Today most of the main political parties in Germany have some kind of mechanism designed to help increase the number of women in party structures and parliaments. In this article the author examines current levels of female representation in Germany’s political institutions, both at federal and Land level. She outlines each party’s policies regarding the advancement of women, examines their imp...

RATIONALE Public health policies are often dependent on political decision-making, but little is known of the impact of different forms of government on countries' health policies. In this exploratory study we studied the association between a wide range of process and outcome indicators of health policy and four groups of political factors (levels of democracy, e.g. voice and accountability; p...

Modern democracy is defined by the principle of political representation. Decisions are justified by pointing to the representative character of the actors and institutions involved in the policy-making process. Over a period of three centuries, beginning in the 18 century various models of modern representative systems developed differing in the locus of sovereignty, the authorisation of repre...

Research on work-family conflict has focused on individuals, and little is known as to how spouses perceive each other’s work-family conflict and how inaccuracies of such perceptions relate to relationship quality. Using a national sample of dual-earner married and cohabiting couples (N = 545), we found that over half of spouses overestimate or underestimate each other’s work-family conflict. H...

This paper is an exploratory analysis of the efficacy of parliamentary representation as a means to moderate ethnic conflict in new democracies. We agree with many others that the interests of an ethnic minority group are better protected when the group has access to decision makers, can block harmful government policies, and can veto potentially damaging decisions. Parliamentary representation...

The majority of the world’s countries have implemented policies designed to advance the political representation of women and/or minority groups. Yet we do not yet understand how these disparate policies affect the election of minority women. In this article, I draw on theories of intersectionality to conduct the first worldwide analysis of the effects of gender and minority quotas on minority ...

Despite the centrality of the median voter prediction in political economy models, overwhelming empirical evidence shows that legislators regularly take positions that diverge significantly from the preferences of the median voter in their districts. However, all these empirical studies to date lack the necessary data to directly measure the preferences of the median voter. We utilize a unique ...

It has been shown that states with higher per capita senate representation have higher federal spending per capita (Atlas, C. M., Gilligan, T. A., Hendershott, R. J. and Zupan, M. A. (1995). American Economic Review 85: 624–629). With a more recent data sample, more highly disaggregated data and a different set of political control variables, we are able to confirm the main result of Atlas et a...

Atlas et al. (1995) show that states with higher per capita senate representation have higher federal spending per capita. With a more recent data sample, more highly disaggregated data, and a different set of political control variables, we are able to confirm the main result of Atlas et al. that per capita senate representation is positively related to federal expenditure. This effect is stro...