Ideological Party Cohesion in Macro‐comparative Politics: The Nordic Social Democratic Parties from a Comparative Perspective

‘Party cohesion’ is a central concept in the analysis of agenda‐setting, veto players and coalition‐building as well as in the analysis of policy efficiency and party responsiveness. However, there is no indicator to measure party cohesion in a systematic manner over time and across parties. As a consequence, most established studies treat political parties as unitary actors although from an analytical point of view they should be considered collective actors. In order to overcome this deficiency, in this article a time‐variant and party‐specific index of party cohesion is developed which can be used in macro‐comparative statistical analysis. The concept of ‘ideological cohesion’ is developed along the Left–Right dimension. This index is applied in order to compare the party cohesion of Nordic social democratic parties (SDs) with their counterparts in 17 additional countries. The results show that the myth of the cohesion of Nordic SDs is only true for the golden age of the welfare state. Currently, most of the Nordic SDs actually have a lower party cohesion than their counterparts in many other countries.     

Undesired intimacy: German–Chinese couples in Germany (1900s–1940s)

ABSTRACT

The article deals with the consequences of the increasing presence of Chinese citizens in Germany since the end of the nineteenth century. Their presence also repeatedly led to marriages with German women, which challenged by the media, the public and state authorities in many ways. This articles focuses initially on the symbolic and institutional-administrative treatment of such marriages between the German Empire and National Socialism. It identifies a wealth of exclusion mechanisms in a highly regulative migration regime. The following sections interpret these developments in light of the broader gender-political and transnational contexts.     

Public interest versus interest groups: a political economy analysis of allowance allocation under the EU emissions trading scheme

In a theoretical analysis, we use a common agency model to show that lobbying by energy-intensive sectors covered under an emissions trading scheme (ETS) shifts the regulatory burden of an economy-wide emission constraint to sectors outside the ETS. The emission tax on the latter becomes inefficiently high such that lobbying does not only induce burden shifting but also efficiency losses. A complementary empirical analysis for a cross section of German firms under the EU emissions trading scheme supports our theoretical result on the role of lobbying on allowance allocation.     

Traditionelle,modernisierte und liberalisierte Sozialdemokratie: Eine Typologie sozialdemokratischer Regierungspolitik in Westeuropa

Ausgehend von der Debatte um einen “Dritten Weg“ der Sozialdemokratie gibt der vorliegende Artikel eine empirisch fundierte Antwort auf die Frage, inwiefern sozialdemokratische Regierungen ihre klassischen politischen Ziele und Instrumente angesichts der Veränderungen durch globale und europäische Marktintegration und den sozialen Wandel einer Revision unterzogen haben. Ein qualitativer Vergleich der Fiskal‐, Beschäftigungs‐ und Sozialpolitik von sechs sozialdemokratischen Regierungen in Grossbritannien, Frankreich, Deutschland, Niederlande, Schweden und Dänemark zeigt, dass sich drei Typen sozialdemokratischer Regierungspolitik identifizieren lassen, die mit jeweils unterschiedlichen Leistungsbilanzen einhergehen. Die erklärungskräftigsten Variablen für die unterschiedlichen Politikmuster sind Parteienwettbewerb, Koalitionskonstellationen sowie Sozialstaatsstrukturen.     

Neueste Rechtsprechung von EuGH und EuG zum Umweltrecht

Zusammenfassung Im Folgenden wird die mit dem europ?ischen Naturschutz- und Artenschutzrecht begonnene Rechtsprechungsübersicht fortgesetzt. Berücksichtigt sind alle im Jahr 2006 ergangenen umweltrechtlichen Urteile zu anderen Themen als dem europ?ischen Naturschutz- und Artenschutzrecht.