Policy-making and Political Supervision in Shanghai's Financial Industry

This study deals with the political economy of local financial industries in China. It focuses on the changing patterns of political interference and the key role of Communist Party bodies in shaping business incentives. The centralization measures in the financial sector that were implemented under the Zhu Rongji government in 1998 and 1999 turned out to be not very effective in supervising local financial institutions. From 2000 to 2003, a trend towards a reaffirmation of local control in financial business emerged. Local governments began to set up new financial work bodies with comprehensive functions and extensively used local banks as their ‘moneybag’ again. Reducing the risks involved in the current politicized management of local financial business will be inseparable from political, legal and regulatory changes: curbing the Communist Party's role in cadre appointments, strengthening legal corporate governance structures and clarifying the division of labor among national and local supervisory bodies.     

EU issue voting and the 2014 European Parliament elections: a dynamic perspective

EU issue voting in European Parliament elections has been shown to be highly conditional upon levels of EU politicization. The present study analyzes this conditionality over time, hypothesizing that the effect of EU attitudes on EP vote preferences is catalyzed as EP elections draw closer. In contrast to extant cross-sectional post-election studies, we use a four-wave panel study covering the six months leading up to the Dutch EP elections of 2014, differentiating between party groups (pro, anti, mixed) and five EU attitude dimensions. We find that EU issue voting occurs for both anti- and pro-EU parties, but only increases for the latter. For mixed parties we find no effect of EU attitudes, yet their support base shifts in the anti-EU direction as the elections draw closer. The overarching image, however, is one of surprising stability: EU attitudes form a consistent part of EP voting motivations even outside EP election times.     

A note on collusion and resale price maintenance

This paper advances a new, anti-collusive, explanation of resale price maintenance. By imposing a price floor, an upstream firm increases the non-cooperative profits of downstream firms and makes collusion relatively less profitable. As a result, collusion may be destabilized and the price floor enables a manufacturer to prevent collusive behavior among downstream firms. This finding contrasts with the popular view that resale price maintenance fosters collusion.     

Dynamic Success on YouTube: A Longitudinal Analysis of Click Counts and Contents of Political Candidate Clips during the 2009 German National Election

Since the 2008 Obama victory, mass media and academic research have contributed to the widespread notion that modern political campaigns are won in the so-called ‘web 2.0’, more precisely on YouTube. While respective studies were able to identify some major factors for the success of political YouTube videos, some videos ‘failed’ to have the presumed success online. This lack of clarity has not been convincingly explained by cross-sectional designs without taking into account the dynamic aspects of the success of YouTube videos. This study evaluates and validates the impact of presentation, professionalism, topic, age and the typical slope of the website-visits over time on the total amount of page visits. Political YouTube videos were analysed over a five-month period before the 2009 German national election. Most strikingly, one has to ignore some of the YouTube conventions to be successful on the platform during an election campaign, like uploading user-generated content.