Party Competition and Government Formation in Germany: Business as Usual or New Patterns?

The process of coalition formation following the 2017 Bundestag election was the most difficult in German post-war history. For the first time, Germany saw negotiations fail, a minority government being discussed as a real possibility, and the federal president involved as formateur in coalition politics. The aim of this contribution is to explain why government formation was so intricate after the 2017 election. To this end, we trace patterns of party politics and the development of the German party system since 2013. We then study general patterns of government formation at the regional and national levels since the 1990s and evaluate whether these have changed with the advent of the right-wing populist party, Alternative for Germany. Our analysis of the 2017–2018 government formation is based on a novel expert survey of the policy profiles of German parties on various issue dimensions, conducted in 2017. The results show that the continuation of the incumbent coalition government of Christian and Social Democrats was the most likely outcome, and that the Social Democrats were indeed able to enforce a surpassing share of their policy positions in the final negotiation rounds.     

The application of immunoblotting to the phenotyping of group-specific component

A sensitive immunoblotting method for the routine detection of group-specific component (GC) from fresh serum, and from control and casework bloodstains has been developed. GC phenotypes were separated in a thin layer polyacrylamide gel by isoelectric focusing, transferred to nitrocellulose by a rapid capillary blotting procedure, and detected using a double antibody enzyme immunoassay. This method is capable of phenotyping 8 ng of GC extracted from bloodstains, a four-fold increase in sensitivity when compared to immunofixation and silverstaining. A total of 2424 casework bloodstains have been analysed and GC phenotypes identified in 78% of samples. The method is suitable for use in routine laboratories and is more sensitive than other methods for GC phenotyping of casework bloodstains.     

What Kinds of Trade Liberalization Agreements Do People in Developing Countries Want?

One of the most striking developments in the global economy in the past decades is the rapid proliferation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), with many of them concluded among or with participation of developing countries. On the presumption that current popular debates on trade policy are not so much about whether citizens want free trade but rather what kinds of trade liberalization they want, we examine individual trade policy preferences with regard to PTAs that can vary in content along several dimensions. To that end we carried out conjoint choice experiments embedded in representative surveys in three developing countries that differ strongly in income levels, political system, and trade liberalization history: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. We conceptualize trade policy preferences as preferences over the scale and scope of trade liberalization, environmental and labor standards, and labor market access (migration). Two main findings emerge. First, non-economic considerations, such as sympathy/antipathy toward particular countries and environmental and labor rights concerns influence citizens’ preferences at least as much as factors based on standard economic logic. Second, preferences over particular facets (attributes) of trade liberalization, that is PTA content, are surprisingly consistent across countries, despite strong differences in macro-economic and political context.     

The alluring voice/the allure of film (theaters): the formation of the voice in the Japanese cinema of the prewar period

Abstract

Kitada Akihiro provides a historical overview of film presentation as a transient business, its migration into dedicated cinemas, and the concomitant rise and fall of benshi film explainer culture, as silent film incorporating a narrative developed out of simplistic ‘moving pictures,’ only to be gradually replaced by ‘talkies.’ He does so by following the career of Tokugawa Musei, one of the most prominent benshi of the 1920s and 1930s, from beginning to end; in describing the changes in audience composition and expectations, he outlines the transition from the showman-like VOICE「声」 to the more ‘talkie’-like voice «声».     

THE INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL VALIDITY OF THE REGRESSION DISCONTINUITY DESIGN: A META‐ANALYSIS OF 15 WITHIN‐STUDY COMPARISONS

Theory predicts that regression discontinuity (RD) provides valid causal inference at the cutoff score that determines treatment assignment. One purpose of this paper is to test RD's internal validity across 15 studies. Each of them assesses the correspondence between causal estimates from an RD study and a randomized control trial (RCT) when the estimates are made at the same cutoff point where they should not differ asymptotically. However, statistical error, imperfect design implementation, and a plethora of different possible analysis options, mean that they might nonetheless differ. We test whether they do, assuming that the bias potential is greater with RDs than RCTs. A second purpose of this paper is to investigate the external validity of RD by exploring how the size of the bias estimates varies across the 15 studies, for they differ in their settings, interventions, analyses, and implementation details. Both Bayesian and frequentist meta‐analysis methods show that the RD bias is below 0.01 standard deviations on average, indicating RD's high internal validity. When the study‐specific estimates are shrunken to capitalize on the information the other studies provide, all the RD causal estimates fall within 0.07 standard deviations of their RCT counterparts, now indicating high external validity. With unshrunken estimates, the mean RD bias is still essentially zero, but the distribution of RD bias estimates is less tight, especially with smaller samples and when parametric RD analyses are used.     

President Donald Trump: A Case Study of Spectacular Power

Donald Trump's election as president certainly startled many, though not all political observers. In this article, I offer my own observation that Mr Trump's election represents a developmental progression of America's electoral system from a political process to an entertainment process. The effect of the office of the president now is to distract and entertain. I will aim to convince readers that his election as America's president is not an anomaly, but rather represents how the politics of image and representation now work as an everyday event and should be treated as part of a reality that we should now take for granted.     

A Bottom‐Up Theory of Public Opinion about Foreign Policy

If public opinion about foreign policy is such an elite‐driven process, why does the public often disagree with what elites have to say? We argue here that elite cue‐taking models in International Relations are both overly pessimistic and unnecessarily restrictive. Members of the public may lack information about the world around them, but they do not lack principles, and information need not only cascade from the top down. We present the results from five survey experiments where we show that cues from social peers are at least as strong as those from political elites. Our theory and results build on a growing number of findings that individuals are embedded in a social context that combines with their general orientations toward foreign policy in shaping responses toward the world around them. Thus, we suggest the public is perhaps better equipped for espousing judgments in foreign affairs than many of our top‐down models claim.