From ‘Dream Team’ to ‘Marriage of Convenience’? An Introduction

This introduction connects some of the main themes covered in this special issue on Chancellor Merkel's second coalition cabinet, which was formed in October 2009 and ended with the electoral collapse of the FDP in the Bundestag election of September 2013. It starts by setting out an interesting ‘puzzle’: the parties forming the coalition of 2009–2013 (CDU, CSU and FDP) had expressed a strong preference for this coalition in the run-up to the election of 2009. Despite their seeming agreement in many policy areas, the coalition formed in 2009 faced tough negotiations and conflicts between the parties from the beginning. The economic crisis the preceding government faced between 2005 and 2009 and unforeseen events during the course of the CDU/CSU–FDP coalition 2009–2013 (e.g. the Euro crisis and the Fukushima environmental disaster) had altered the policy agenda in important ways and rendered the former ‘Christian–Liberal reform project’ obsolete.     

How prices matter in politics: the returns to campaign advertising

The apparent ineffectiveness of incumbent campaign spending in congressional elections is one of the enduring puzzles in the political economy literature. Previous work in this area has assumed that advertising prices are uniform across congressional districts, and therefore that campaign spending alone is a good proxy for campaign advertising. However, candidates in different districts face widely different advertising prices and this paper shows that differences in advertising costs are one source of the apparent ineffectiveness of campaign spending. Accounting for the price of advertising, this paper shows that campaign spending is productive for both incumbents and challengers.     

Reform,Demokratisierung, Stabilität oder Kollaps? Literaturbericht zur Entwicklung des chinesischen Herrschaftssystems

Politische Vierteljahresschrift - Der Literaturbericht gibt eine Übersicht über die internationale Debatte zur aktuellen innenpolitischen Entwicklung Chinas und zur möglichen...     

Voter‐weighted environmental preferences

This article examines the political economy of preferences with respect to the environment using a new stated preference survey that presents the first benefit values for national water quality levels. The mean valuation greatly exceeds the median value, as the distribution of valuations is highly skewed. The study couples the survey valuations with unique and extensive information on respondent voting patterns. Preferences of registered voters are similar to the preferences of the population at large, but median voters value water quality more than nonvoters. The strongest contrast related to voter‐weighted preferences is among voters for different candidates, as those who voted for Gore in the 2000 presidential election have the highest environmental values. © 2009 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

A Reconnaissance of Alternative Measures of Effective Property Tax Rates

Informed policy discussions on local property tax reform initiatives require accurate and reliable information about the tax's current use. This paper reviews two popular measures of property tax burden and their limitations. The paper then reports the results of a reconnaissance of measures of effective property tax rates and how they vary across the 50 states. The paper also reports the findings of a 50-state survey that indicates how states calculated and reported effective property tax rates. These comparisons lead to a suggested framework for certain methodologies for calculating effective property tax rates.     

Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia

This article examines how the Commonwealth Parliament of Australia seeks to hold responsible ministers directly and senior public servants indirectly accountable for the performance of departments and programs on the basis of published performance data and inquiries conducted by parliamentary committees. From the perspective of an outsider, the scrutiny process in the Australian parliament, although not without its problems, is more systematic and substantive than is the case in other parliamentary systems such as Canada. Creating a more meaningful dialogue in the Australian parliament on performance issues will depend more on changes to the intersecting cultures of the legislature, government and the public service than on organisational and procedural reforms to any of those institutions.     

Perceived Interparental Conflict and Early Adolescents’ Friendships: The Role of Attachment Security and Emotion Regulation

Although there is strong evidence for the effect of interparental conflict on adolescents' internalizing and externalizing problems, little is known about the effect on the quality of adolescents' relationships. The current study investigates the link between adolescents' friendships and interparental conflict as reported by both parents and adolescents. It considers early adolescents' emotion regulation ability and attachment security as mediators. The analysis is based on a longitudinal study with two waves separated by 12?months. The participants were 180 two-parent families and their adolescent children (50.5?% girls), the average age of the latter being 10.61?years (SD?=?0.41) at the outset (Time 1). Binomial logistic regression analysis revealed that perceived interparental conflict increased the risk of instability in friendship relationships across the 1-year period. Structural equation modeling analysis indicated that the association between perceived interparental conflict and friendship quality was mediated by emotion regulation and attachment security. The discussion focuses on mechanisms whereby interparental conflict influences early adolescents' friendship relationships.     

Geschlechtsspezifische Lohnungleichheit in Betrieben, Berufen und Jobzellen (1993–2006)

Whereas educational inequalities between women and men and differences in labor market participation shrinked or even diminished during the last decades, the gender pay gap remained stable over time. This is remarkable because the pay gap has attracted much more attention as the main target of anti-discrimination policies. Using data from the IAB (Institute for Employment Research), we analyze whether the average pay gap between women and men working full-time can be explained by their employment in different industries, occupations, and firms. As the smallest level of analysis we focus on occupations within firms (job cells). This strategy of analysis yields the best possible approximation to the concept of “within-job wage gap”. The results show that women with equivalent training and occupational experience earn wages that are 12 percent less than the wages of men in such job cells. Even though the educational participation of women rose to that of their male counterpart, the gender composition of labor market participation changed and the pressure of equal employment policies grew, the gender wage gap does not decrease within our observation period (1993–2006). In conclusion, we discuss theoretical and methodological reasons for this finding.