Engineering a critical realignment of the electorate: The case of the socialists in France

For the first time, largely owing to the Socialists' ability to gain and retain the allegiance of the electorate, France has experienced a major electoral realignment without a concomitant change in governmental system. The Socialists' success results from three major factors: their pre‐1981 electoral strategy which involved refashioning their traditional ideology and rhetoric to appeal to a new, emerging portion of the electorate, the wage‐earners; their subsequent ideological flexibility, which included a move toward more pragmatic politics along with an opening to the centre; and the failure of their rivals on the moderate and the extreme right to mount a lasting challenge with their own counter‐ideologies and policy initiatives.     

The Policy of Strategic Demobilisation: The Social Policy of the Christian Democratic–Liberal Coalition, 2009–13

This article addresses two research questions: which course did the CDU, CSU–FDP coalition government choose to follow in social policy from 2009 to 2013? And what relationships exist between social policy in this period and the Bundestag election in 2013? The analysis of primary and secondary data reveals both continuity and discontinuity in social policy in the 17th legislative period of the Bundestag. The decisions and non-decisions on social protection and labour market regulation in this period mirror a wide variety of determinants. These include partisan effects, electoral cycles, co-governing judges and anonymous social policy of market forces. The data also suggest that the CDU/CSU has been relatively successful in its strategy of ‘asymmetric demobilisation’, the strategy of changing its social policy profile to one more similar to that of its social democratic opponent, in order to demobilise the SPD's voters rather than mobilising them. More ambivalent has been the electoral outcome of the FDP's role in social policy. The FDP's first foray into leading a large welfare state ministry, the Federal Ministry of Health, in 2009 to 2013 did not prove to be a winning proposition for the Liberals electorally. Social policy in general and welfare state recalibration in particular thus seem to be an electorally especially risky project for a liberal party such as the FDP.     

Learning to Be Postmodern in an All Too Modern World: “Whatever Action” in International Climate Change Imaginaries

Recent contributions in International Relations focus either on a shift from modernity towards postmodernity in approaches to address climate change, or underline the permanencies and continuities of modern thought and power hierarchies. In contrast, we suggest that there is a contradictory simultaneity of both of these framings through which the world is continuously decomposed and recomposed. Today climate change programmes seem to be driven by a key contradiction, which lies at the heart of the Anthropocene: the environment is ours to manipulate and yet is out of reach. Based on this framing, and thinking through Timothy Morton and Bruno Latour’s writings on political ecology, we argue that “whatever action” best captures current policy thinking: multiple initiatives are taken without a telos; rather they are designed to avoid that opportunities for adaptation and climate mitigation are foreclosed.     

Cooperation in PD Games: Fear, Greed, and History of Play

The impact of the cardinal relationships amongpecuniary payoffs, and of social history and reputation, on thechoice of strategies in four one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma games isexperimentally examined. The results suggest that normalized payoffvalues linked to ``fear'' and ``greed'' are important as predictorsof behavior in the PD games. Success in coordinating on the payoffdominant equilibrium in previous plays of coordination games alsoincreases the probability of cooperative play in the PD games. Theeffect of past play is strongest when individuals are matchedrepeatedly with the same person in previous play, as contrasted tobeing matched randomly with another player.     

Laudatio: Verleihung des Theodor Eschenburg-Preises an Prof. Dr. Gerhard Lehmbruch am 25. September 2003 auf dem Kongress der Deutschen Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft in Mainz

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Short Term Change in Attitude and Motivating Factors to Change Abusive Behavior of Male Batterers after Participating in a Group Intervention Program Based on the Pro-Feminist and Cognitive-Behavioral Approach

The Domestic Abuse Education Project (DAEP), in Burlington, Middlebury, and St. Albans, Vermont, is a group based domestic abuse intervention program, based in a pro-feminist and cognitive-behavioral approach for domestic violence intervention and prevention. A pre and post-test instrument was developed and implemented to determine short-term change in attitude of participants and motivating factors to change behavior, after completing the twenty-seven session program. After the program, participants reported a positive change in attitudes regarding their abusive behavior and stereotypical beliefs about women. Participants were also more motivated to change their behavior by the effect abuse has on their family relationships. However, many participants continued to agree that insecurity, jealousy, and alcohol and drug use can cause violence. The positive changes in attitude and motivational factors show that this is an effective model in changing underlying batterer attitudes that provide rationale for abusive behavior.     

The Psychology of Political Extremism

Any attempt to analyse the phenomenon of political extremism must seek to explain why choices are sometimes made to articulate such views through violence. It is proposed that such a choice may have little to do with the specific ideology through which extremism is expressed but instead may reflect deeper psychological considerations. Investigations of persons who grew up in totalitarian systems suggest that the state may invade the psyche, interfering with the normal interplay of ego, superego and id. An explanation depending on the construction of a tripartite model of personal, non-personal and impersonal self was developed to explain the consequences of this process. It is proposed that such models may have a wider relevance and can be applied to the phenomenon of violence arising from contemporary political extremism. The advantage of such models is that they can be subjected to empirical investigation.     

Injuries of the occipital condyles in fatal traffic accidents

Among 600 deaths of traffic accidents we found injuries of the occipital condyles in 10 cyclists, 12 car drivers and 3 pedestrians. In most cases the collision speed ranged from 70 to 100 km/h. In 18 cases of direct head impact the more severe injury was on the opposite side, in 4 cases of indirect side impact (whiplash injury) on the same side. Most types of fractures were 12 horizontal disconnections and 4 fractures of the inner edges. In 9 cases the condyle fractures were on one side, in 16 cases on both sides.