The control of visual representation: American art policy in occupied Germany, 1945–1949

The development of the fine arts in post-war West Germany was influenced by the Office of Military Government for Germany, US (OMGUS). In mid-1946, a small group of OMGUS officers proposed the development of a fine arts policy aimed at neutralizing the Soviet cultural offensive. They were also interested in overcoming the cultural isolationism inherited from the Third Reich, and in strengthening the link between Western Germany and the democratic West. In 1947 the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Branch (MFA&A) of OMGUS began to develop an active fine arts policy. Its officers organized art exhibitions, provided exhibition space, established art contests, invited international speakers to lecture on art, created art appreciation groups, purchased work by German artists, channeled funds to German artists, and connected German artists with American museums, universities, and art patrons. Formal and informal, overt and covert networks were established to develop German-American artistic relations in the context of a cultural policy emphasizing collaboration.     

Who Cuts Back and When? The Politics of Delays in Social Expenditure Cutbacks, 1980–2005

This article investigates the politics of delays in social spending cutbacks in OECD democracies. In the context of fiscal austerity, policymakers are assumed to have a strong incentive to manipulate the timing of cutbacks strategically. Applying event history analysis to small and large cutbacks in 21 mature welfare states, the authors test whether partisanship, electioneering and institutional constraints contribute to explain the timing of cutbacks. Macro-economic determinants such as worker productivity, economic growth and unemployment are found to be more important than these political variables. However, left-wing governments and welfare states with more institutional rigidity or a greater degree of contribution financing do tend to delay welfare cutbacks, while cabinets that have recently changed their party composition implement cutbacks earlier.     

The Good of Banality? The Emergence of Cost—Benefit Analysis and Proportionality in the Treatment of Aliens in the US and Germany

In this essay, I argue that the gap between 'citizen' and 'alien' has been shrinking in both American and German law. Despite the recent hostility toward immigrants and aliens in both countries, the longer-term tendency has been to grant aliens greater rights. In part this is because the courts have moved to a more functionalist and prosaic perspective and away from grand theories of citizenship and rights. In part, however, this development also points to the reduction of solidarity within these societies and the decline in the power and viability of citizenship as a political and socioeconomic category. The result has been a gain in 'recognition' but at the expense of 'redistributive' politics.     

The European refugee crisis,party competition,and voters’ responses in Germany

Studies show that globalisation creates political potentials that can transform electoral competition in Western societies. The specific process of how these potentials become effective is not completely understood. It is argued in the article that attention-grabbing events can trigger the transformation of electoral competition as they force actors to take clear positions and thereby allow citizens to align their partisan preferences and policy attitudes. The article analyses the case of German parties’ reaction to the arrival of large numbers of refugees at Europe’s borders in 2015/16. Using panel data that bracket this event, it is shown how German citizens responded to party behaviour by changing partisan preferences on the basis of prior immigration attitudes. The so-called refugee crisis may thus have been a critical juncture transforming party competition in Germany. As such, the crisis represents a striking example of how events may focus attention on a new policy dimension and catalyse the evolution of new cleavages.     

An Empirical Analysis on the Determinants of the Length of Ministerial Tenure in Korea, 1980–2008

ABSTRACT

The study of the length of ministerial tenure has received some attention by scholars of public management in Western countries. Responding to the lack of empirical research on ministerial duration in non-Western countries, this article empirically examines the determinants of ministerial duration based on the Korean Ministerial Database from 1980 to 2008. The empirical findings are as follows. First, being a female minister decreases the probability of stepping down by 1.78 times compared to a male minister. Second, political democratization after 1987 drastically increases the probability of ministerial stepping down by 3.46 times. Third, confirmation hearings after 2005 decrease the probability of ministerial stepping down by 0.53 times. Based on these empirical findings of the analysis, we can identify distinctive characteristics of ministerial duration in Korea. We argue that as the Korean political system shifts from military or authoritarian rule to democratic rule after 1987, a single five-year presidential term may set a political environment for frequent changes of ministers to allocate political spoils.     

Cooperative Federalism?: The Case of the Ministerial Council on Education,Employment, Training and Youth Affairs

New Federalism reforms introduced in Australia in the early 1990s were expected to improve efficiency and reduce duplication through new cooperative intergovernmental arrangements. The reforms were also an attempt to reduce the continuing trend of Commonwealth intrusion in state powers. As well as establishing the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), the reforms created the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) to promote a more coordinated and cooperative approach to the delivery of education. MCEETYA provides the quintessential example of the difficulties of establishing a national approach when the function, education, is squarely within the power of the states. This article investigates the operation of MCEETYA from its inception to 2006.     

Union participation in economic policy making in France,Italy, Germany and Britain, 1970–1993

This study uses a specially‐developed measure of union participation in economic policy making to classify and compare the historical experiences of France, Italy, the Federal Republic of Germany and Britain between 1970 and 1993 in order to present a clearer view of the variability of union participation in economic policy making in these countries over this period than has been available up to now. It is found that union participation was concentrated in certain areas of economic policy, in particular labour market policy, and that even high levels of participation were not necessarily linked to union agreement on wage restraint. Over the period as a whole, participation was highest in Italy and lowest in Britain and France, but varied considerably over time as well as between countries. These variations were clearly linked to whether the Left was included in the government of the day as well as to the nature of the national union movements.     

Reforming the Rules of the Parliamentary Game: Measuring and Explaining Changes in Parliamentary Rules in Austria,Germany, and Switzerland, 1945–2010

Questions of institutional change have recently received increased attention in comparative politics. Even though comparative legislative research has identified important effects of parliamentary rules on processes and outputs as well as large variation across countries, we know very little about changes in these rules. This article takes several steps towards mapping and explaining rule changes in European parliaments. Theoretically, it sketches a model explaining such changes based on the rational choice notion of institutions as endogenous equilibria. Methodologically, it proposes two complementary approaches to measure rule changes. In combination, these measures allow us to identify the content, relevance, and effects of changes in parliamentary rules. Empirically, the article provides the first systematic analysis of all changes in the parliamentary standing orders of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland since 1945. This analysis demonstrates that parliamentary rules are changed frequently and massively. It also identifies differences across countries and content areas that are largely in line with theoretical expectations.     

Partisan Improprieties: Ministerial Control and Australia's Security Agencies, 1962–72

Partisan behaviour and abuses by intelligence and security agencies have often been attributed to the fact that agencies have become ‘out of control’ or ‘rogue elephants’. But a detailed empirical study of the politicization of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) over ten years shows that the agency was not ‘out of control’ but very much under the control of its minister. The partisan use of security information arose from directives issued through the ‘democratic’ control exercised by a government. On the basis of this study, prevention of abuses by tighter governmental control is unlikely to work. A combination of government control, autonomy of the agency and independent scrutiny by an inspector-general is more likely to succeed.     

The politics of central‐local relations in England and Wales, 1974–81

Local government expenditure in England and Wales is under pressure from the central government. Attempts to control local spending have involved the development of new grant arrangements which threaten the traditional freedom of local authorities to determine their own level of spending. The article traces the recent shift in emphasis from concern with local government spending to the spending of individual authorities, and concludes that local government democracy is being eroded. The erosion of local democracy is not necessarily the product of deliberate political philosophy but a result of political incompetence and a cultural disdain for the values of local freedom.     

The Plurality of Peter Berger's “Two Pluralisms” in Germany

The aim of this paper is to unfold Peter L. Berger’s new paradigm of the “Two Pluralisms” for the German context, concretizing and localizing the management of religious plurality with regard to central societal fields. It is argued that, besides the bird’s-eye view of the global and national developments, more differentiated analyses of smaller-scale units (like federal states, municipalities, and cities) are needed which zoom into the concrete local negotiation processes, opening them up with regard to their topics, actor constellations, dynamics, and effects. While Berger builds up his new paradigm in the connection of the social macro-level and the individual micro-level, this paper deals primarily with the meso-level and the consequences of the “Two Pluralisms” in the institutional contexts of politics/law, education, symbolic representation, and communication that are currently undergoing a significant change through secularization and religious pluralization while, however, have so far hardly been examined with regard to their dynamics and the intended integrative effects.     

Debating Islam in Austria,Germany and Switzerland: Ethnic Citizenship,Church–State Relations and Right-Wing Populism

This article explores public debates regarding Islam and Muslim immigration in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The authors are interested in which issues dominate the debates, which actors participate, which positions are taken, and which arguments are mobilised. Exploring three countries with an ethnic model of citizenship allows them to control for important cultural factors and to focus on three other explanatory variables: the dominant model of political participation, the relationship between the state and church/Islam, and the strength of right-wing populism. To test their arguments, they rely on a new dataset based on content analyses of quality newspapers from 1998 to 2007 that enables them to go beyond existing studies, which concentrate on state activities or on mass-level attitudes. The authors demonstrate that above all the relationship between the state and church/Islam, i.e. issue-specific opportunity structures, influences the debates to a great extent.     

The political economy of churches in Denmark, 1300–2015

This paper reports new time-series for the numbers and sizes of churches in Denmark over a 715-year period. Per capita, the new series are termed church densities. A pattern emerges in the series that corresponds to the main development in the economy: until 1750, the economy was in the traditional steady state, where church densities were high and did not decline substantially. Modern development set in after 1750. Since then, church densities have declined more than five times. Moreover, capacity utilization of church rooms has declined, which means that the reduction in the demand for churches must have been even larger. We argue that this large decline is caused by a fall in religiosity that is caused by economic development as measured by the rise in incomes. In parallel with similar transitions in other sectors, e.g., the Agricultural Transition, it is termed the Religious Transition.     

The Institution of Modern Cryptology in the Netherlands and in the Netherlands East Indies, 1914–1935

The need for Communications Intelligence in the Netherlands was first felt by the Dutch military as a consequence of the outbreak of the First World War. The decision to prolong, as in the Netherlands, or establish, as in the case of the East Indies, COMINT facilities belonged to the judicial domain and was primarily related to threats posed by revolutionary movements from within the country. The monitoring of traffic from foreign embassies or consulates happened only when interference from foreign governments was suspected. Japanese expansionism, leading to direct Japanese involvement in the political developments in the East Indies, provided such a case. As a consequence, the fine line between domestic and foreign affairs became thinner still until it entirely vanished during the later part of the 1930s.