Personalisierung der Politik in Mehrparteiensystemen am Beispiel deutscher Bundestagswahlen seit 1980

Personalization of politics is investigated as relative importance of leading politicians for the party vote (Zweitstimme) in German Bundestag elections, compared to the importance of parties and the recall of voting behavior in the last federal election. Contrary to recent German research on the impact of special candidate attributes (competence, integrity etc.) we interpret general evaluations of parties and the leading politicians as the most immediate utility attributes or distance measures of the options listed on the ballot. On the basis of this model, of discrete choice analysis as the statistical method and of the Politbarometer data of the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, Mannheim, we estimate candidate effects in three regions of Germany, characterized by slightly different party systems (West Germany without Bavaria, Bavaria with the CSU instead of the CDU and East Germany with the PDS as a more important party than the FDP or the Greens). It is shown that region is important for personalization, that a general trend towards increasing personalization does not exist, that the most popular politicians sometimes lose their capacity to attract voters to their party and that both attractiveness for floating voters and repulsiveness for former party voters must be taken into account when interpreting effect parameters.     

Structural and Textural Dimensions of Territorial State Organisation

In the framework of devolution, British scholars have inquired how to assess the constitutional position of the local government in the UK and its effect for improving or hindering autonomy and democracy at the local level. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the same topic from a more general and comparative perspective, combining conceptual tools of continental public law and political science. To do this the paper proposes to differentiate three concepts of territorial state configuration. These concepts are territorial structure, territorial texture, and vertical diffusion of state authority. This paper asserts that the confusion of these three dimensions has not only impaired an adequate assessment of the constitutional position of local governments, but that the structural dimension has been under-theorised, thus distorting measurements of subnational authority. Moreover, scholars have underestimated structural constraints upon changes in the local government position within the polity. Finally, an operationalisation of the new findings is offered by plotting selected countries in a Cartesian system comparing them from the perspective of territorial structure and vertical authority diffusion.     

Evaluating Measures of Campaign Tone

Research on framing effects has demonstrated how elites can influence public opinion by the way they present and interpret political issues. However, these findings overwhelmingly stem from experimental settings that differ from how issues are typically discussed in real-world political situations. This study takes framing research to more realistic contexts by exploiting a natural experiment to examine the neglected role of political parties in framing effects. Examining the effects on public opinion of a sudden shift in how a major political party frames a salient issue, I demonstrate that parties can be powerful in shaping the policy preferences among their supporters. Yet, even strong partisans do not follow the party line uncritically. Rather, they judge the party frame according to their own beliefs about the problems surrounding the issue. Thus, party elites face the challenge of developing frames that resonate with their voters' preexisting beliefs if they want to shape policy preferences, even among their otherwise most loyal supporters. These dynamics have important implications for understanding interactions between political elites and the public.     

Crimes against water: non-enforcement of state water pollution laws

In the United States water pollution is a serious problem criminalized not only by the federal government, but by all states. These laws vary greatly in content, but are widely disobeyed and universally under-enforced. Statutes, case law, histories and journalism show “law in action” typologies of non-enforcement efficacious for analysis including: (1) jurisdiction issues like federal pre-emption, inter-state compacts, and constitutional limitations; (2) legislative issues such as failure to legislate, or legislating ineffectively; (3) agency issues, including administrative obstacles, delegation, power vacuums, procedure, and “agency capture”; (4) policing issues like apathy, under-funding/training, jurisdictional confusion, and “following the path of least resistance”; (5) prosecutorial issues, including isolation, intimidation, and ideological priority bias; (6) trial and appellate court issues, including unclear culpability, erroneous holdings, bias, and lack of judicial independence; and (7) citizen, victim, and defendant issues, including legal intellectual influence, environmentalist criminalization apathy, industry lobbying, environmental justice, reporting failures, self-policing, ethics and flight. The conclusion is non-enforcement in this area of criminal law shows that while federally there may exist a relatively consistent, content neutral enforcement system, at the state level resistance to enforcement is seen across a number of fronts. Ultimately, states can be seens as colonized frontiers servicing venture capitalism, consistent with a “race to the bottom.”     

Can Leviathan governments mitigate the tragedy of the commons?

This paper explores the conjecture whether the Leviathan motive of politicians — to tax for the purpose of raising revenues rather than for benevolent, Pigovian motives — helps to overcome the inefficiency of international pollution spillovers such as in the cases of acid rain and global warming. It turns out that this conjecture is true in a static context that captures flow externalities, e.g., acid rain, as long as environmental damages are not too high. In contrast, Leviathan motives aggravate the already existing inefficiency in the case of stock externalities (e.g., global warming) despite probably high taxes at the beginning.