Introduction to the Special Issue: Reframing German Federalism

Pamphilis, Niccole M.; Jeffery, Charlie; Rowe, Carolyn; Turner, Ed

doi:10.1080/09644008.2016.1165804

Cited by 12 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 19 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Moving to the subnational level has the additional advantage that the regions are embedded in a common context, therefore allowing to keep conditions such as the general institutional design or cultural aspects more or less constant between these units (Snyder, 2001). Moreover, the overall structure of the party systems of the German Länder is very similar (Bräuninger & Debus, 2012), whereas the regions also have their own dynamics of party competition where it matters for policy outputs which are the parties that get into government (Jeffery et al, 2016;Schmidt, 2016). We can thus expect substantially interesting variation at the subnational level.…”

Section: Case Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On digital front-runners and late-comers: Analyzing issue competition over digitization in German subnational elections

Siewert

König

2019

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Despite the sweeping societal and economic transformation brought about by digitization, it has remained a relatively marginal topic in elections, with parties having few incentives to signal commitment to digitization. Why then would parties start to do so? We address this question by examining party manifestos from German subnational elections in the period between 2010 and 2018. Our analysis contributes to the research on issue competition by looking at why parties engage with the topic of the digitization even though it has neither become politicized nor salient, at present. We find, first, that parties emphasize digitization more in regions belonging to the mid-tier in terms of their degree of digital modernization. Second, parties with more resources and greater ideological compatibility signal more commitment to digitization. Finally, electoral success of the Pirate Party as a credible challenger has been followed by greater emphasis on digitization, especially among the ideologically closest competitors.

show abstract