Political participation: national election study

"The chapter gives an overview of recent developments within participation and electoral research, and discusses the current state of affairs with regard to data provision and access. It concludes with several recommendations: (a) to tag a small number of key political variables as constant elements of the future question programmes of both the ALLBUS and the GSOEP, thereby creating substantial amounts of synergy at little marginal cost; (b) to establish a National Election Study in Germany by providing the current GLES project (which is funded by the DFG to study the 2009, 2013 and 2017 national elections) with a constant logistic and methodological support infrastructure by GESIS, and on the long run by providing a regular follow-up study to this project with a stable basis of reliable public funding and a firm institutional embedding, preferably by including it into the remit of GESIS; (c) to adapt the data services of the statistical offices in several respects more closely to the data requirements of participation and electoral research; (d) to establish a formal obligation for public agencies to submit survey data collected under their auspices in due time to the public domain for purposes of secondary analysis." (author's abstract

Mass communication, personal communication and vote choice: the filter hypothesis of media influence in comparative perspective

In den letzten Jahren sind sowohl die Massenmedien als auch die persönliche Kommunikation als Informationsquellen des politischen Wahlverhaltens verstärkt diskutiert worden. Über einen genaueren Zusammenhang liegen jedoch nur unvollständig empirische Untersuchungen vor. Von Katz und Lazarsfeld ist 1955 die 'Filter-Hypothese' über einen zweistufigen Kommunikationsfluß aufgestellt worden: Danach wirken die Massenmedien nicht unmittelbar auf die Einstellungen ihrer Rezipienten ein, sondern nur indirekt über 'Meinungsführer', die als Mittler zu und in informellen Gruppierungen auftreten. Das Arbeitspapier überprüft die Hypothese erneut an Hand von Wahlergebnissen aus Großbritannien, Spanien, den USA und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Die Daten bestätigen im wesentlichen die Hypothese, wenn die Eigenheiten der jeweiligen Parteiensysteme verstärkt berücksichtigt werden. (ICAÜbers)'In recent years, both mass communication and personal communication have attracted increased interest as sources of persuasive information which influences individual voting decisions. However, few efforts have so far been undertaken to investigate how mass communication and personal communication interact with regard to electoral decision-making. Katz/ Lazarsfeld's (1955) 'filter hypothesis' maintains that personal communication mediates the influence of mass communication an individual voters, reinforcing or blocking the impact of media information, depending an the evaluative implications of that information and an the political structure of voters' discussant networks. The paper examines this hypothesis, using comparable national election-survey data from Britain, Spain, the United States and West Germany. Based an detailled information about structures and political content of voters' discussant networks, about their media exposure, and about the content of the media used, the filter hypothesis is empirically corroborated. In addition, qualifications pertaining to the importance of differing formats of party systems are made.' (author's abstract)

Political Participation / National Election Study

The chapter gives an overview of recent developments within participation and electoral research, and discusses the current state of affairs with regard to data provision and access. It concludes with several recommendations: (a) to tag a small number of key political variables as constant elements of the future question programmes of both the ALLBUS and the GSOEP, thereby creating substantial amounts of synergy at little marginal cost; (b) to establish a National Election Study in Germany by providing the current GLES project (which is funded by the DFG to study the 2009, 2013 and 2017 national elections) with a constant logistic and methodological support infrastructure by GESIS, and on the long run by providing a regular follow-up study to this project with a stable basis of reliable public funding and a firm institutional embedding, preferably by including it into the remit of GESIS; (c) to adapt the data services of the statistical offices in several respects more closely to the data requirements of participation and electoral research; (d) to establish a formal obligation for public agencies to submit survey data collected under their auspices in due time to the public domain for purposes of secondary analysis.Political participation, political behaviour, elections, electoral behaviour, voting

« Archeaologia, storia e filologia a Susa », in : Maria Vittoria Fontana, Bruno Genito, eds., Studi in onore di Umberto Scerrato per il suo settantacinquesimo compleanno. Napoli, Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, 2003, pp. 681-700.

The A., who has initiated a large-scale project of setting up a critical corpus of the royal Achaemenid trilingual inscriptions, here deals with the question of what the various nouns used for palace buildings actually mean. By way of introduction, he complains about V. Scheil having put together the alleged « charte de fondation » DSf from scattered fragments of clay tablets found all over the excavation area during a period of several decades. The whole matter was seriously complicated by t..

Chomolangma, Demawend und Kasbek. Festschrift für Roland Bielmeier zu seinem 65. Geburtstag. Halle (Saale), International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, 2008, 2 vols., XXIII, 754 p. (Beiträge zur Zentralasienforschung, 12, 1-2).

To celebrate the 65th birthday of Roland Bielmeier, the known specialist of Tibetan, Iranian and Georgian linguistics at Berne University, a random selection of his friends and colleagues has been called together. What they have to offer to him on that occasion may be found in this two-volume collection with a triad of oronyms as its title. In the Demawend section of vol. II one can read among those concerning the Indo-European world in general a number of papers on Iranian topics: D. Durkin-..

« Avestan and Old Persian Morphology », in : Alan S. Kaye, ed., Morphologies of Asia and Africa. Vol. 2, Winona Lake, Eisenbrauns, 2007, p. 853-940.

In the introduction to this detailed overview the problem is discussed to what extent the Avestan (and Old Persian) texts are reliable for a linguistic analysis. The three main sections deal with (1) Avestan morpho(phono)logy in general (i.e., esp. vowel and consonant alternations), (2) the verbal system (stems, endings, non-finite forms), and (3) the nominal system (stems, endings, adjectives) together with the other parts of speech. This sketch is supplemented by 55 tables (p. 910-940). To ..

Der Satrap. Ein achaimenidischer Amtsträger und seine Handlungsspielräume. Frankfurt am Main, Verlag Antike, 2005, 578 p. (Oikumene. Studien zur antiken Weltgeschichte; 1).

The first volume in a new series of studies on world history in Antiquity, especially on the relations of the Mediterranean and the Near East, is about one of the central institutions of the administration of the Achaemenid Empire, viz. about the satrap. The satrapal system, being one of the Empire’s essential pillars, is known particularly through the (often biased) information given by Greek authors. The present account, however, is based not only on the Greek literary sources, but also on ..

Manfred Brust. Die indischen und iranischen Lehnwörter im Griechischen

The first edition of this book, published in 2005, provided, for the first time, a rather complete description of Iranian (and Indo-Aryan) loanwords in ancient Greek. These words were examined philologically and linguistically. Iranian and Indo-Aryan loanwords were dealt with together since most of the latter found their way into Greek through contacts with Iran. Some words attested only by later (Byzantine) lexicographers were missing, as were several others that lack a convincing (Iranian) ..