Regieren unter den Bedingungen des institutionellen Pluralismus: ein deutsch-amerikanischer Vergleich

Within the discipline of comparative politics, Western democracies have been categorized according to the number of veto-players or ‘co-governing actors’ governments face when pursuing their programmes. Often, potential veto-players have been treated as rather static factors with a focus on their maximum veto potential. In this article, devoted to studying the conditions of governing in the United States and Germany, veto-players are explicitly considered as dynamic actors, which allows much more realistic assessments of the conditions of governing in highly power-sharing systems. In fact, under certain conditions some veto-players may ease rather than complicate the task of governing. Moreover, the fundamental difference between parliamentarism and presidentialism is being highligthed as a key variable shaping the functioning of seemingly similar institutional arrangements in liberal democracies.     

Perspectives on Government and Opposition in Unified Germany

This paper is dedicated to the analysis of the configuration of government/opposition relations in unified Germany. It seeks to assess the impact of institutional, political as well as more situational factors on the relationship between the two key actors of the parliamentary arena. In the concluding section, the performance of government and opposition during the 1990s will additionally be judged against the background of the basic normative considerations concerning the most important institutional and functional division in parliamentary democracies.     

Identification and characterization of JWH-122 used as new ingredient in "Spice-like" herbal incenses

This preliminary communication describes seven babies with β-amyloid precursor protein (βAPP) positive axonal swellings in nerve roots at multiple levels of the spinal cord. All seven babies died of natural causes. Two died in utero providing evidence for nerve root injury in the absence of trauma, two died within one day of birth and the possibility of birth related injury has to be considered. Three babies were over one month of age and had no history or pathological evidence of trauma. These findings show that if axonal injury is carefully sought in every infant death, not just in babies where trauma is suspected, it will be found in a proportion of babies dying from natural diseases. While spinal nerve root axonal injury in infants may suggest trauma, it is not, in itself, diagnostic of trauma.     

Public sector efficiency: An international comparison

We compute public sector performance (PSP) and public sector efficiency (PSE) indicators, comprising a composite and seven sub-indicators, for 23 industrialised countries. The first four sub-indicators are “opportunity” indicators that take into account administrative, education and health outcomes and the quality of public infrastructure and that support the rule of law and a level playing-field in a market economy. Three other indicators reflect the standard “Musgravian” tasks for government: allocation, distribution and stabilisation. The input and output efficiency of public sectors across countries is then measured via a non-parametric production frontier technique. The study finds significant differences in PSP and PSE, which suggests a large potential for expenditure savings in many countries.     

Public expenditures and the risk of social dominance

Public Choice - Based on the observation of an unabated trend towards higher social spending-to-GDP ratios in advanced countries, the study analyzes the risk of social dominance, a situation in...     

Nationalist Politics at the Crossroads: The Basque Nationalist Party and the Challenge of Sovereignty (1998–2014)

In the past two decades the Basque Nationalist Party's political strategy has exemplified its historical oscillation between, on the one hand, a more radical claim to Basque sovereignty supported mostly by nationalist forces and, on the other, a comparatively more moderate Realpolitik aimed at achieving higher degrees of regional autonomy and cross-party consensus as a means of more gradual Basque nation-building. In contrast to the mainstream interpretation forwarded by the media and other political parties, the main difference between the relatively more radical or moderate strategies of the PNV is not a higher or lower ideological profile of the claim for Basque sovereignty but a different strategic decision concerning the problem of how to bring together the struggle for sovereignty and the reality of Basque pluralism.