Thomas Däubler

Government Formation and Policy Formulation in the German States

This article theorizes and analyzes two aspects of government building in the German states while paying special attention to interrelations between the federal and state level. First, we examine which factors influence the choice of the partisan composition of the next government. Secondly, we ask for the determinants of the policy positions of the newly formed coalition governments. Original empirical results show that both government formation and policy formulation in the German Länder are clearly affected by federal politics. State-level coalitions cross-cutting the federal government–opposition divide are avoided, and the strength of this effect depends on institutional context and the federal election cycle. The policy position of state-level governments is affected by the position of the respective federal government. On the economic policy dimension, all state-level governments move towards the federal government. On the social policy dimension, those state governments whose partisan composition is congruent with the federal government seem to move away from the latter.

Natural Sentences as Valid Units for Coded Political Texts

All methods for analyzing text require the identification of a fundamental unit of analysis. In expert-coded content analysis schemes such as the Comparative Manifesto Project, this unit is the ‘quasi-sentence’: a natural sentence or a part of a sentence judged by the coder to have an independent component of meaning. Because they are subjective constructs identified by individual coders, however, quasi-sentences make text analysis fundamentally unreliable. The justification for quasi-sentences is a supposed gain in coding validity. We show that this justification is unfounded: using quasi-sentences does not produce valuable additional information in characterizing substantive political content. Using natural sentences as text units, by contrast, delivers perfectly reliable unitization with no measurable loss in content validity of the resulting estimates.

The Preparation and Use of Election Manifestos: Learning from the Irish Case

Election manifestos are important documents, but very little is known about the way parties create their manifestos and how they use them. This is unfortunate, because such knowledge can inform both the academic study of party politics and political practice. This article presents original results from interviews with actors who played a key role in creating the 2007 national election manifesto for the major Irish parties. It describes the sequence of actions in developing the manifesto, and how those involved in the preparation perceive its functions. The results suggest that preparation processes are similar to those found a decade ago, but a trend towards giving party activists a larger say seems to be emerging. This finding is at odds with the prediction of the cartel party model that party leaders seek to reduce the influence of activists. Another finding is that manifestos are not only used to address voters, but also are tools for intra-party coordination, for communication with interest groups, and are especially important in the government formation process. Students of party competition should take this multi-purpose nature of the documents and variation in preparation modes into account. Finally, if there is a lack of policy debate in Irish election campaigns, the reason does not lie in a lack of policy material on the side of the parties.

Assessing democratic representation in multi-level democracies

Abstract This article introduces the special issue ‘Assessing democratic representation in multi-level democracies’ from a conceptual perspective. It adapts Powell’s chain of responsiveness – as a model of the democratic process on the national level – to the context of multi-level systems and discusses conditions that might facilitate or hamper responsiveness in regional democracies. The theoretical reasoning identifies added complexity, multiple actors sharing the same label and cross-level interdependent decisions as the key challenges to multi-level democracy. Empirical illustrations focus on the first stage of the representation process. Here voters should form rational policy preferences and take informed voting decisions, and parties are expected to offer coherent policy platforms that are tailored to the specifics of the regional level. While the analysis of party manifesto data suggests that regional parties cover regional issues, and strategic incentives to focus on other levels appear limited, survey-based information illustrates the cognitive burden of multi-level democracy on voters. In combination with a synopsis of the other contributions assembled in this issue, the findings suggest that information, responsibility and accountability problems may be particular obstacles to responsiveness in multi-level systems.

Holding Individual Representatives Accountable: The Role of Electoral Systems

Voters are reluctant to sanction representatives for individual misconduct if they have to balance candidate-level and party-level factors in their choice, but this trade-off is affected by the electoral system. Our general theoretical model explains why individual accountability can empirically occur in single-member district (SMD) systems but is expected under less restrictive conditions using open-list proportional representation (OLPR). The latter not only decouples party and candidate choice but also makes seat allocation more vote elastic. For a thorough empirical test of our argument, we draw on real-world evidence from state-level elections in Bavaria, Germany, which are held under an unusual mixed-member system. Exploiting a recent public scandal involving one-third of representatives, we examine how electoral punishment of the same candidates by the same voters differs across electoral rules. Drawing on difference-in-differences as well as matching/regression estimators, we show that electoral punishment is substantially larger under OLPR than under SMD systems.

Wie entstehen Wahlprogramme? Eine Untersuchung zur Landtagswahl in Baden-Württemberg 2006

Election manifestos play an important role both in political practice and in political science research. Nevertheless there are only few studies which examine how parties develop election manifestos. I present an exploratory study of the preparation of the election manifestos for the German state level election in Baden-Wurttemberg in 2006. The empirical analysis consists firstly of interviews with key actors in the preparation process and secondly of a comparison between the manifesto proposals the party leaderships presented to the party conferences and the final versions. Based on the interview findings I introduce a stylized model of manifesto preparation. The results show that the process was comparatively similar across parties, but there were differences especially with regard to the involvement of party members prior to the party conference stage. This involvement was lower in the two large parties CDU and SPD. All examined party conferences extended the leadership’s manifesto proposal considerably. The Greens and the WASG, the two parties with the supposedly most strongly policy-oriented members, changed the original versions more strongly than the others.

Ballot structure, list flexibility and policy representation

ABSTRACT There is a growing body of research on the impact of the electoral system ‘ballot structure’ on the behaviour of politicians. We offer a clear, ordinal and rules-based three-way coding (closed, flexible, open) of the electoral systems used in European Parliament elections, taking into account both the ballot type and the intra-party seat-allocation rules. For the notoriously difficult group of flexible list-systems, we show how these operated in the 2004, 2009 and 2014 elections, and introduce an additional behavioural distinction between ‘weakly flexible’ and ‘strongly flexible’ subtypes at the party-list-level. We then illustrate how the type of ballot used in an election can influence individual policy representation by looking at the vote-splits between Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the European People’s Party in a vote on tackling homophobia.

Das Einstimmen-Mischwahlsystem bei baden-württembergischen Landtagswahlen : wie fehlende Listen zur ungleichen deskriptiven Repräsentation von Stadt und Land in den Fraktionen beitragen

State-level elections in Baden-Wurttemberg are run under an unusual mixed-member electoral system, which gives citizens just one vote, but does not use party lists - allocating seats in the second tier to the “best losers” from the plurality tier instead. Several aspects of this system have already been criticized. This article presents a novel systematic analysis of how the lack of party lists affects the descriptive representation of urban and rural constituencies. For this purpose the distribution of votes and seats within parties is compared, since bias caused by the electoral system is likely to appear at this level, where it also particularly matters due to the key political role of parliamentary party groups. There is a considerable seats-votes-disproportionality along the urban-rural dimension within all parties. A counterfactual analysis of the results of the state-level election in North Rhine-Westphalia from 2005 corroborates the argument that the electoral system drives this pattern. The reform of the Baden-Wurttemberg electoral system announced in the 2016 coalition agreement is therefore overdue also from the perspective of adequate representation of urban and rural areas.

Bills from the Floor: Why Governing Party Groups Initiate their Own Legislation

In parliamentary systems, why do party groups of the government camp initiate their own bills instead of going through the cabinet? This article suggests that such governing party group bills occur for three reasons: (a) cabinets hand out bills to the parties on the floor; (b) party groups or MPs want to signal to constituencies; or (c) parties on the floor are dissatisfied with cabinet policy making. Arguing that the absolute and relative importance of these explanations varies with institutional context, country-specific hypotheses with regard to the number of governing party group bills in Germany are tested. As expected, mechanisms (a) and (c) are especially important in explaining the occurrence of governing party group legislation in Germany.

Links-rechts und darüber hinaus – eine Neuvermessung der deutschen Parteienlandschaft mit einem auf die MARPOR/CMP-Daten angewandten IRT-Modell

Sowohl die theoretische Bedeutung der links-rechts-Dimension als auch die Methodik zu ihrer empirischen Ermittlung sind umstritten. Der Beitrag analysiert die inhaltsanalytisch gewonnen MARPOR/CMP-Daten mit einer innovativen induktiven Methode. Das Item-Response-Theory-Modell erlaubt nicht nur die Bestimmung von Parteipositionen, sondern ermoglicht auch neue Einsichten in den Gegenstand des politischen Konflikts, hier angewandt auf Deutschland (1990–2013). So wird etwa klar, dass die links-rechts-Achse in diesem Zeitraum nicht nur von der Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik, sondern auch von der Ausenpolitik gepragt wurde. Die Ergebnisse widersprechen auserdem der weitverbreiteten These von einer Konvergenz der Volksparteien und Lager bei den Wahlen 2009 und 2013. Eine Erweiterung des Modells auf zwei Dimensionen zeigt unter anderem auf, dass das Thema Umweltschutz in den Wahlprogrammen eher gesellschaftspolitische als wirtschaftspolitische Positionen zum Ausdruck bringt.