Within the scope of a project sponsored by an enquiry commission set up by the German Bundestag to examine "how the consequences of the SED dictatorship are being overcome in the ongoing process of German unity", the BIOst has undertaken to perform a review of the status of endeavours in other countries similarly affected to re-examine and come to terms with a past lived under a dictatorial regime. This was the context that gave rise to the present report. In order to make the reports on the various countries more readily comparable, a question framework was developed which serves to give the reports a general structure. The sources for the present report were mainly publications in the Polish and German specialist and daily press. (BIOst-Dok)
This paper investigates micro- and macro-level determinants of participation in demonstrations worldwide, focusing on the role of resources and grievances across different democratic contexts. The analysis relies on a data set stemming from the ex-post harmonization of five international survey projects covering 100 countries between 1989 and 2009: Americas Barometer, Asia Europe Survey, European Values Study, International Social Survey Programme, and the World Values Survey. Results provide mixed support for previous findings and point to new insights. First, I find that the positive association between education and participation in demonstrations is stronger in democratic countries than in nondemocracies, but there is no evidence of similar variation in the case of income. Second, the effect of trust in parliament is U-shaped, and more pronounced in non-democracies compared to democracies. Overall the findings indicate that the role of resources as well as disaffection with the political system in explaining participation in demonstrations depends on the political context, thus emphasizing the importance of incorporating both levels of analysis in theoretical and empirical models. The paper concludes with a discussion of the opportunities and challenges associated with ex-post harmonization of survey data.
This article analyses the image of the three abrahamic religions in the recent political programs of the French Front National (2012 and 2017) in a comparative perspective with other successful populist radical right-wing parties in EU-Countries of continental Western and Northern Europe. It will be shown that even if there is a common tendency of representing Islam negatively and avoiding overt antisemitism, there are differences with regard to Judaism and/or Israel as well as to the weight of Christianity for the national and/or European culture, which have interesting parallels with the national discourse traditions and the particular radical right-wing history of these parties.
During the past half century, the political attitude of the Eastern European people toward the state, government and society changed dramatically. So did their value systems. Inglehart's materialist vs. post-materialist comparative analysis gives a measure of this value change, but not enough as to fully characterize the phenomena underlining the differences in political culture before and after the Fall of Berlin Wall. Little has left from the communist regimes to prove how this change actually occurred and where we are as compared to the stable democratic regimes. With rare exceptions, no public survey has been developed in the Eastern European countries between 1950-1990 able to mirror people's true beliefs and values. In order to understand the current value systems and political attitudes of the people in the Eastern Europe, we have to recover the past. One way to do that is to identify key concepts in the texts, discourses, audio and video recordings of the past times. The present paper provides the rationale of this approach and describes a system which works on dynamically collecting content-based items from library and web references and resources. The system currently works on concepts described by single words or compound expressions, and could be extended so as to work on multimedia items, like words, images, and sounds (voices, music, audio signals, etc.). Our approach aims at constructing a dynamic system and an open access repository of content-based collections of the past and offers a research instrument to the students of political attitudes toward democracy and freedom of the people in Eastern Europe. We approach the problem of recovering the historical process of political change in the Eastern European societies known as the Fall of Berlin Wall in terms of political attitude change modeling and simulation. Modeling makes intensive use of web and data mining technologies for identifying political attitude structural configurations in patterns of value and belief change. Based on web-extracted political attitude configurations, simulation provides a clue on how political attitude structure looks like, and how political attitude change emerges in macro level political change phenomena.
"This paper provides a brief overview of elite change and continuity in East Germany as a post-socialist society. To do so, at first, some peculiarities of the former cadre system and elites in socialist East Germany, i.e. the late German Democratic Republic, are addressed with regard to social structure development and the arrangement of generations. Selected empirical evidence is based on cross-sectoral, longitudinal and cohort analyses and the inspection of prosopographic elite data compiled until the end of the 1980s which deconstruct the myth of a levelled egalitarian socialist society. In the second part of the paper, elite change and continuity after the political change of 1989/90 is discussed in the context of the transformation of institutions. Inspired by Bourdieu's analytic paradigm, one central thesis on the career survivals, take-offs, and breakdowns of East German elites is the continued validity and efficacy of social and cultural capital obtained before the fall of the wall, most of all formal qualification. Dimension of vertical social inequality under socialist rule, such as gender and class background, remain to be decisive until today." (author's abstract)
Ein großes Problem langfristig orientierter Politik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland besteht darin, dass die Parteien sich auch dann nichts schenken, wenn sie inhaltlich nahe beieinanderliegen. Schließlich will die Regierung wiedergewählt werden und die Opposition die Regierung als unfähig darstellen, um selbst an die Macht zu gelangen. Eine Direktwahl der Minister würde die Ämterfrage separat klären und den Parteien einen Anreiz geben, miteinander zur Erreichung sachpolitischer Ziele zu kooperieren.
Latin American legislatures have gone largely unstudied, with the functioning of the Argentine Chamber of Deputies prior to the 1980s being an entirely unexplored subject. This paper fills that gap by examining the organization of the Chamber, with particular focus on its standing committee system from 1946 to 2001. We assess the portability of two U.S.-based theoretical approaches to legislative organization by applying them to committee assignments. An original data set of Argentine deputies was constructed and a way of measuring political power in committees was devised for this study. Despite weak democratic governments, military interventions, and changes to the electoral system, we find that ruling parties have consistently influenced the committee system, shaping its structure and securing an over-proportion of their deputies in key committee positions. These results support the applicability of the U.S. originated Cartel Theory of legislative organization to understanding and studying legislatures outside that country. (GIGA)
In: Discussion Papers / Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Forschungsschwerpunkt Zivilgesellschaft, Konflikte und Demokratie, Abteilung Demokratie: Strukturen, Leistungsprofil und Herausforderungen, Band 2009-202
"This handbook describes a specific approach to content analyzing multilevel party manifestos, building on a methodology that was originally developed in the context of the Manifesto Research Group (MRG). Since 1979, the MRG has been collecting and coding election programs with the aim of estimating policy preferences of political parties. The second phase of the project started in 1989. In the context of its 'Comparative Manifestos Project' (CMP), the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) provided resources for updating and expanding the MRG data. Since then, country experts were hired to collect and code national election programs according to a handbook that describes how to identify the coding units and how to apply the classification scheme of policy preferences under central supervision. The CMP is solely concerned with national election programs. However, in decentralized political systems, parties also publish local and regional election programs and, in times of globalization, transnational party federations increasingly produce joint programs. Comparing these multilevel manifestos can provide additional answers to questions of multilevel governance. This handbook, elaborated in collaboration with the Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados de Andalucía (IESA-CSIC, Spain), presents a classical content analytical approach to identifying parties' multilevel preferences. It instructs coders on how to apply two combined content analytical classification schemes: first, the CMP classification of policy preferences developed for party manifestos at national levels and, second, a classification of cultural and authority claims on multiple levels of governance. This double classification scheme is then applied to regional party manifestos in Spain, providing examples of multilevel analysis for training coders and testing their grasp of the complex concepts of parties' multilevel preferences." (author's abstract)