Themenschwerpunkte einer Wissenschaftlerlaufbahn

In the introduction to this HSR Supplement, Franz Urban Pappi recounts the development of his career as a social scientist, following how his academic interests have changed over time. Pappi then discusses why he has chosen social cleavages as the overreaching theme of this HSR Supplement, and follows with a discussion of his other research and publication themes, including topics of: local elites, social networks, and spatial models of party competition

A spatial analysis of Turkish party preferences

The paper focuses on party preferences of Turkish voters within the spatial model of voting that proved to be a successful explanatory framework in various other countries. The analysis is based on spatial theory of electoral competition and its statistical implementation using survey data. The paper aims at depicting the cognitive organization of voters' attitudes about issues and evaluations of political parties that compete for their vote. The spatial map derived from a survey of urban settlers show that the dominant ideological dimension sets secularists vs. pro-Islamists as expected from the center-periphery framework often used in Turkish electoral analyses. The second dimension reflects the impact of recent conflict involving the Kurdish minority on rising nationalist sentiments. Given a general depiction of the Turkish political space, we examine the impact of various demographic characteristics as well as issue evaluations on individuals' ideal positions in the space

Пространственный анализ парламентских выборов–2006 в Украине

Following the parliamentary election of 2006 and the protracted negotiations there after, Ukraine witnessed the formation of a coalition that undermined many of the gains seemingly won by the Orange Revolution with the reemergence of Victor Yanukovich as its Prime Minister. A critical element of this reemergence was the defection of Aleksandr Moroz to Yanukovich’s Party of Regions, which, along with the Communists, formed a governing parliamentary coalition. Applying the methodology of spatial analysis of party positions to data from a nation-wide pre-election poll, we estimate the spatial positions of the leading parties and political personalities and as, on the basis of those estimates, whether Yanukovich’s governing coalition should be deemed “inevitable” as dictated by formal theories of coalition formation or whether it best be described as a blunder on the part of President Yushchenko and his Orange Coalition partners