Aggregate party identification in Germany: the effects of consumer confidence and government approval.

Partisanship has been the object of extensive scholarly attention. Because individual partisanship seemed relatively stable and insensitive to short term forces, aggregate partisanship was long thought to display no meaningful variation. This view was challenged by MacKuen et al. (1989), who found that aggregate partisanship in the United States is a¤ected by consumer con…dence and presidential approval. This paper studies aggregate party identi…cation in Germany, and how it has evolved in the past thirty years. Speci…cally, we analyze the impact of consumer con…dence and government approval on party identi…cation. We conclude that rises in consumer con…dence and government approval do indeed lead to increases in identi…cation with the main governing parties.

Party identification and the economy in Europe: A literature review

As one of the strongest determinants of the vote choice of United States citizens, party identification has been the object of extensive scholarly attention. Despite fifty years of research, its place in the funnel of causality and its applicability outside the United States remains unclear. In this literature review, we discuss the most influential articles about these two unsolved questions. Furthermore, we evaluate whether propensity-to-vote data can enrich our understanding of European partisanship and its relationship with citizens’ evaluation of the economy.nrpages: 25status: publishe

The tale of a Trojan horse or the quest for market access? China and the World Trade Organization

In 2001, China finally joined the WTO. The accession of China was looked forward to by many WTO members and China itself. However, observers had some fears that the Chinese accession would prove to be a Trojan horse, disrupting the working of the WTO. This paper looks into the Chinese accession and its involvement in the WTO Dispute Settlement and argues that these fears seem so far to be unfounded

Transnational union cooperation in the European metal sector: Reinforcing and obstructing factors

The literature on unionized oligopoly has demonstrated that unions will generally ben t from cooperation. Despite these bene ts, most initiatives towards Europeanization of collective bargaining have been unsuccesful. Some noteable exceptions can be found in the European metal industry. The European Metalworkers Federation can claim several path-breaking precedents of cross-border coordination, and is being monitored closely by scholars of European industrial relations. Despite this abundant attention, the reasons for success or faillure have not been analyzed analytically. In this paper, we present a model that takes speci c charachteristics of the metal industry into account, such as product di¤erentiation, imports from low-wage countries and di¤erences in reservation wages. We predict that cooperation will be easier when reservation wages are similar and when imports are imperfect substitutes. In contrast to the common truth that an external threat encourages cooperation, we nd that under speci c circumstances unions will be less eager to cooperate when faced with a foreign competitor. Our predictions are in line with the various levels of transnational cooperation in the automobile, electrical equipment and steel industries. Furthermore, our results indicate that the opposition of rms and the reluctancy of the European Commission to support transnational bargaining are generally justi ed by predicted changes in pro ts and overall welfare.nrpages: 46status: publishe