Most efforts to detect the consequences of divided government in German federalism by analyzing legislative statistics have been unsuccessful. Therefore, there is still much debate in Germany about the gridlock potential of divided government, as there is in the United States. Using a...

Most efforts to detect the consequences of divided government in German federalism by analyzing legislative statistics have been unsuccessful. Therefore, there is still much debate in Germany about the gridlock potential of divided government, as there is in the United States. Using a...

Why junior ministers? What function do they serve? Two explanations dominate the literature. Both focus on the role of junior ministers in coalition formation and coalition management. One approach sees junior ministers as instruments for controlling policy, the other as a means to solve or ease...

Europe's 'political space', its dimensionality and its impact on European policies have received increased academic attention lately. Yet, one very basic element of this political space, the party composition of EU member states' governments, has never been studied in a systematic way in the...

Voting behavior in elections to the European Parliament seems to follow a regular pattern, as many EP-election studies have found: Parties in government at the national level tend to lose vote shares in EP-elections as compared to the last domestic electoral contest; small and ideologically more...

This paper analyzes 'globalization' as the interplay between domestic and 'foreign' economic agents that seek to break up nationally contained and/or institutionally constrained markets with the aim of altering distributive outcomes in their favor. I take as my exemplary cases the recent opening...

Esping-Andersen's 'Three World of Welfare Capitalism' has been the most influential contribution of recent years to the comparative welfare state research literature. According to Esping-Andersen, the welfare state basically comes in three variants: as a social-democratic, a conservative, or as...

Is there a relation between welfare state regimes and national wage setting systems? Peter Swenson in his research on the historical dynamics of the US-American and Swedish welfare state has recently claimed that such a relation does indeed exist. The essay aims to check if this also holds true...

The unique characteristics of Germany's federalism have been long identified as one of the main obstacles to legitimate and efficient governance. In 2006, the grand coalition adopted a federal reform which aims to disentangle the intertwined levels of government by reducing the influence of the...