Most efforts to detect the consequences of divided government in German federalism by analyzing legislative statistics have been unsuccessful. Therefore, there is still much debate in Germany about the gridlock potential of divided government, as there is in the United States. Using a...

Voters who participate in elections to the European Parliament tend to use these elections to punish their domestic governing parties. Many students of the EU therefore claim that the party-political composition of the Parliament should systematically differ from that of the Council. This study,...

The complexity of the multi-level European polity is not adequately represented by the single-level theoretical concepts of competing “intergovernmentalist” and “supranationalist” approaches. By contrast, empirical research focusing on multilevel interactions tends either to emphasize...

In the age of globalization, many economic sectors are addressed not only by the policies of national, but also of international institutions. Using three cases of highly internationalized sectors of the German economy - international tourism, telecommunications, and the pharmaceutical industry...

Why junior ministers? What function do they serve? Two explanations dominate the literature. Both focus on the role of junior ministers in coalition formation and coalition management. One approach sees junior ministers as instruments for controlling policy, the other as a means to solve or ease...

In the comparative political economy of rich democracies there is a long tradition of classifying countries into one of a small number of categories based on their economic institutions and policies. The most recent of these is the Varieties of Capitalism project, which posits two major clusters...

Liberalisierungspolitik bezeichnet die politisch herbeigeführte und politisch legitimierte Delegation von Allokations- und Distributionsentscheidungen an Märkte und zielt auf Durchsetzung der Prinzipien der Eigenverantwortung, der dezentralen Entscheidungsfindung und der Konkurrenz. Viele...

This paper starts from four observations: (1) voter turnout is declining in established democracies; (2) low turnout means socio-economically unequal turnout; (3) compulsory voting is an effective means to increase turnout; (4) even low-turnout countries, however, have neither introduced nor...

This paper explores the degree to which exposure to reoccurring natural disasters of various kinds explains seven dimensions of severe child poverty in 67 middle- and low-income countries. It also analyzes how certain institutional conditions, namely the quality of government (QoG), have...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the social construction of order in two adjacent markets in the production flow of the global garment industry. The consumer market is identified as a status market, while the production market is defined as a "standardʺ market. In a status market, order...