Parliamentarians' Evaluations of the Global Economic Crisis

Based on two surveys of parliamentarians in five new (Chile, South Korea, Poland, South Africa, Turkey) and two established (Germany, Sweden) democracies, the paper analyzes perceptions of the global economic crisis as well as evaluations of policies to fight the crisis and their determinants. In a second step, it will be determined if these perceptions and evaluations are related to participation in government and to the ideological positions of the political parties. Finally, it will be asked if a decline in democratic legitimacy in the political orientations of MPs and citizens can be observed in the wake of the crisis

Assessing Emission Allocation in Europe: An Interactive Simulation Approach

Implementation of an EU-wide emissions trading system by means of National Allocation Plans is at the core of European environmental policy agenda. Member States are faced with the problem of allocating their national emission budgets under the EU Burden Sharing Agreement between energy-intensive sectors that are eligible for international emissions trading and the remaining segments of their economies that will be subject to complementary domestic emission regulation. The country-specific segmentation of national emission budgets between trading sectors and non-trading sectors will determine the cost efficiency of the EU emissions trading system and the gains for each Member State vis-?-vis domestic abatement policies. We present an interactive simulation model where users can specify the design of National Allocation Plans for each EU Member State and then evaluate the induced economic effects. Our numerical framework is based on marginal abatement cost curves for (emissions) trading and non-trading sectors of the EU-15 economies. Illustrative simulations highlight the importance of a coordinated design of National Allocation Plans in order to avoid substantial excess costs of regulation and drastic burden shifting between nontrading and trading sectors. --emissions trading,allowance allocation,National Allocation Plans

Challenged Elites - Elites as Challengers: Towards a Unified Theory of Representative Elites

This HSR Special Issue assembles contributions on current topics of elite research. They deal in particular with the challenges globalization poses for the traditional linkages between citizens and their representatives and their impact on political legitimacy. We argue that these developments upset the balance between a broad elite consensus embracing universal values and citizens' fears that their representatives pay too little attention to their demands to fight the negative effects of globalization on the country. We develop a unified theory of representative elites by combining three theorems: The theorem of antagonistic cooperation, the principal-agent theorem and the challenge-response theorem. While the first explains how elite consensus ensures effective policy making, the second demands responsiveness to citizen demands, and the third implies that fundamental social and political changes produce strains for established intra-elite and elite-citizen relations

The Impact of the Global Economic Crisis on Support for Democracy

This contribution provides a brief introduction into the second part of this HSR Special Issue. It informs about an ongoing project on the development of democracy in seven countries, five 'new' and two 'established' democracies. The five new democracies are Chile, South Korea, Poland, South Africa and Turkey. They are compared to Sweden and Germany. The five new democracies are located in different world regions and have different cultural and historical backgrounds. The contribution provides basic economic and political information on these countries. It also describes the common data base used by the six contributions: two surveys of members of parliament conducted in 2007 and 2013 as well as waves 5 and 6 of the World Values Survey conducted at about the same time. The common focus of all six contributions is the analysis of change in political legitimacy between 2007 and 2013

Quantitative Comparison of Abundance Structures of Generalized Communities: From B-Cell Receptor Repertoires to Microbiomes

The \emph{community}, the assemblage of organisms co-existing in a given space and time, has the potential to become one of the unifying concepts of biology, especially with the advent of high-throughput sequencing experiments that reveal genetic diversity exhaustively. In this spirit we show that a tool from community ecology, the Rank Abundance Distribution (RAD), can be turned by the new MaxRank normalization method into a generic, expressive descriptor for quantitative comparison of communities in many areas of biology. To illustrate the versatility of the method, we analyze RADs from various \emph{generalized communities}, i.e.\ assemblages of genetically diverse cells or organisms, including human B cells, gut microbiomes under antibiotic treatment and of different ages and countries of origin, and other human and environmental microbial communities. We show that normalized RADs enable novel quantitative approaches that help to understand structures and dynamics of complex generalize communities

Eliten in der Bundesrepublik: Kartell der Angst, Machtelite oder verantwortliche Repräsentanten?

In diesem Beitrag wird auf der Basis von Dahrendorfs Elitetheorie untersucht, wie sich die Eliten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland rekrutieren und welchen Grad der Integration beziehungsweise welche Segmentierung sie aufweisen. Zunächst wird Dahrendorfs Elitetheorie in einem kurzen Abriß dargestellt und operationalisiert. Datengrundlage der folgenden Untersuchung sind die Ergebnisse einer 1981 durchgeführten Elitenumfrage mit 1744 realisierten Interviews. Auf der Grundlage der erhaltenen Daten wird zuerst die soziale Herkunft der westdeutschen Eliten dargestellt. Es zeigt sich, daß die soziale Herkunft keinen direkten Einfluß auf den Aufstieg in die Eliten hat. Der Anteil von Personen aus der Arbeiterschicht in den Eliten ist in erster Linie auf deren geringere Bildungschancen zurückzuführen, nicht auf eine darüber hinausgehende Diskriminierung. In einem weiteren Kapitel wird die Parteipräferenz der Nichtpolitiker in den Eliten untersucht sowie der Einfluß der beruflichen Ausbildung auf die politische Präferenz. In einem letzten Abschnitt wird der Frage nach der Elitenintegration in der Bundesrepublik nachgegangen. Die gefundenen Daten und andere Beobachtungen legen den Schluß nahe, daß die in der Weimarer Republik zu beobachtende Segmentierung oder "Versäulung" der deutschen Eliten, die Dahrendorf auch noch in den fünfziger und frühen sechziger Jahren bei den Eliten der Bundesrepublik feststellte, im Verlauf der folgenden Jahrzehnte abgebaut worden ist. Offensichtlich ist ein Wandel hin zu konkordanzdemokratischen Strukturen des Verhaltens der Eliten in Deutschland eingetreten. (ICF