In a new article recently published in Legislative Studies Quarterly, Philipp Mai and Georg Wenzelburger investigate how the socialization experiences of Members of Parliament (MPs) at lower levels of their party affect how they vote in parliament. Exploiting the full set of recorded votes in the German Bundestag between 1949 und 2017, the authors show that MPs who did not hold party offices at the local or regional level prior to their first election into parliament have a significantly higher probability to vote against the party line in legislative votes. In addition, this ‘Ochsentour’ effe ..read more

In a recently published book, edited by Reimut Zohlnhöfer and Fabian Engler (Heidelberg University), two new chapters of the public policy team at the TUK have appeared. In his chapter, Frank Bandau analyses the social policies adopted during the fourth Merkel government (2017-2021). His focus is on the determinants of three reforms during that time: 1) introduction of a basic pension, 2) a law on employment protection and safety at work and 3) temporary changes of the social security system during the Covid-19 crisis. He shows that the government of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats co ..read more

We warmly welcome Dr. Frank Bandau, who will be filling the professorship for Policy Analysis and Political Economy at the TU Kaiserslautern from this winter semester. Frank Bandau studied political science, economics and media studies in Braunschweig. He received his doctorate with a thesis on welfare state structures and party effects and has since been employed as a research assistant at the universities of Bamberg and Heidelberg. Between 2019 and 2022, he filled the professorship for political science, in particular international comparative policy analysis, at the Otto Friedrich Universit ..read more

Foto: Koziel Georg Wenzelburger left the TU Kaiserslautern in September to take up a newly created professorship in political science with a focus on Comparative European Politics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken. If you want to keep up to date with his research, please visit his institutional website and his personal website. We thank him for being an academic role model and an approachable group leader for us and wish him all the best for his new position! The public policy team at TUK ..read more

Great news: The paper “Migration policies in the German Länder”, published in 2021 in the “Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft” by Daniel Meyer, Jonas Philipp and Georg Wenzelburger, has been awarded the “Fritz Thyssen Preis” (runner-up). The award is given by an independent jury to the best three papers in social science in German language published in the last year. We are happy to have written the second best article, at least accoding to the jury… To read the paper, please click here Georg Wenzelburger ..read more

A new article by Katja Demler has just been published in Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen. In the article, the author investigates the political parties’ handling of COVID-19 in their manifestos for the German federal elections 2021. The Corona pandemic and its consequences, which had a significant impact on social, political, ecological, and economic life over the past two years, was also said to have a significant impact on the 2021 federal elections. Based on theoretical assumptions of saliency theory, issue ownership theory and issue framing, Demler examines the issue competition strategie ..read more

After the University of Kaiserslautern organized the Annual Conference of the European Real Estate Society (ERES) 2021, this year’s conference took place mid-June at the Bocconi School of Management, Milan. The ERES conference is the annual gathering of all academics and practicians doing research on real estate. The conference is highly interdisciplinary and brings together researchers with backgrounds ranging from Architecture to Appraisal and Valuation, Corporate Finance to Corporate Real Estate Management, and from Urban Planning to Policy Research. The keynote speech at the opening cerem ..read more

Dr. des. Beatriz Carbone joined the Chair for Policy Analysis and Political Economy as a research associate in April 2022. Her research interests are focused on right-wing populism, feminist political theory, Latin American politics, and postcolonial studies. We wish her a good start at TUK ..read more

This week, Dr. Peter Ulrich from BTU Cottbus presented his dissertation entitled ‘Participatory Governance in the Europe of Cross-Border Regions: Cooperation – Boundaries – Civil Society’ at our brown bag lecture series. Dr. Peter Ulrich has been staying in Kaiserslautern during a shared desk phase as part of the project Linking Borderlands for the last two weeks. During his stay, we have advanced our work on identifying key stakeholders and networks in the SaarLorLux+ and Brandenburg/Lebus border regions. Additionally, Peter got to know the region and connected with other project partners fro ..read more

A new article by Georg Wenzelburger and Carsten Jensen has just been published in Politische Vierteljahresschrift. In the article, the authors discuss blind spots of the blooming field of comparative public policy analysis and outline how a closer integration of policy process theories can lead to more fruitful research in the future. Wenzelburger and Jensen state that cross-country comparisons have been taking front stage in analyzing public policy whichheavily rely on quantitative data. The authors identify four key weaknesses of this research, namely the obsession with covari ..read more