Government stability in six European countries during the world economic crisis of the 1930s: some preliminary considerations

Abstract. To date there is no genuine cross-national analysis of the world economic crisis of the 1930s. of the political turbulence it led to and of the economic and political measures that were taken. In this study the focus is on Great Britain, France. the Netherlands, Belgium. Germany and Austria from 1927 to 1938 or the collapse of the polity. Possible determinants of governmental instability are discussed and considered in preliminary bivariate testing. The main findings are: the survival measure of governments suggested by Sanders and Herman does not add any information at all; parliamentary variables in this analysis do not satisfactorily explain the duration of governments; though exempted from this verdict are variables like proportion of seats held by governing parties. parliamentary fractionalization. share of oppositional seats in parliament and percentage of seats held by anty-system parties. It is suggested that the economic and political impact of the world economic crisis of the 1930s worked through linkages other than those spelled out in post-World War II parliamentary and coalitional analyses on the determinants of government stability.     

Doom in East Germany,Dawn in the New East European Member States of the European Union? Elements of a Comparative Analysis

The economic, and in part political, transition failures in East Germany, based on institutional path dependencies and politicians begging for the median voter, form the background of this analysis. Although there are plentiful data to compare developments in East Germany and West Germany after unification in 1990, East German developments are rarely explicitly contrasted with those in the eight new East European member states of the European Union. Such comparisons are vital in highlighting the long-term drawbacks and catastrophic failures committed in the East German case. Acknowledging that much more empirically guided theoretical research lies ahead, this article aims at being more than a mere “think piece”.     

The determinants of structural changes in public budgets: a theoretical and empirical analysis for the Federal Republic of Germany

Abstract. Since there is no generally accepted and satisfactory theory that can explain structural changes in public budgets over time, this article focuses on the determinants of the budget structure and its changes over time. Thus, it would already be an improvement in the development of a complex and coherent theory of budgetary structures and its changes if initially appropriate variables could be identified which could explain in the short, intermediate and long runs the structural changes in public budgets with respect to the various governmental levels. Potential candidates for explaining structural changes could be socio-economic, political and institutional variables. These sets of variables will be analyzed here in detail for the Federal Republic of Germany for the time period 1964–1978. The results are very similar to those found in various U.S. studies. In comparably developed nations with similar political (federal) structures, institutional factors seem to play the dominant role in determining and explaining changes in the budgetary structure.