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In East Germany, childlessness was below 10 percent before reunification, while West Germany witnessed a steady and substantial increase in the proportion of childless women, with proportions reaching over 20 percent. This paper describes these divergent developments based on micro-census data. We examine the social policy contexts that shaped women’s work and family patterns before reunification. Moreover, we discuss more recent trends and policy reforms, in particular the expansion of childcare and the parental leave benefit reform of 2007. Although family and employment patterns have become similar in eastern and western Germany, distinct behavioral patterns have prevailed. Even today, childlessness is more common in western than in eastern Germany. Furthermore, East German women regularly work full-time, while maternal full-time employment is only gradually increasing in the western parts of Germany.
The severe political and economic repercussions of the "euro crisis" during the last decade have revealed the necessity for an improved understanding of both the determinants of sovereign debt crises and the political economy of structural reforms. This dissertation, which consists of three self-contained papers, contributes to these research areas.
In the first paper, we investigate the interaction of fiscal federalism and sovereign default risk. Numerous countries with chronic external debt problems are characterized by inefficient federal fiscal structures. However, the impact of a country's federal design on sovereign default risk has barely been studied in previous work. This paper aims to address this gap. We develop a stylized model of a federation in which regions borrow individually from international lenders while the central government decides whether to default on aggregate sovereign debt. We show that decentralized borrowing leads to higher debt levels, at higher bond yields, an increased default probability and lower welfare compared to a benchmark scenario of centralized borrowing. Moreover, differing regional default costs further increase aggregate welfare losses through distorted regional borrowing incentives. Case studies of Argentina and the euro area illustrate the channels described in the model.
The second paper analyzes how domestic distributional incentives influence sovereign default on debt held by foreign creditors. In a simple political economy model, we show that external default can serve as a redistributive policy similar to distortionary income taxation. The channel we derive builds on recent evidence which suggests that the output costs of default are mainly incurred by high-income households, whereas relatively poor ones benefit due to smaller public spending cuts. Although the potentially important role of income heterogeneity among domestic agents has attracted comparatively little attention in previous work, historical evidence is in line with our argument.
In the third paper (with Johannes Brumm), we argue that an important determinant of voters' support for economic reform is the strength of family ties. While the "crisis hypothesis" predicts that crises facilitate reform, we show in a political economy model that this relation can break down, and even reverse, when agents take into account the effect of reform on their family members. Applied to southern European countries with strong family ties, the model rationalizes why the extremely high (youth) unemployment following the Great Recession has not led to more substantial labor market reforms. In such countries austerity might block rather than foster additional structural reforms.
This paper discusses the fundamental tensions between economic globalisation and democratic politics in the field of international trade. New bilateral and regional trade agreements increasingly incorporate other “trade-related” policy areas and threaten to constrain state action and democratic politics. The move towards deeper and more comprehensive trade deals has greatly accentuated grievances and is of exemplary importance in the realms of transnational governance. This article examines the decoupling of these agreements from national and democratic control and the resulting legitimacy impasses of transnational governance based upon the theoretical frameworks of Karl Polanyi and Dani Rodrik. Arguing that politics is not a mistake that gets in the way of markets, we submit our own conceptualisation of transnational legitimacy. In doing so, we suggest a new type of conflicts law which does not seek to overcome socio-economic and political diversity by some substantive transnational regime, but responds to diversity with procedural safeguards, thus ensuring space for co-operative problem-solving and the search for fair compromises.
Im Zentrum des Bandes stehen Austauschprozesse, Vermischungen sowie Konflikte zwischen verschiedenen Rechtskulturen. Dabei geht es um den Transfer von Rechtsordnungen, um lokale autonome Ordnungen in Bezug auf Ordnungen mit generellem Geltungsanspruch, um neue Formen der Hybridisierung in der wechselseitigen Rezeption von Rechtsgrundsätzen oder um die Herausbildung transnationaler Rechtsordnungen und die Frage, ob diese sich als Prozesse der Konstitutionalisierung, der Durchsetzung universaler Rechtsprinzipien oder des Managements von Pluralität deuten lassen.
European Studies used to be dominated by legal and political science approaches which hailed the progress of European integration and its reliance on law. The recent set of crises that struck the EU have highlighted fundamental problems in the ways and means by which European integration unfolds. The quasi-authoritarian emergency politics deployed in the euro crisis is a radical expression of the fading prevalence of democratic processes to accommodate economic and social diversity in the Union. As we argue in this paper, however, the mainstreams in both disciplines retain a largely affirmative and apologetic stance on the EU's post-democratic and extra-constitutional development. While political science contributions mostly content themselves with a revival of conventional integration theories and thus turn a blind eye to normatively critical aspects of European crisis governance, legal scholarship is in short supply of normatively convincing theoretical paradigms and thus aligns itself with the functionalist reasoning of the EU's Court of Justice. Yet, we also identify critical peripheries in both disciplines which intersect in their critical appraisal of the authoritarian tendencies that inhere in the crisis-ridden state of European integration. Their results curb the prevailing optimism and underline that the need for fundamental reorientations in both the theory and practice of European integration has become irrefutable.
Democracy is discussed in the comparative empirical literature as an important determinant of corruption. Several studies show that not only are democracies less corrupt than authoritarian regimes, but also that there is great variation in corruption levels across democratic regimes. This dissertation is concerned with examining the reasons behind this pattern. It begins by arguing that the study of democracy’s impact on corruption requires a stronger focus on the causal mechanisms linking these two phenomena. Based on a review of causal arguments raised in the literature, a discussion of different dimensions of accountability–electoral, social and horizontal–is introduced as a useful framework for this purpose.
This sets the ground for the two main empirical contributions of the dissertation. In both cases, the study relies on original corruption data collected from over 600 audit reports on municipalities randomly selected through a federal audit program implemented in Brazil. First, a panel data set with 130 municipalities that have faced multiple audits between 2003 and 2013 is used to examine whether those three dimensions of accountability exert a deterrent effect on corruption over time. Second, a cross-section of 383 municipalities is the basis for analyzing the factors explaining when accountability effectively occurs, focusing on conditioning factors of electoral accountability against corrupt politicians.(...)