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Since the early 1980s, Western Europe has witnessed the rising success of niche parties and a simultaneous decline in the vote share of mainstream parties. While for one group of these niche parties, namely the left-libertarian and green parties, this success is commonly explained by the rise of a 'new politics' or 'post-materialist' dimension, the causes for the emergence of Extreme Right Parties (ERPs) are still disputed. The continuous electoral support for ERPs at the national, regional and local level was unexpected and has induced a great deal of scientific attention and effort to explain the different fortunes of these parties at the polls. Previous research on the factors influencing the electoral success of ERPs has emphasized the importance of voter characteristics and party competition for the electoral fortunes of ERPs. With regard to the first, ERP voters have been found to share common policy preferences and are related to distinct socio-economic groups. With regard to party competition, scholars have pointed to the role of the electoral programmatic of ERPs as well as their mainstream competitors for the electoral support of ERPs. While existing studies come to the overall conclusion that both voter preferences and patterns of party competition do influence the electoral fortunes of ERPs, the question of how party competition influences the vote decision for an ERP is still a matter of academic dispute. The single contributions of this dissertation contribute to the existing literature on the impact of party competition on the vote decision for an ERP by (1) focusing on the interplay between the political preferences of ERP voters and party competition, (2) applying a two-dimensional approach to the political opportunity structure of ERPs, and (3) incorporating the findings into a formal theory on how party competition influences the decision of individual voters, be they ERP voters or supporters of any other party in Western Europe.

In this article, we consider the gender gap in political participation by analyzing recent survey data about German adolescents. Differentiating between institutional, non-institutional, and expressive participation, we show that, even in Germany where there is strong gender equality, type-specific gender differences persist. Testing for resource, socialization, and attitudinal explanations, in multivariate regression analyses, we identify socialization in civic forms of participation together with the lower confidence of women in their personal and political skills as major drivers for the sexual differences in political engagement, especially so for institutionalized forms of participation.

In this article, we consider the gender gap in political participation by analyzing recent survey data about German adolescents. Differentiating between institutional, non-institutional, and expressive participation, we show that, even in Germany where there is strong gender equality, type-specific gender differences persist. Testing for resource, socialization, and attitudinal explanations, in multivariate regression analyses, we identify socialization in civic forms of participation together with the lower confidence of women in their personal and political skills as major drivers for the sexual differences in political engagement, especially so for institutionalized forms of participation.

General attitudes of citizens toward the European Union (EU) have frequently been analyzed. However, European integration represents a multifaceted process and citizen attitudes may well depend on the precise nature of policy proposals. In this contribution, we analyze the determinants of specific support for three prominent EU economic policy proposals: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, Eurobonds, and a EU financial transaction tax. Drawing on Eurobarometer data, we find that four standard explanatory factorsideology, utility, identity, and cuesalso affect support for these policies. However, they do so in systematically different ways, depending on whether the policies primarily represent positive or negative integration and market-making or market-correcting, on how they affect national sovereignty, and on how they are affected by complexity and salience.

General attitudes of citizens toward the European Union (EU) have frequently been analyzed. However, European integration represents a multifaceted process and citizen attitudes may well depend on the precise nature of policy proposals. In this contribution, we analyze the determinants of specific support for three prominent EU economic policy proposals: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, Eurobonds, and a EU financial transaction tax. Drawing on Eurobarometer data, we find that four standard explanatory factors—ideology, utility, identity, and cues—also affect support for these policies. However, they do so in systematically different ways, depending on whether the policies primarily represent positive or negative integration and market-making or market-correcting, on how they affect national sovereignty, and on how they are affected by complexity and salience.

An extensive body of scholarship has claimed that the relationship between migration and the welfare state is a potentially troublesome one, because the native population might be concerned about the fiscal, economic and cultural threats this poses. At the same time, studies have argued that 'migrants differ', not only in their actual numbers but also in their similarities or differences compared with the native population. Taking these differences into account, we analyse the effect of the integration of migrants for natives' support for welfare. In detail, we test for the possibility that the integration of migrants might have a direct impact on the economic and cultural difficulties which natives associate with migration and in this way will have an indirect effect on their support for social spending. Our results show that the objective integration of migrants has only limited relevance for the relationship between migration and welfare support and point to the need to focus on subjectively perceived migration- and integration-related attitudes of natives.

While public debate about derivative transactions has intensified in the last years, the role of political authorities has received only limited attention: On the one hand, political actors take the role of law-makers for this growing market; on the other hand, they actively engage in it as market-participants. This study addresses the determinants of the Swap-transactions of municipalities in North Rhine-Westphalia from 2004 to 2008 and discusses three sets of explanatory variables on the local level: the budgetary situation, the financial expertise, and the patterns of political competition. Our quantitative analysis reveals that communal Swap-transactions are mainly driven by the budgetary situation, while the explanatory power of the political variables is rather limited. Adapted from the source document.

In this article, we analyse the impact of intra-party procedures of candidate selection for national elections on the representativeness of parties towards their voters. With regard to candidate selection we distinguish between two dimensions: inclusion and centralization. While the first identifies the type of selectorate for candidate nominations (members, delegates or committees), the second captures the territorial unit in which the nomination is decided (local, regional or national). Based on data for 53 parties in 9 Western European countries for the period 1970 to 1990, the analysis points to the relevance of the inclusion dimension. Parties in which party elites decide the nomination of candidates show slightly higher degrees of representation than parties with more inclusive selectorates. We conduct our analysis separately for two frequently used but theoretically different concepts of representation: cross-sectional representation (at one point in time) and dynamic representation (over time). Our analysis shows that candidate-selection procedures only matter for the first concept. The empirically inconsistent results between the two concepts are due to deficiencies in the way dynamic representation is currently operationalized. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

Addressing the literature on the historical origins of capitalism, this study analyses the role agriculture played in the formation of non-market economic coordination in economic and social affairs around 1900. It argues that the dominant rural production profile dictated whether farmers did exert a significant impact on socio-economic institution and policy formation outside the rural sector. By applying the method of parallel demonstration of theory, we illustrate the plausibility of these theoretical considerations through juxtaposing the historical record of Germany, Denmark, New Zealand and the USA. The article highlights the limits of a dichotomous view on the origins of capitalism because the coordination effect of rural economies varies within the later coordinated and the later liberal cluster of market economies. Adapted from the source document.