Suchergebnisse

Partial contents: Pressures for West Germany rearmament; Does West Germany pay its share of NATO costs? Economic impact.

Unions in most advanced capitalist societies have faced new challenges as a consequence of the lasting economic crisis since the mid-1970s. This rather unsettling situation has called for a strategic and conceptual reorientation on the part of most organized labor movements, including the West German. Although still very much in the stage of general formulation, the unions are in the process of rethinking their priorities in the area of collective bargaining, their relationship to the state and political parties, and their view of technology and economic growth; in short, we are witnessing a period of the reevaluation of previously-held positions. In specific, our paper focuses on this formative period in connection with economic policy in West Germany and analyzes the strident debates which have transpired in the daily formulation of actual strategies. Concretely, we delineate the unions' conceptions in opposition to the dominant theories in the West German political economy and highlight additional important intra-union debates. As evident in our brief description of the 'Memorandum' debates, these processes are far from being merely 'academic' and have decisive immediate implications upon the politics of West German unions and their role in German society.

Although the move to the center of many European Social Democratic parties in the 1990s was first rewarded with victories, these parties have since faced a remarkable electoral drought. What explains the seeming inability of these catchall parties to cast a wider but sustainable net for voters? Incorporating a temporal dimension helps explain when and why the broadening of party platforms fails and produces counterintuitive electoral outcomes. Our empirical study analyzes the votes of individuals in three European countries in the past three decades. The individual level allows us to track changes in parties' voter structures, which are necessarily omitted from studies using aggregate vote shares. Our findings indicate that current analyses of the electoral effects of strategy shifts are misleading inasmuch as they fail to account for individual-level motivations for vote switching. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

Although the move to the center of many European Social Democratic parties in the 1990s was first rewarded with victories, these parties have since faced a remarkable electoral drought. What explains the seeming inability of these catchall parties to cast a wider but sustainable net for voters? Incorporating a temporal dimension helps explain when and why the broadening of party platforms fails and produces counterintuitive electoral outcomes. Our empirical study analyzes the votes of individuals in three European countries in the past three decades. The individual level allows us to track changes in parties' voter structures, which are necessarily omitted from studies using aggregate vote shares. Our findings indicate that current analyses of the electoral effects of strategy shifts are misleading inasmuch as they fail to account for individual-level motivations for vote switching.

Germany's institutional anatomy, its norms, and the spirits that animate it can only be properly understood if one takes into account such factors as its economic power and central position within Europe. This volume traces the difficult passage of German society to modernity, offering new perspectives on the "German question," largely characterized by the absence of key ideological underpinnings of democracy in the early modern period and a constitutional exceptionalism on the eve of the 20th century. The essays describe the organizational infrastructure and behavioral norms that account for the success of Germany's postwar economy and polity, but also register the tensions between the increasingly individualist outlook of post-1968 Germans and the country's highly organized and ritualistic decision-making structures, which often severely test the democratic foundations of the republic. However, Germany is not unique in its efforts to find a balance between traditional and modern forces that have shaped its history. This volume demonstrates that Germany's experience, past and present, teaches broader lessons that speak to the central concerns of our time: what are the historical precursors of and vital attitudes towards democracy? How much structural variation will be feasible in political economies embedded in Europe after the introduction of the Euro and in the context of economic and other globalization? The considerable insights into these questions provided by this volume celebrate the inspiration given to colleagues and students who have worked with Andrei S. Markovits, to whom it is dedicated