The Merits and Perils of Intra-Party Democracy: Assessing the Effects of Party Reform in Germany, France and the United Kingdom

Over the past decades, European democracies have experienced diminishing trust in their political representative institutions leading to a decline in party membership as well as both reduced electoral turnout and overall political participation (Van Biezen et al., 2012). In response, many European parties began reforming themselves allowing for the direct participation of party members or even non-members in various intra-party arenas, such as leadership selections through primaries. Parties claim that such reforms increase intra-party democracy (IPD) by making internal organisation more inclusive and by providing all party members or even non-members with decision-making power perilously reserved to the party elites (Hazan and Rahat, 2010). However, the positive effect of increased IPD on membership is highly contested and surprisingly few relevant empirical and comparative studies exist. The central research question of this thesis is what are the (different) consequences of adopting different types of primary rules for party members? Hence, my aim is to examine whether the introduction of primaries is in fact as negative for party members as outlined by Katz and Mair (1994), Lefebvre (2011) or Hopkin (2001) or, alternatively, whether it represents a chance to revitalize parties as membership organizations (Macpherson, 1977; Ware, 1979; Bille, 2001). Primaries are defined as selection process for party leaders and candidates in which the final vote rests with either party members in closed primaries, or loosely defined group of party supporters or the wider electorate, open primaries. Thus, introducing a primary leads to a change in the level of intra-party democracy, as it shifts power from a more exclusive selectorate to either of the two selectorates outlined above. While this project focuses on primaries that select top-executive candidates, the theory and conceptual framework developed can be applied to primaries more broadly. The general argument put forward is that to capture the differentiated effects of party primaries we have to study the interplay between the rules determining who can vote (selectorate) and who can run (candidacy requirements) in primaries. This thesis answers its central research question by developing a conceptual framework that combines these two dimensions for party primaries that select the party leader in public office. First, it outlines the underlying logic of the conceptual framework that links the two dimensions and then provides a theoretical discussion of its consequences for party members looking specifically at the interaction between the two. To assess the consequences of different primary reforms, the thesis focuses on four dimensions of party membership: the party membership level, the turnout in primaries, the quality of membership and the attitude towards the leadership. This perspective highlights that different combinations of selection rules and candidacy requirements in primaries result in four distinct types of intra-party democracy from the perception of party members. In turn, these types lead party members to respond in a distinct fashion. Using a mixed-method case study approach, the second part of the thesis tests the theoretical framework for various Western European parties. The analysis will mainly use primary and secondary document analysis as well as new and existing survey data complemented by qualitative in-depth membership surveys. The main conclusion is that only some combinations of primary rules can lead to a positive effect for members while others do not. For example, closed primaries with open candidacy requirements will lead to more active participation of members, while open primaries with open candidacy requirements will reduce membership participation considerably.Strategic (Departmental) Ph.D. Studentship, College of Social Science and International Studies for the Department of Politics (2013-2016

Re-shoring : a real trend or a fad? : an analysis of the German Fashion Industry

In recent times academics claim the rise of the so-called re-shoring trend. According to them, re-shoring - the moving of manufacturing back to the country of its parent company - has been made possible due to the change of global economic indices such as wages, transportation costs or government trade policies. Especially the fashion industry, being a dynamic and ever-evolving industry seems a suitable candidate for this apparent trend. However, trying to detect this trend throughout the real fashion world, one has difficulties finding multiple successful re-shoring attempts. The object of the paper is to examine this disparity between theory and reality by highlighting the factors influencing manufacturing location decision through in-depth interviews with German fashion companies as exploratory case studies. A detailed literature review concerning re-shoring is followed by five interviews conducted with managers of German fashion companies. Those were in turn analyzed to determine to which extend the apparent trend has arrived in the real fashion industry or which other future developments can be detected. Despite some of the interviewees showing great interest in the re-shoring trend in theory, data analysis revealed that in practice none of them have participated in the trend mainly due to high costs and uncertain outcome concerns. Yet other strategies frequently used by companies to overcome the problems of decentralized supply-chains could be detected and a future rise of the re-shoring trend is not out ruled.Recentemente, académicos têm realçado o crescimento da tendência denominada de re-shoring. De acordo com a sua opinião, re-shoring, o retorno do processo de produção ao país de origem de uma empresa, tem sido possível devido à evolução de índices económicos globais tais como salários, custos de transporte ou políticas comerciais governamentais. Especialmente sendo a indústria da moda considerada dinâmica e em constante transformação, esta parece ser uma candidata apropriada face a esta tendência. No entanto, a tentativa de encontrar múltiplos casos de sucesso na aplicação do fenómeno re-shoring nesta indústria têm sido em vão. O objectivo deste estudo tem por base examinar a disparidade entre a teoria e a realidade, compreendendo os factores que influenciam a processo de escolha do local de produção. Para isso, foram elaboradas entrevistas com empresas de moda alemãs como casos de estudo exploratórios. Para isso, após uma revisão literária detalhada, cinco entrevistas foram realizadas com profissionais de empresas deste sector no sentido de apurar até que ponto esta aparente tendência veio para ficar na indústria da moda ou outros futuros desenvolvimentos que possam ser detectados. A análise destes dados revelou que apesar de alguns dos entrevistados demonstrarem grande interesse no conceito teórico de re-shoring, nenhum deles lidou directamente com este fenómeno devido a custos elevados e incerteza face aos potenciais resultados. Contudo, outras estratégias frequentemente utilizadas por estas empresas puderam ser identificadas de modo a ultrapassar os problemas de cadeias logísticas descentralizadas. Para além disto, uma futura ascensão da tendência re-shoring não está descartada

Judicial decision-making within political parties: A political approach

How do German intra-party tribunals manage internal conflicts? More specifically, why do they accept some cases for trial but reject others? Required by law to strictly adhere to implement rule of law standards, German intra-party tribunals are designed to insulate conflict regulation from politics. Meanwhile, research on judicial politics highlights the role of political and strategic considerations in accepting cases for trial. Building on the latter, we develop a theory that emphasizes tribunals’ political concerns such as winning elections. We test our hypotheses with a mixed-effects logit model on a novel data set covering 1088 tribunal decisions in six German parties from 1967 until 2015. Our findings indicate that political factors exert a strong effect on tribunal case acceptance. Tribunals are more likely to accept cases when suffering electoral loss and after losing government office. Moreover, tribunals dismiss cases more easily when their parties display relatively high levels of policy agreement

Vocal Culture in the Age of Laryngoscopy

For several months beginning in 1884, readers of Life, Science, Health, the Atlantic Monthly and similar magazines would have encountered half-page advertisements for a newly patented medical device called the ‘ammoniaphone’ (Figure 2.1). Invented and promoted by a Scottish doctor named Carter Moffat and endorsed by the soprano Adelina Patti, British Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Princess of Wales, the ammoniaphone promised a miraculous transformation in the voices of its users. It was recommended for ‘vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, parliamentary men, readers, reciters, lecturers, leaders of psalmody, schoolmasters, amateurs, church choirs, barristers, and all persons who have to use their voices professionally, or who desire to greatly improve their speaking or singing tones’. Some estimates indicated that Moffat sold upwards of 30,000 units, yet the ammoniaphone was a flash in the pan as far as such things go, fading from public view after 1886

Unsound Seeds

With this image of a curtain hiding and at the same time heightening some terrible secret, Max Kalbeck began his review of the first Viennese performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome. Theodor W. Adorno picked up the image of the curtain in the context of Strauss’s fabled skill at composing non-musical events, when he identified the opening flourish of Strauss’s Salome as the swooshing sound of the rising curtain. If this is so, the succès de scandale of the opera was achieved, in more than one sense, as soon as the curtain rose at Dresden’s Semperoper on 10 December 1905. Critics of the premiere noted that the opera set ‘boundless wildness and degeneration to music’; it brought ‘high decadence’ onto the operatic stage; a ‘composition of hysteria’, reflecting the ‘disease of our time’, Salome is ‘hardly music any more’.The outrage did not end there

Opera and Hypnosis: Victor Maurel’s Experiments with Verdi’s Otello

One day in his private home on the avenue Bugeaud, in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, the famous baritone Victor Maurel hosted a meeting which combined music with hypnotism of a young woman

Science, Technology and Love in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera

It is a tale told by countless operas: young love, thwarted by an old man’s financially motivated marriage plans, triumphs in the end thanks to a deception that tricks the old man into blessing the young lovers’ union. Always a doddering fool, the old man is often also an enthusiast for knowledge. Such is the case, for instance, in Carlo Goldoni’s comic opera libretto Il mondo della luna (1750), in which Buonafede’s interest in the moon opens him to an elaborate hoax that has him believe he and his daughters have left Earth for the lunar world; and also in the Singspiel Die Luftbälle, oder der Liebhaber à la Montgolfier (1788), wherein the apothecary Wurm trades Sophie, the ward he intended to marry himself, for a technological innovation that will make him a pioneering aeronaut

Operatic Fantasies in Early Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry

In his celebrated essay on insanity in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales (1816), French psychiatrist Étienne Esquirol marvelled at the earlier custom of allowing asylum inmates to attend theatrical productions at Charenton