Suchergebnisse

Gegenstand des Beitrags ist die historische Entwicklung des Systems der repräsentativen Demokratie in Großbritannien. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die Rolle von Wahlen in diesem System und die Frage, wie sich diese Rolle im Laufe der Zeit von 1832 bis 1918 gewandelt hat. Auf die Frage, seit wann die Wähler eher der Partei und nicht mehr dem Kandidaten die Stimme geben, finden sich in der Literatur verschiedene Antworten. (1) Die erste Position datiert die Entwicklung des parteiorientierten Wahlverhaltens in die Zeit nach 1885. (2) Nach Ansicht der zweiten Position wird dieses Wahlverhalten nach 1867 signifikant. (3) In der dritten Position wird die explosive Zunahme der Zeitungen nach 1856 als Ursache für eine massive Entwicklung der Parteiloyalität angesehen. Ein zweiter Schwerpunkt ist es, auf eine systematische und quantitative Weise den Einfluß der Wähler auf ihre Parlamentsmitglieder zu erforschen. In dem Beitrag wird gezeigt, daß ein substantieller Wandel im Wählerverhalten in England stattgefunden hat, bei dem die Wähler ihre Entscheidung zunehmend an der Partei orientiert haben. (KW)

Partisan conflict between the White House and Congress is now a dominant feature of national politics in the United States. What the Constitution sought to institute--a system of checks and balances--divided government has taken to extremes: institutional divisions so deep that national challenges like balancing the federal budget or effectively regulating the nation's savings and loans have become insurmountable. In original essays written especially for this volume, eight of the leading scholars in American government address the causes and consequences of divided party control. Their essays, written with a student audience in mind, take up such timely questions as: Why do voters consistently elect Republican presidents and Democratic congresses? How does divided control shape national policy on crucial issues such as the declaration of war? How have presidents adapted their leadership strategies to the circumstance of divided government? And, how has Congress responded in the way it writes laws and oversees departmental performance? These issues and a host of others are addressed in this compact yet comprehensive volume. The distinguished lineup of contributors promises to make this book "must" reading for both novice and serious students of elections, Congress, and the presidency.

Abstract
Prominent scholars argue that Europe's political fragmentation improved the security of property rights, thereby promoting growth. We explore a complementary mechanism: urban fragmentation—the proliferation of self-governing cities—helped emancipate labor, and freer labor promoted both faster and more correlated town growth. To test these hypotheses, we first show that polities with more self-governing cities offered more protection to runaway serfs against lordly recapture. We then show that more fragmented areas exhibited both faster and more correlated urban growth. While both the property rights and labor freedom mechanisms predict faster growth, only the latter predicts more highly correlated growth.

In this article, we examine bonuses garnered by government formateurs in all European democracies that began the 20th century as constitutional monarchies. Using a new data set on how portfolios were allocated in each democratic coalition cabinet formed 1901–99, we show that formateurs' bonuses were positive and significant when the monarch still exercised discretion in choosing them but declined after the monarch's role was constrained. Relatedly, Gamson's Law was more strongly violated when monarchs played a larger role. After identifying the dates at which monarchs were constrained, we conduct a difference‐in‐differences analysis, comparing formateurs' bonuses in each reformed country with those in otherwise similar countries that did not reform at the same time. The results support the hypothesis that greater royal discretion engendered larger formateurs' bonuses.

In this article the authors study delegation problems within multiparty coalition governments. They argue that coalition parties can use the committee system to "shadow" the ministers of their partners; that is, they can appoint committee chairs from other governing parties, who will then be well placed to monitor and/or check the actions of the corresponding ministers. The authors analyze which ministers should be shadowed if governing parties seek to minimize the aggregate policy losses they suffer as the result of ministers pursuing their own parties' interests rather than the coalition's. Based on data from 19 mostly European parliamentary democracies, the authors find that the greater the policy disagreement between a minister's party and its partners, the more likely the minister is to be shadowed. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]