic dominance were more supportive of confessional religious instruction than Länder where the left was stronger. At the same time Christian Democrats initially were more reluctant to extend the privilege of religious instruction to Muslim groups. In Länder where Article 7 III of the German constitution applied, corporatist hurdles were an obstacle for Muslim groups, but this was less the case in Berlin. Religion–state institutions are important for understanding how European countries have dealt with the growing presence of Islam, but it is equally important to understand the politically contested nature of these institutions.     

Between deepening and widening: Role conflict in Germany's enlargement policy

Although Germany is the principal proponent of the EU's eastern enlargement, it has at times found it difficult to reconcile this aim with its desire to promote deeper EU integration. The use of role theory illustrates these conflicting priorities. West Germany's post‐war role in European politics was that of a promoter of deeper integration; the deepening of West European integration thus became part of the self‐conception of West German foreign policy‐making élites. The changed situation after 1990 placed new demands on German foreign policy makers. West Germany's traditional self‐conception as an integration deepener conflicted with the desire on behalf of unified Germany to press for EU enlargement. However, although German policy makers employed a variety of strategies in order to pursue their incongruous foreign‐policy aims, their principal concern remained with the deepening of western integration.     

Interactions between scientists and public officials: A comparison of the use of science in regulatory programs in the United States and West Germany

This essay compares and contrasts important attributes of the use of scientific knowledge and judgment in regulatory decisions in the United States and West Germany. It decribes the broader historical context for such decisions in each country. Although the system in America exhibits considerable conflict and assumption of adversarial positions, it is argued that a more fundamental attribute of the system is that policy decisions are reviewed according to rules of evidence and its interpretation. Similarly, although the German system involves a great deal of consultation, a more fundamental aspect of policy decisions there is that of the determination of the social obligation to act. In the United States, it is more important that a decisionmaker has properly developed and interpreted the evidence than that he or she has consulted with all the relevant parties. In Germany, the order of importance of the two is reversed.Based on seminars given in Berlin in December 1984 at the International Institute for Environment and Society of the Science Center Berlin and in Washington, DC in January 1985 at the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.The author, a National Research Council Fellow, wishes to thank his colleagues in Berlin and Washington for their comments, many of which have been integrated into this essay. The ideas presented here, however, remain the responsibility of the author.     

Politicians’ outside earnings and electoral competition

This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians’ outside earnings. In our framework, politicians face a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings. The main hypothesis is that the amount of time spent on outside work is negatively related to the degree of electoral competition. We test this hypothesis using a new dataset on outside earnings of members of the German federal assembly and find that politicians facing low competition have substantially higher outside earnings.     

When Do Leaders Free-Ride? Business Experience and Contributions to Collective Defense

The logic of free-riding expects that individuals will underinvest in public goods, but people often behave in ways that are inconsistent with this prediction. Why do we observe variation in free-riding behavior? This study addresses this question by examining contributions to an important international public good—collective defense in military alliances. It develops a behavioral theory of free-riding in which the beliefs of world leaders are important for explaining investments in public goods. The argument holds that leaders with business experience make smaller contributions to collective defense because they are egoistic and more comfortable relying on a powerful ally for their defense. An analysis of defense expenditures in 17 non-U.S. members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from 1952 to 2014 provides evidence consistent with the theory. The findings suggest that leaders with business experience are more likely than other heads of government to act as self-interested utility maximizers.     

Sometimes Less Is More: Censorship,News Falsification,and Disapproval in 1989 East Germany

Does more media censorship imply more regime stability? We argue that censorship may cause mass disapproval for censoring regimes. In particular, we expect that censorship backfires when citizens can falsify media content through alternative sources of information. We empirically test our theoretical argument in an autocratic regime—the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Results demonstrate how exposed state censorship on the country's emigration crisis fueled outrage in the weeks before the 1989 revolution. Combining original weekly approval surveys on GDR state television and daily content data of West German news programs with a quasi-experimental research design, we show that recipients disapproved of censorship if they were able to detect misinformation through conflicting reports on Western television. Our findings have important implications for the study of censoring systems in contemporary autocracies, external democracy promotion, and campaigns aimed at undermining trust in traditional journalism.     

Incremental and cyclical developments in public expenditure in West Germany

Abstract. The 'cyclical' effect covered in this paper deals with the development of public expenditure in West Germany in combination with the timing of elections. The underlying hypotheses on the cyclical development of certain expenditures are based on the 'New Political Economy' literature. This approach is then contrasted with the theory of budgetary incrementalism, an alternative mode of explanation of public sector growth. The data are tested to see whether a cyclical or linear model is more appropriate for describing public expenditure developments.     

The decontamination of German history: Jürgen Habermas and the ‘Historikerstreit’ in West Germany

The ‘Historikerstreit’ in West Germany was opened by the non-historian Habermas who sought to expose what he saw as a ‘scandalous’ revision of aspects of the history of German fascism on the part of leading conservative historians like Nolte, Hillgruber and Stürmer. Habermas sees this revisionism in the wider context of the perceived need to foster a new German nationalism as a means of legitimation. The attempt to decontaminate German history would seem to derive from the need to resist the demands for political realignment in West Germany and to establish a strong pedigree of German anti-communism which takes in National Socialism and its membership of the Anti-Comintern Pact as well as West Germany's membership of NATO. Habermas's critique of conservative historians and the non-rational assumptions of their philosophy of history is essentially linked to his critique of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault and his identification of a common paralyzing influence on discourse.     

Who gets what and why? Committee assignments in the German Bundestag

Although committee assignments have been researched in various parliaments, findings are inconclusive. This article contributes to the debate by analysing the allocations to specialised committees in the Bundestag, a legislature that establishes strong committees despite having strong parliamentary party groups. Studying assignments in this legislature can, therefore, help us to solve the present disjunction between ‘European’ and ‘American’ experiences regarding committee research. The study uses the congressional theories of legislative organisation as heuristic devices but explicitly highlights the strong involvement of parliamentary party groups. The hypotheses are tested with a multiple membership multilevel model across several legislative periods (1990?2013) and backed up with evidence from 51 interviews with German legislators. The results show that next to constituency demands and the influence of regional factions, there is strong evidence for a reassignment pattern and that a legislator’s occupational background and connections to interest groups matter in the assignment process.