Anti-Minority Riots in Unified Germany: Cultural Conflicts and Mischanneled Political Participation

Anti-foreigner riots in eastern Germany in the early 1990s have usually been explained by ethnonationalism or racism, ethnic competition for scarce resources, and opportunistic political elites. If anti-minority riots are analyzed as a distinct phenomenon with a cross-sectional approach, local political processes emerge as more important causes. Cultural conflicts, the channeling of mobilization from nonviolent into violent forms, local political opportunities for success, and mobilization by social movement organizations convert ethnic conflict and violence into riots. A comparison of riot and non-riot localities in eastern Germany supports this argument

Opportunity/Threat Spirals in the U.S. Women\u27s Suffrage and German Anti-Immigration Movements

Many have noted that protesters sometimes expand political opportunities for later protests, but there has been little analysis of how this occurs. The problem can be addressed by analyzing opportunity/threat spirals, which involve positive feedback among: actions by challengers (bold protests and the formation of alliances between challenger groups); opportunity-increasing actions by authorities and elites (elite divisions and support, procedural reforms, substantive concessions, and police inaction); and threat-increasing actions by authorities and elites (new grievance production and excessive repression). Interactions among these eight mechanisms are demonstrated in two cases of social movement growth, the U.S. women\u27s suffrage movement of the 1910s and the German anti-immigration movement of the early 1990s. The cases show similar positive feedback processes despite many other differences, which suggests that the specified interactions may operate in a wide range of social movements in democratic countries

Radical-Right and Neo-Fascist Political Parties in Western Europe

Far right-wing parties have gained dramatically in many West European countries since the early 1980s. Recent cross-national studies distinguish between neo-fascist parties, which are anti-democratic and anti-capitalist, and radical right-wing parties which combine anti-immigration appeals with pro-capitalist, neo-liberal economic positions, social conservatism, and a basic acceptance of representative democracy. While the former have been stagnant and unimportant, the latter have been gaining. Yet there are also borderline cases where it is more difficult to determine whether the party rejects fascism and accepts democracy, a problem which the theoretical literature has neglected. The far right\u27s success is largely due to the politicization of immigration issues, political alienation, and backlashes against welfare states

Explaining Success and Failure in Climate Policies: Developing Theory through German Case Studies

Theories of environmental outcomes have been developed mostly through large-N cross-national studies, which have a structuralist bias and do not include the mechanisms through which inferred causes operate. Structured, focused case studies can help overcome those limits by incorporating political processes and identifying causal mechanisms. Here, comparisons of climate policy outcomes within Germany are used to test and develop theory, by explaining the differences among nine cases with the help of process tracing. The findings suggest that environmental-outcome theories should be modified to include: external events and advocacy-coalition formation as key processes; multiple causal paths through which green parties improve environmental quality; more examination of the ways that neocorporatism can hinder environmental performance and that advocacy-coalition formation can change patterns of interest intermediation; and rising income and consumption as factors producing environmental deterioration in the absence of policies regulating consumption

Climate Policy Outcomes in Germany: Environmental Performance and Environmental Damage in Eleven Policy Areas

Germany has reduced its emissions of greenhouse gases more than almost any other industrialized democracy and is exceeding its ambitious Kyoto commitment of a 21% reduction since 1990. Hence, it is commonly portrayed as a climate-policy success story, but the situation is much more complex. Generalizing Germany\u27s per-capita emissions to all countries or its emissions reductions to all industrialized democracies would still very likely produce more than a two-degree rise in global temperature. Moreover, analyzing the German country-case into eleven subcases shows that it is a mixture of relative successes and failures. This illustrates several major problems with the literature on environmental performance. It has a competitive emphasis, which assesses performance relative to other countries rather than an external standard, and a bias toward seeing success and ignoring failure. Moreover, the literature has developed through cross-national studies, which have treated national cases as undifferentiated wholes. To counter-balance these tendencies, this article uses absolute, external standards to assess climate-policy outcomes in terms of environmental damage, it focuses on failures as well as successes, and it analyzes differences in outcomes across policy areas and economic sectors. This differentiated analysis leads to three main conclusions, which are also applicable to other countries. First, high relative performance and high environmental damage can coexist, and hence a fuller and more realistic understanding of environmental policy and its outcomes requires keeping both aspects in view. Second, we should see national cases in a differentiated way and not only in terms of their aggregate performances, since all countries are really mixtures of successes and failures. Third, researchers on climate policies should more often begin with outcomes, work backward to policies, and be prepared for some surprises. Some major climate policies, e.g., the ecological tax reform, may not be very effective. Ironically, the most effective government interventions may not be explicit climate policies, e.g., the economic transformation of eastern Germany. Moreover, the lack of policy-making in certain areas may undercut progress made elsewhere, e.g., unregulated increases in car travel, road freight, and electricity consumption. Therefore, research on climate and other environmental policies should focus on different areas of government intervention and ask different questions about them than it currently does

The Political Viability of Carbon Pricing: Policy Design and Framing in British Columbia and California

The adoption of climate policies with visible, substantial costs for households is uncommon because of expected political backlash, but British Columbia\u27s carbon tax and California\u27s cap-and-trade program imposed such costs and still survived vigorous opposition. To explain these outcomes, this paper tests hypotheses concerning policy design, framing, energy prices, and elections. It conducts universalizing and variation-finding comparisons across three subcases in the two jurisdictions and uses primary sources to carry out process tracing involving mechanisms of public opinion and elite position taking. The paper finds strong support for the timing of independent energy price changes, exogenous causes of election results, reducing the visibility of carbon pricing, and using public-benefit justifications, as well as some support for making concessions to voters. By contrast, the effects of the use of revenue, industry exemptions/compensations, and making polluters pay are not uniform, because the former depends on how it is embedded in coalition building efforts and a middle path between exempting or compensating industry and burdening it appears to be more effective than pursuing just one or the other approach

The Politics of Immigration Control in Britain and Germany: Subnational Politicians and Social Movements

Political backlash against immigrant minorities and restrictive immigration policies have increased in western Europe. Most explanations of the adoption of restrictions on immigration have focused on ethnic competition for material resources and on national political factors. An alternative theory of political mobilization and restrictive policy changes argues that pressure from subnational politicians and social movement organizations and signals from dramatic anti-immigrant events such as riots lead national elites to infer that public interest in anti-immigration policies is intense enough to justify a break with liberal policies. This theory is tested against four cases in Britain and Germany, where the hypothesized processes are observed despite very different socioeconomic and political-institutional contexts

Household Costs and Resistance to Germany\u27s Energy Transition

Germany is an exemplary case of an energy transition from nuclear energy and fossil fuels toward renewables in the electricity sector, but it also demonstrates repeated, increasingly successful counter-mobilization by energy incumbents and their allies. The course for Germany\u27s energy transition was largely set with the adoption of a feed-in tariff law in 1990, but since then the energy transition has been altered by a series of policy-making episodes, each of which was shaped by the outcomes of the previous episodes; there has been a combination of reinforcing and reactive sequences. This article uses policy windows and advocacy coalition theory, supplemented by work on resistance to carbon pricing, to analyze the four periods in which opponents of the energy transition had the greatest opportunities to limit or reverse it. It makes three main arguments intended to influence future research on energy transitions: 1) episodes of opposition to the feed-in tariff policy occurred when problem awareness and political commitment converged; 2) the outcomes of those conflicts depended on the balance of mobilization by advocacy and opposing coalitions; and 3) rising household costs due to the renewable-energy surcharge drove both problem awareness and the composition of the opposing coalition, which helped lead to a more far-reaching retrenchment of renewable-energy policy in 2014 than in earlier periods