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"Advertisement. Walt Whitman's books", p. [4] of cover, lists this work. ; Copyrighted 1870, by Walt Whitman. ; On cover: New York, J. S. Redfield, publisher. ; At head of title: Memoranda. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; BANC; PS3213.D78 1871: Author's presentation copy "Sara Carr Upton, from Walt Whitman, Washington, 1871.

We measure where and to what end parties take control of Congressional redistricting, which lets them redraw districts to favor their own candidates. We exploit the discontinuous change in a party's control of redistricting triggered when its share of seats in the state legislature exceeds 50 percent. Parties capture redistricting in states where they have suffered recent losses, which are temporarily reversed by redistricting. Opposition candidates are 11 percentage points less likely to win House elections just after redistricting. Consistent with recent Supreme Court rulings, African Americans are more likely to be segregated into overwhelmingly black districts under Republican redistricting.

Nous étudions l'allocation de la dotation globale de fonctionnement (DGF) des communes. Les modalités d'allocation de la DGF sont fixées par des règles en apparence strictes, mais dont la complexité même pourrait créer des marges discrétionnaires. Notre analyse empirique révèle que ces marges existent et sont utilisées, favorisant certains « bastions » électoraux. Classification JEL : D71, D78, E58, N12, N42.

Vier Parteien - Die Linke, SPD, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen und FDP - haben bis Ende April 2021 den Entwurf ihres Programms zur Bundestagswahl am 26. September veröffentlicht. Wie klar und überzeugend vermitteln Bundestagsparteien ihre Vorstellungen? Die digital- und medienpolitischen Aussagen der Entwürfe werden kritisch analysiert. ; By late April 2021, four parties have published their programme for the German federal parliamentary elections (Bundestag) in September 2021. This article provides a critical comparative review of digital and media policy messages presented in these programmes. The Greens cover current topics in the areas of public service and commercial media large online platform providers and infrastructure roll out for electronic communications both most comprehensively and most vaguely. The digital and media policy statements of the left, social democratic and free democratic parties stick more closely to the respective party's brand.

In der aktuellen Wahlperiode wird diskutiert, einen Fonds für Härtefälle aus der Rentenüberleitung einzurichten. Damit soll die Deutsche Einheit in der Rentenfrage vollendet werden. Dabei stellt sich die Frage, ob Ungerechtigkeiten aus der Rentenüberleitung entstanden sind. Entgegen der in der Öffentlichkeit vorgebrachten These, dass erhebliche Ungerechtigkeiten vorliegen, kann diese Analyse zeigen, dass zum Beispiel bei den in der DDR geschiedenen Frauen keine ökonomische und politische Diskriminierung vorliegt. Die Einrichtung eines Härtefallfonds erscheint dementsprechend als eine Scheinlösung, um eine Befriedung betroffener Gruppen sicherzustellen. ; This paper analyses whether a fund for social hardships from the pension transition is politically an effective instrument for completing the German unity in the pension issue. For this purpose, one group ("women divorced under GDR law") is identified as a hardship case and analysed with regards to whether injustices from the pension transfer are present. Contrary to public opinion, the analysis shows that in the case of women divorced in the GDR, there is no economic or political discrimination. Overall, the transition of the German pension insurance to East Germany is a great success of the federal and state governments. In this case, a fund for social hardships is to be viewed as a false solution to the problem.

A sizeable literature studies whether governments strategically interact with each other through policy-diffusion, learning, fiscal and yardstick competition. This paper asks whether, in the presence of direct democratic institutions, spatial interactions additionally result from voters' direct actions. The proposed mechanism is that the voters' actions in vetoing a decision or inaugurating a preferred policy by a binding initiative in their jurisdiction can potentially have spillover effects on the actions of voters and special interest groups of neighboring jurisdictions. Utilizing data on around 1,800 voter-petitions across over 12,000 German municipalities in 2002-09, we find that a jurisdiction's probability of hosting a petition is positively driven by the neighbors' direct democratic activity. These effects are persistent, and are stronger for more visible instruments of direct democracy. The interactions are also mostly driven by petitions in same or similar policy areas, and are stronger in towns with relatively more per capita newspapers.

In this paper we apply the unit root and cointegration methodology of modern econometric time series analysis to estimated popularity functions for the Austrian parties in government since the mid-1970s. We find no evidence for and rather strong evidence against influences of unemployment or inflation on the popularity of the political parties in the federal government, thereby challenging previous studies that claimed to have established such influences. The usefulness of the applied methodology to clarify such questions is demonstrated by this example.

Electoral systems determine the role party affiliations play in political representation. According to conventional expectations, politicians' party affiliations should influence political representation when they are elected under a proportional system. In contrast, majoritarian systems force politicians to converge to the median position of their constituency, thus, muting the role of party affiliations to some extent. Using unique data, we test these predictions within a common party system by matching referenda decisions of constituents with voting behavior of their representatives, who are elected either by a majoritarian or proportional system.

The paper studies political competition between endogenously formed parties instead of independent candidates. Party formation allows policy-motivated citizens to nominate one of their fellow party members as their candidate for a general election and to share the cost of running in this election. Thus, like-minded citizens are able to coordinate their political behavior in order to improve the policy outcome. The paper focuses on political equilibria with two active parties, and investigates the properties of stable parties and the policy platforms offered in equilibrium. The platforms of both parties can neither be fully convergent as in the median voter model (Downs 1957) nor extremely polarized as in the citizen candidate model (Besley & Coate 1997). In the benchmark case of full electoral certainty, a unique political equilibrium with positive platform distance exists. Endogenous party formation thus eliminates a major weakness of the citizen candidate model, the extreme multiplicity of equilibria. The model remains tractable, and the qualitative results are shown to be robust under the assumption of electoral uncertainty, where vote results cannot be perfectly predicted.

We model a society that values the coherence between past policy platforms and current implemented policy, and where policy platforms partially commit candidates to their future actions. If an incumbent politician seeks to be reelected, she has to use her platforms to commit to moderate policies that can be distant from her most preferred one. Commitment is related to the incoherence cost that politicians pay when they renege on promised platforms. In this context, we suggest a novel mechanism through which issuing government debt can affect electoral results. Debt is exploited by an incumbent politician, who is in favor of low spending, to damage the credibility of her opponent's policy platforms, and be reelected. A higher level of debt decreases voters' most preferred level of spending, and makes the opponent's past platform a losing policy. Even if the latter chose to update her proposal, she would not be able to credibly commit to it, given the incoherence cost associated to changing proposals.

Drei Jahre nach Beginn des Verhandlungsprozesses über das geplante Freihandelsabkommen TTIP zwischen der EU und den USA breitet sich die Skepsis besonders im deutschsprachigen Raum weiter aus. Zwar unterstützt die Mehrheit der Bevölkerung den Freihandelsgedanken und protektionistische Maßnahmen haben ein schlechtes Image. Trotzdem findet sich etwa in Deutschland eine solide Mehrheit, die TTIP ablehnt. Die vorliegende empirische Analyse untersucht potenzielle Ursachen für Skepsis gegenüber TTIP. Diese geht mit einem schlechten Image des Globalisierungsprozesses und einem mangelnden Verständnis für seine ökonomischen Vorteile einher. Doch die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Ablehnung des Freihandelsabkommens auch durch ein geringes Vertrauen in die EU und durch die Unzufriedenheit mit der Art und Weise, wie Demokratie auf der EU-Ebene funktioniert, befeuert wird. Auch die Offenheit für Fremdgruppen ist positiv mit der Zustimmung zu TTIP korreliert. Zusammenfassend lässt sich aus der empirischen Analyse ableiten, dass hinter der TTIP-Skepsis eine Reihe von Ursachen steckt, die nur einen indirekten Bezug zu TTIP haben. Die Ablehnung des Freihandelsabkommens ist ein Teil des Protests gegen die Strukturen der EU, sodass mögliche Ansätze für mehr TTIP-Unterstützung darin bestehen, das Vertrauen in die EU auszubauen. Heutzutage werden die Errungenschaften der europäischen Integration als eine Gegebenheit empfunden und ihre Vorteile nicht richtig wahrgenommen. Zudem ist die gefühlte Distanz zu den Europäischen Institutionen mit einem verstärkten Gefühl verbunden, dass die EU-Bürger den politischen Prozess nicht beeinflussen können. Es ist somit nicht nur für die Zukunftsfähigkeit der EU von großer Bedeutung, die Funktionsweise der EUDemokratie zu verbessern und auch die positiven Seiten der europäischen Integration ins Gedächtnis zu rufen. Auch der Kampf um die Unterstützung für TTIP dürfte davon profitieren.

We study the political determinants of policy experimentation during the US welfare reform. Among other changes, this reform shifted the autonomy to implement welfare policies from the federal government to the individual states. In line the predictions from a political agency model, we find that (i) governors with high initial reputation among voters experiment less with welfare policies; (ii) governors with lower reelection concerns experiment more; (iii) governors with little experience are more likely to revert an experiment, but are also more likely to stick to a policy experiment with high potential gains. Overall our findings suggest that reelection concerns play an important role for policy experimentation and reversals.

Do established parties change political institutions to disadvantage smaller, non-mainstream parties if the latters' electoral prospects improve? We study this question with a natural experiment from the German federal State of Hesse. The experiment is the abolishment of an explicit electoral threshold (the so called "five percent hurdle") for local elections in 2001 by the Hessian state parliament. The abolishment improved the electoral prospects of smaller parties at local elections, but local politicians from mainstream parties had the ability to adjust municipal political institutions in such as way as to counteract the increased competitiveness of smaller parties. One such institutional adjustment is to reduce the size of the local council and thereby raise implicit electoral thresholds. Using a dataset that covers all 426 Hessian municipalities over the period 1989-2011, we document with a difference-in-discontinuity design that municipalities where the electoral competitiveness of smaller parties improved more because of the abolishment of the explicit threshold, reduced their council size more. Hence, established parties appear to erect barriers to entry by adjusting political institutions once new political formations become viable electoral alternatives.