Originally published on this blog in German on August 29th, 2013.

Especially when elections are in the offing, the personalization of politics is a highly popular thesis. It is claimed:

• That more attention is paid to politicians than to the content of politics and the merits of parties
• That assessing the private and personal qualities of candidates for the chancellorship is more important than judging distinctly political qualities
• That these have been growing trends in recent years. Weiterlesen →

Originally published on this blog in German on October 2nd, 2013.

After more or less stagnating for 15 years, the proportion of women in the German Bundestag has for the first time reached the mark of 36.9%. That is an increase of a good 5%. The CDU and CSU parliamentary groups now have more woman members than ever before and women are markedly overrepresented in the Green and Left Party groups. This is quite unexpected. As we had shown in an earlier contribution, the parties had broken no new ground in nominating candidates for this last election to the Bundestag. Weiterlesen →

Originally published on this blog in German on Septmeber 19th, 2013.

Do women make politics differently from men? The answer lies somewhere between gender stereotypes and contradictory empirical findings. Do women automatically do better work in parliamentary assemblies than men simply because they are women? This seems rather unlikely. Is a low proportion of women in parliament a problem for democracy? This is surely the case, for it points to structural discrimination that cannot be eclipsed simply by having a woman head the federal government. After the Bundestag election in 2009, the proportion of women in the house was only 32.8%, a figure that had more or less stagnated since the 1998 election. The debate about quotas in top management in business could easily be transferred to the Bundestag and political parties. Weiterlesen →

Originally published on this blog in German on Septmeber 12th, 2013.

Political repression in the sense of systematic violation of civil and political rights is practically a defining property of autocracies. If autocratic governments want to stay in power they have to be in a position to repress dissidents and to eliminate opposition. Under these circumstances, political repression becomes a key tool. Whether the army of Myanmar savagely crushes the 1988 democracy movement or Alexander Lukashenko imprisons the presidential candidate of the opposition, the intention is the same: via political repression, autocratic regimes seek to prevent the development of forceful political opposition movements. But to what extent do autocracies actually resort to political repression? What developments are to be observed over time? And how does political repression affect the chances of democratization? These and closely related questions are addressed by the project “Critical Junctures and the Survival of Dictatorships. Explaining the Stability of Autocratic Regimes” at the WZB. Weiterlesen →

Originally published on this blog in German on November 12th, 2013.

After the fall of the Mubarak regime in February 2011 and the ensuing 18-month “transitional period,” during which Egypt was ruled by a military junta – the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) – the Egyptian army once again intervened in the political fortunes of the country on 2 July 2013. In a television address, the minister of defence and commander-in-chief of the armed forces General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced the dismissal of President Mohamed Morsi, democratically elected only a year earlier, and the suspension of the controversial new constitution. In December 2012, despite the withdrawal of left wing, liberal, and Christian representatives from the Islamist-dominated constitutional convention, this constitution had been accepted by referendum with a very low voter turnout. Instead of returning power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, General al-Sisi appointed the president of the Supreme Constitutional Court Adly Mansour interim president, instructing him to form a “technocratic government.” The army leadership wanted this government to remain in place for an indeterminate “transitional period” until early elections could be held. The measures were justified on the grounds that the president, who had emerged from the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, had been unwilling to engage in a “national dialogue” to end weeks of mass opposition protests against Morsi’s increasingly authoritarian style of government and the bad economic situation in the country. ((For an English translation of the television declaration by General al-Sisi of 3 July 2013 see: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/07/201373203740167797.html))

Weiterlesen →