Henk Erik Meier

Party Size and Portfolio Payoffs: The Proportional Allocation of Ministerial Posts in Coalition Governments

Over 30 years ago, Eric Browne and Mark Franklin demonstrated that parties in a coalition tend to receive portfolio payoffs in almost perfect proportionality to their seat share. Even though this result has been confirmed in several studies, few researchers have asked what the underlying mechanism is that explains why parties receive a proportional payoff. The aim of this paper is to investigate the causal mechanism linking party size and portfolio payoffs. To fulfil this aim, a small-n analysis is performed. By analysing the predictions from a statistical analysis of all post-war coalition governments in 14 Western European countries, two predicted cases are selected, the coalitions that formed after the 1976 Swedish election and the 1994 German election. In these case studies two hypotheses are evaluated: that the proportional distribution of ministerial posts is the result of a social norm, and that parties obtain payoffs according to their bargaining strength. The results give no support to the social norm hypothesis. Instead, it is suggested that proportionality serves as a bargaining convention for the actors involved, thus rendering proportional payoffs more likely.

Limits of Interest Empowerment in the European Union: The Case Of Football

Abstract The European Union (EU) represents an emerging opportunity structure refining societal actors’ chances to get access to and influence over policymaking. While research has mainly focused on lobbying within the legislative arena, we provide evidence that competition policy can also be understood as a venue of interest group politics by taking the case of European football. The specific institutional features of competition policy have the potential to increase probability of access and lower costs for political action for certain interest groups, but also to limit potential benefits from interest group politics. Professional football players and clubs in Europe have used competition policy procedures as an avenue to challenge the supremacy of governing bodies such as UEFA in the game’s organizational structures. Whilst managing some impact in terms of policy, the challengers have attained only moderate influence in football’s sectoral governance.

European Integration and Prime Ministerial Power: A Differential Impact on Cabinet Reshuffles in Germany and Sweden

It is commonly assumed that European integration empowers prime ministers at the expense of cabinet ministers and parliamentary actors. This article follows the suggestion that an increase in cabinet reshuffles indicates power shifts in favour of the PM, and studies reshuffles in two countries that have been involved very differently in the process of European integration, Germany and Sweden. It hypothesises that if European integration empowers the PM, the PM will employ cabinet reshuffles more often. By implication, as integration increases, (1) ministerial reshuffles should become more frequent, and (2) political insiders and ministers holding important portfolios should be more likely to be dismissed. The results found in an event history analysis show that EU integration leads to an increase of turnover when looking at Swedish post-war cabinets, whereas no such effect is found for German cabinets. These results are in line with the idea that a differential impact of Europe on intra-executive relations should be expected.

Successful, sexy, popular: Athletic performance and physical attractiveness as determinants of public interest in male and female soccer players:

This study examines to what extent the public attention directed at individual male and female players of various national soccer teams is influenced by (a) their athletic performance and (b) their physical attractiveness. The results prove that public interest in athletes depends significantly on performance and attractiveness. However, those athletes who both perform strongly and are attractive by far draw the greatest public attention. Against expectations, gender differences do not figure in this: the attractiveness of male soccer players is equally as important for popularity as it is of female soccer players.

The demand for women's league soccer in Germany

ABSTRACT Research question: Given growing skepticism regarding the future of womens soccer in Germany, research presented here aims to fill a gap in research and explores demand functions for the German womens top division, the Frauen-Bundesliga (FBL). Research methods: FBL attendance data for 1848 matches from the seasons 1998/1999 to 2011/2012 are analyzed by employing fixed effects panel regressions. Results and findings: Aggregate attendance has increased substantially over the period examined. However, there is no continuous growth of attendance at the club level. Consumers’ loyalty appears to play a dominant role for FBL attendance but consumer demand responds to the quality of the involved teams, the relevance of matches for championship outcomes as well as costs and weather conditions. Host site characteristics appear to play a minor role. Moreover, womens soccer might represent an inferior good. While national team performance does not affect league attendance, the more aggressive marketing strategy for the home World Cup in 2011 might have served to create a short-term boost in attendance. Implications: More aggressive marketing strategies might be able to increase attendance. However, given the dominant role of habit persistence for FBL attendance, such marketing strategies have to be accompanied by efforts of FBL teams to build and expand a sustainable fan base.

Consumer Demand for Telecasts of Tennis Matches in Germany

The research presented here aims to fill the existing gap in empirical research on demand for individual sports. A unique data set on audiences for live broadcast tennis matches from Germany, as Europe’s biggest and most competitive TV market, is analyzed. The results indicate that canonical approaches of empirical sport economics can be fruitfully applied to individual sports. Consumers prefer prestigious competitions, relevant matches, highly ranked, and German players. The findings suggest that the German tennis industry needs to provide national tennis stars in order to revitalize the interest of major networks and audiences.

Performance Enhancement and Politicisation of High-Performance Sport: The West German ‘air clyster’ Affair of 1976

While the politicisation of high-performance sport is perceived to represent one of the driving forces behind doping, we know not much how exactly the cold war in sports has affected sporting misconduct in western societies. Therefore, we propose here to distinguish between ideological and institutional politicisation and explicit and implicit acceptance of dubious practices. We apply our framework to analyse the West German ‘air clyster’ affair of 1976 in order to examine to what extent the politicisation of high-performance sport during the cold war affected the search for innovation in performance enhancement. We find that political pressure for improved competitiveness in West German sport had served to create a semi-autonomous high-performance sport sector in West Germany where blurred lines of accountability allowed questionable practices to prosper. While the public despised the use of questionable methods, sportive nationalism served to eclipse dubious practices. West German sport leaders adopted insofar a permissive attitude towards questionable practices as sporting misconduct was not sanctioned. Thus, our results strongly suggest that sports politicisation during the cold war facilitated the search for performance-increasing methods in western societies.

Abandoning hopes for veto power: institutional options for sport governing bodies in the European Union

For a long time, sport governing bodies have put high hopes in a consideration of sport in the European Union (EU) Treaties. Ideally, such a sport consideration should not only entitle the sport bodies to get access to the EU budget but, more importantly, also attach more weight to political considerations of sport specificity in proceedings before the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). While the Treaty of Lisbon denied the sport bodies once more any exception under EU law, it has set a new scenario under which to develop EU sports policy. This article explores what institutional status would be most beneficial for the sport bodies in that new scenario. By employing basic ideas of veto player (VP) theory, we arrive at the conclusion that veto power within EU policymaking would be likely to grant sport bodies more influence in policymaking, but could also result in bargaining deadlock without ending or solving the conflicts at stake. Only if the sport bodies would be given the status of a legitimate representative of the ‘sporting movement’, they could prevent any detrimental EU-induced policy change. Since such a status is unlikely to be achieved, our recommendation for the sport bodies is to continue to pursue a more inclusive approach towards other stakeholders in the sport sector.

Difficult Adaptations to Innovations in Performance Enhancement: ‘Dr Brustmann's Power Pills’ and Anti-doping in German Post-war Sport

The paper emphasizes the idea that in order to avoid present-minded moralizing research on doping history we should consider doping as a socially constructed phenomenon. By examining the most spectacular West German doping scandal of the 1950s, the so-called Brustmann affair, the paper illustrates the difficulties sport physicians as well as sport functionaries faced when it came to deal with innovations in pharmacological performance enhancement. The complexities and ambiguities surrounding doping in the 1950s make evident why turning sport physicians into sport health guardians was a logical option for the sport associations in post war Germany even though ‘doctors dilemmas’ typical for sport medicine soon emerged.

Feminization of sport audiences and fans? Evidence from German men’s national soccer team

Sport and sport consumption represent highly gendered spheres. Accordingly, sport spectatorship and fandom have been predominantly male. Recently, however, a trend towards a ‘feminization of sport crowds’ within European soccer has been detected. The piece of research presented here focuses on the concept’s quantitative dimension and aims to provide empirical evidence on long-term trends in female sport consumption and team identification studying trends for the German national soccer team over a 12-year period. The results suggest that the feminization of soccer reflects not only inauthentic consumerism but also increased team identification. Moreover, consistent age effects might be interpreted as indicating that the detected trends relate to changes in gender roles attitudes.