Suchergebnisse

"In diesem Beitrag untersuchen die Autoren das Abstimmungsverhalten der Länder bei namentlichen Abstimmungen im Bundesrat im Zeitraum von der deutschen Wiedervereinigung 1990 bis zum Ende der Regierung Gerhard Schröders 2005. Sie gehen der Frage nach, ob und wenn ja, wann und in welchem Ausmaß der Bundesrat parteipolitisiert ist. Analytisch geht es um die Frage, wie ein durch originär sachpolitische Interessen motiviertes Verhalten von einem solchen unterschieden werden kann, das sich ausschließlich am strategischen Wettbewerb der Parteien um Wählerstimmen orientiert. Die Autoren entwickeln dazu eine Analysemethode, mit welcher der Zusammenhang zwischen sachpolitischen Länder- respektive Parteiinteressen und parteipolitischer Motivation, also etwa dem Druck, der durch die Parteilager ausgeübt wird, aufgelöst werden kann." (Autorenreferat)

In order to participate in the legislation of the federal level, the Lander may introduce bills in the Bundestag through the Bundesrat. To assess to what extent these initiatives are influenced by party political conflicts, all 1332 bills introduced in the Bundesrat between 1972 and 2005 are analyzed. It can be seen that only half of these initiatives reach the status of a formal Bundesrat's initiative. This success rate is strongly influenced by the majorities in the second chamber. Under government parities sit on the benches of the opposition in the Bundestag (O-Lander). In times of opposition majorities in the Bundesrat only 30 per cent of all initiatives by R-Lander are adopted as a Bundesrat's initiative. This pattern clearly corroborates the prominent finding that the Bundesrat's legislative activities are heavily influenced by party political conflicts. The high success rate of cross-party initiatives, however, indicates that a minor share of initiatives is motivated by issues of territorial representation. Adapted from the source document.

This paper presents the first comprehensive quantitative analysis of patronage appointments in Austrian state-owned enterprises. It is based on data on the nominations of 1242 individuals to managerial boards in corporations that were majority-owned by the Austrian federal government between 1995 and 2010. The multivariate models show that the composition of government, ministerial partisanship, the size of corporations and the importance of the individual posts are significant determinants of patronage appointments. Adapted from the source document.

The first part of the article argues in favor of an anti-hermeneutic strategy of reading Marx, taking into account the always shifting character of the meaning of his theory due to historical transformations generated by social struggles & the partisan & interventionist character of any Marxist theory. This has effects upon how the relation of structure & agency has to be conceptualized as a specific historical relation -- very often ignored by a misled sociological reading of Marx in the tradition of Weber & Parsons. Decisive is the argument that in Marx's theory the differentiation & opposition of structure & agency is in itself not pertinent but has to be explained in terms of historical struggles. At the center of the argument is a reformulation of the law of value as a logic of collective practice & the important meaning of what Marx calls the "ideal average" as a subject of his theory. Adapted from the source document.

Legends are the storehouse of the history of ideas. The development of the Slavic idea in Slovakia, for example, can be derived from the figure of the Carpathian thief Juraj Janosik. The historical Janosik took part in the uprisings of the Hungarian nobility in the 18th century & was later executed as a thief. The fathers of Pan-Slavism made him a Slavic epic hero. On the eve of the Revolution of 1848, poets declared Janosik a Slovak national hero. But only in Neo-Slavism were ethnic traits attributed to the figure. These did not disappear either, when the figure was stylized into a social rebel in the 20th century & a partisan in the communist era. Today, the figure is an icon of pop culture that is exploited commercially & politically. Adapted from the source document.

In order to investigate the thesis of a homogenization in the German party system in view of the 2013 Bundestag elections as compared to the two preceding elections (2005 and 2009), data contained in the Wahl-O-Mat is used as a new possible source for describing and mapping (spatial) party positions. The descriptive results together with their statistical inspection via cluster analysis and the extraction of parties' spatial positions do not support the idea of a homogenization and the disappearance of partisan antagonisms. There is some evidence for a slight convergence of the two catch-all parties in 2013 compared to the two preceding federal elections. However, the familiar structure of two blocks remains clearly discernible, with the Pirate Party and the AfD falling into the leftist and rightist block respectively. The most conspicuous drawback treated in the discussion of the suitability and possible improvements of the Wahl-O-Mat data is a consistently low discriminatory power within the left block. Adapted from the source document.

The quantitative strand of social policy research suffers from a double deficit: On the one hand, analyses of aggregate expenditure dominate, and on the other hand, most studies of replacement rates focus on unemployment or sickness benefits, while pensions are excluded. This paper addresses the said deficit firstly by discussing the pension sectors' theoretical peculiarities and by proposing two hypotheses: one on the retrenchment of pension replacement rates and one on the role played by political parties in implementing it. Secondly, after an outline of our methodological approach, we present regression results on replacement rate changes in 18 developed democracies. Our findings show considerably smaller cuts of pensions than of unemployment or sickness benefits, and striking differences regarding partisan effects between the sectors. Adapted from the source document.

We examine the regional variance of the votes on the railway station project "Stuttgart 21". In addition to party partisanship, prospective regional advantages and their regionally specific relevance explain the voting behaviour in local districts. Thus, our findings contest previous journalistic and political interpretations of the voting behaviour, confirming the results of other studies on plebiscites. As in our case the overall voting results reflect parliamentary majorities, the use of plebiscites for increasing public participation seems questionable. Moreover, plebiscites may prevent the realisation of infrastructure projects in low-population areas, as the voting results also depend on the covariance of the regional advantages with the distribution of the population. In the light of these findings, alternatives ensuring public participation need to be considered. Adapted from the source document.

In this issue five freely submitted journal articles and a discussion paper appear. In the first of three articles submitted to Laurenz Enns-Jedenastik engaged in partisan cast of top functions in Austrian state-owned enterprises. The database consists of a collection of party ties all 1242 people who have been appointed in the 1995-2010 to the board, management and supervisory board of the majority government-owned corporations. The performed multivariate analysis shows that the changing composition of the government, the ministerial responsibility of individual parties, the company and the importance of the great vacant position in the company have a significant impact on the appointment party near people. Although an empirical separation between postal occupations primary for purposes of reward (reward) or the influence (control) is only partly possible, the main objective expectation, derived from both delegation theories as from the patronage literature for Austria hits let, impressively: namely that carried out by postal occupations with parties. Adapted from the source document.