Den Luxus getrennter Ämter – Kanzler + Präsident – leisten sich die Bundesländer nicht. Aber das bedeutet nicht, dass es die Aufgaben und die Rolle eines Staatsoberhaupts auf Länderebene nicht gibt. Der Ministerpräsident übernimmt sie – beide. Damit müsste also jeder Ministerpräsident wissen, “wie Präsident geht”, denn es ist ein ureigener Teil seines Jobs.

schreibt der Kollege Faas via Ministerpräsident = Präsident + Kanzler « Zweitstimme « ZEIT ONLINE Blogs.

Continue reading “Ministerpräsident = Präsident + Kanzler” »

Unless you spent the last couple of days under a rock, you will have heard about the terrible series of (at least) ten neo-Nazi murders that has stunned Germany. In my view, three things are particularly remarkable about this crime.

First, the mainstream media including the public broadcasters and the left-liberal press refer to the series as ‘Dönermorde’, i.e. ‘Kebab Killings’, because most of the victims were small businessmen of Turkish origin. This is impious at any rate, and not exactly sensitive in the context of ethnically motivated violence.

Continue reading “Random thoughts on right-wing terrorism in Germany” »

Life as an early 21st century comparativist is good: Skim through the English literature on country X, Y, and Z, get the dataset from some institution’s website, run the models on a superfast computer, and hey presto, you’re done. More often than not, one might be tempted to skip the literature bit completely and simply analyse a dataset on any group of countries, because this dataset has the variables required to run some fancy model that one always wanted to run.  The phrase ‘guilty pleasure’ springs to mind.

Therefore, analyses by people who read and speak the relevant languages and even live in the country they are writing about fill me with vicarious pride. While I was going back and forth between Angela’s Own Country and the Disgraced Republic Formerly Known as Hellas, two fine specimen have cropped up on the internet: My old chum Ben Stanley has a journal-length piece on the Polish parliamentary elections at the monkey cage, and Jacob Christensen of trailer park political scientist fame gives an equally detailed account of the situation in Denmark.

Apparently, Libya has a Department for Anti-Corruption or, more precisely, the Ministry for Inspection and Popular Control. Sounds weird? Concepts such as National Liberation Army, Security Forces, Dear Leader(s), People’s Democracy and, last not least, Ministry of Truth spring readily to mind.

The German government’s spokesman now has his own twitter account (@regsprecher). The German government’s spokesman also has his own little twittergate, since he surprised his global audience yesterday by claiming that ‘Obama is responsible for thousands of innocent deaths’. What a difference a letter makes.

The polity project’s country code for Israel is … Continue reading “Random fun fact of the day” »

Colleagues over at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham have started yet another political science blog. Its official name is “Ballots & Bullets”, but I find its URL nottspolitics.org rather more memorable. They started out only six weeks ago, but the range of topics and the number of articles is quite impressive. So go and see/read for yourself.

I’ve just finished a review of Tim Spier’s new book on the electorates of the Western European populist right for a yearbook. Since the yearbook is not due to appear before September, here’s the text for your edification (in German)

Continue reading “Review of Tim Spier’s “Modernisierungsverlierer”: Die Wählerschaft rechtspopulistischer Parteien in Westeuropa (in German)” »

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As predicted yesterday, the nuclear disaster in Japan is having a profound impact on something as trivial as three state election campaigns in Germany, more than 9000 kilometres away. Roughly 70 per cent of the population believe that an incident on the scale of the Japanese catastrophe could happen in Germany, too. The Federal Government has declared a three-month “moratorium” on its controversial decision to extend the life-span of German nuclear plants, what ever that means. Meanwhile, they want to reconsider their position on the issue and to re-assess the status of the German plants. It makes you wonder if/why they have not assessed those plants in the first place.

Continue reading “Agenda Set, Japanese Style II” »