Open Access

This dissertation addresses the longstanding and contentious question of whether and how government ideology influences labor market policy reforms in advanced democracies. While classical partisan theory suggests that leftist governments expand and rightist governments reduce welfare policies, empirical findings across decades of research remain inconclusive, often producing contradictory results. This study seeks to resolve these inconsistencies by applying a new analytical framework that takes into account both variation over time and differences between countries. Specifically, I extend Jahn’s Agenda Setting Power Model (ASPM) by adding a country-specific analytical layer, which enables the simultaneous estimation of unique partisan dynamics across 21 OECD countries between 1970 and 2016. The focus is on active and passive labor market policies, which represent functions of reintegration into employment and income compensation for job loss, respectively. I show that partisan effects depend heavily on national institutional settings and change significantly across different periods. The methodological innovation lies in estimating separate effects for each country within a single, integrated model. This approach avoids the oversimplification often found in conventional time series cross-sectional regressions that apply uniform effects across all countries and years. The results show that each of the three leading theories—classical partisanship, new politics, and reverse partisanship—receives empirical support, but only in specific national and temporal contexts. This dissertation contributes to the field of comparative welfare state research by offering a more detailed and evidence-based understanding of how government ideology interacts with institutional constraints and economic conditions to shape labor market policy. The findings point to the importance of using refined analytical strategies and stress the value of acknowledging both the timing and country-specific nature of political dynamics.

This article seeks to capture a facet of US – Baltic relations that for the most part has played out behind the public curtain. As such, the following chronicles key twists and turns, achievements and failures in American – Baltic intelligence relations. A substantial body of scholarship has already examined cultural, diplomatic, and security ties between these actors. The same cannot be said about intelligence bonds. This article attempts to redress this neglect in the literature. It argues that the Baltics, with their well-honed sense of Russian political affairs, have become valuable sources of intelligence for their key ally across the Atlantic.

This article sheds light on the obstacles that women face as members of the government by answering the questions: How does the sex of ministers shape the way MPs’ assess the quality of their work? And, how does this relationship differ depending on the political ideology of MPs? We argue that legislators assess the competencies of women ministers differently after the activation of gender stereotypes, but that the way they react depends on the ideological orientation of their party. We investigate this topic in a real-word context using a unique survey experiment with German and Austrian MPs. The evidence reveals that, while MPs belonging to right-wing parties perceive women in the executive as less competent than men ministers, their colleagues from left-wing parties actually assess them more favorably. These findings highlight the persistence of old myths about women’s lacking political skills and the emergence of new ones about women’s superior ability to govern.

Der interdisziplinäre Band postuliert eine Macht des Kontextes und erklärt, was darunter verstanden wird. Die Beiträge beleuchten und hinterfragen die Macht des Kontextes in dessen Relationen zu Sprache(n), Gesellschaft(en) und Medien. Dies geschieht teils aus philologischem, teils aus sozialwissenschaftlich-kommunikationswissenschaftlichem Blickwinkel und schließt jeweils mit Thesen zur Macht des Kontextes. Der Fokus in den Beiträgen lässt sich entlang der sozialwissenschaftlichen Ebenen (Mikroebene, Mesoebene, Makroebene) differenzieren. Mit Blick auf die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse eröffnet sich die Perspektive einer breit verstandenen Kontextlinguistik, und es werden Impulse und Anknüpfungspunkte für weitere Forschung in den Einzeldisziplinen sowie für disziplinenverbindende Forschung geboten.