Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States

This book radically revises established knowledge in comparative welfare state studies and introduces a new perspective on how religion shaped modern social protection systems. The interplay of societal cleavage structures and electoral rules produced the different political class coalitions sustaining the three welfare regimes of the Western world. In countries with proportional electoral systems the absence or presence of state–church conflicts decided whether class remained the dominant source of coalition building or whether a political logic not exclusively based on socio-economic interests (e.g. religion) was introduced into politics, particularly social policy. The political class-coalitions in countries with majoritarian systems, on the other hand, allowed only for the residual-liberal welfare state to emerge, as in the US or the UK. This book also reconsiders the role of Protestantism. Reformed Protestantism substantially delayed and restricted modern social policy. The Lutheran state churches positively contributed to the introduction of social protection programs

The christian democratic phoenix and modern unsecular politics

Christian democracy is still posing theoretical problems of definition and empirical puzzles of classification and interpretation. Analyses based on secularization theory produce puzzles and anomalies and have little to offer as explanations for the variation in Christian democratic power mobilization. Empirically, this article focuses on Christian democracy in The Netherlands and offers an explanation of the party's decline in the 1990s and its remarkable recovery. From this, lessons are drawn for further theory-building on party and party system change, and on Christian democracy. It seems that modern Christian democratic politics is evolving as neither religious nor secular, but as a version of unsecular politics. Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications

REV7 counteracts DNA double-strand break resection and affects PARP inhibition

Error-free repair of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) is achieved by homologous recombination (HR), and BRCA1 is an important factor for this repair pathway. In the absence of BRCA1-mediated HR, the administration of PARP inhibitors induces synthetic lethality of tumour cells of patients with breast or ovarian cancers. Despite the benefit of this tailored therapy, drug resistance can occur by HR restoration. Genetic reversion of BRCA1-inactivating mutations can be the underlying mechanism of drug resistance, but this does not explain resistance in all cases. In particular, little is known about BRCA1-independent restoration of HR. Here we show that loss of REV7 (also known as MAD2L2) in mouse and human cell lines re-establishes CTIP-dependent end resection of DSBs in BRCA1-deficient cells, leading to HR restoration and PARP inhibitor resistance, which is reversed by ATM kinase inhibition. REV7 is recruited to DSBs in a manner dependent on the H2AX-MDC1-RNF8-RNF168-53BP1 chromatin pathway, and seems to block HR and promote end joining in addition to its regulatory role in DNA damage tolerance. Finally, we establish that REV7 blocks DSB resection to promote non-homologous end-joining during immunoglobulin class switch recombination. Our results reveal an unexpected crucial function of REV7 downstream of 53BP1 in coordinating pathological DSB repair pathway choices in BRCA1-deficient cells

Zur Messung von Staat-Kirche-Beziehungen. Eine vergleichende Analyse neuerer Indizes

Im Zuge der erhöhten Aufmerksamkeit, welche dem Faktor Religion in der Politik zuteil wird, ist das spannungsreiche Verhältnis von Staat und Kirche wieder vermehrt in den Blick geraten. Gleichwohl werden bisherige Forschungsbemühungen der quantitativ-vergleichenden Politikwissenschaft oftmals durch einen Mangel an geeigneten Messkonzepten gehemmt. Erst in allerjüngster Zeit sind verschiedene Vorschläge zur Messung von Staat-Kirche-Beziehungen hervorgebracht worden. Ziel des vorliegenden Beitrags ist es, diese neuen Messvorschläge vorzustellen und in einem kritischen Vergleich ihre jeweiligen methodischen Stärken und Schwächen herauszuarbeiten. Genauer gesprochen wird der Versuch unternommen, den von Munck und Verkuilen (Comparative Political Studies 35:5–24, 2002) im Rahmen der Demokratiemessung vorgeschlagenen und von Müller und Pickel (Politische Vierteljahresschrift 48:511–539, 2007) präzisierten Kriterienkatalog zur methodologischen Bewertung von Messkonzepten auf insgesamt fünf verschiedene Indizes zur Messung von Staat-Kirche-Verflechtungen anzuwenden. Konkret wird dabei anhand spezifischer Beurteilungskriterien untersucht, inwieweit die methodischen Herausforderungen der Konzeptualisierung, der Messung sowie der Aggregation bei der Konstruktion der betrachteten Indizes überzeugend bewältigt wurden. Neben der vergleichenden Analyse und Bewertung von neuen Messinstrumenten wird damit gleichzeitig die Brauchbarkeit dieses Evaluationsschemas, sowie seine Übertragbarkeit in alternative Anwendungskontexte erprobt