Lukas Haffert

University of Geneva | UNIGE · Department of Political Science and International Relations

Western Europe is experiencing growing levels of political polarization between parties of the New Left and the Far Right. The authors argue that this antagonism reflects the emergence of a social cleavage between universalism and particularism. To understand cleavage formation in the midst of party system fragmentation and the proliferation of new...

Group-based identities are an important basis of political competition. Politicians consciously appeal to specific social groups, and these group-based appeals often improve the evaluation of parties and candidates. Studying place-based appeals, we advance the understanding of this strategy by distinguishing between dominant and subordinate social...

The 2021 German Federal Election saw an increasing variation in voting behavior between both age groups and geographic groups. This paper brings these developments together and argues that the urban-rural divide is much bigger among younger than among older voters. We combine data from the German Longitudinal Election Study with original survey dat...

The Covid pandemic confronted the Merkel IV government with unprecedented fiscal challenges. We argue that the government’s response to these challenges constitutes a break with established patterns of German fiscal policy orthodoxy in at least three areas. First, the government suspended the debt brake and gave up the ‘Schwarze Null’ without much...

This paper demonstrates a systematic geographic bias in the German mixed-member electoral system. This bias concerns the composition of the individual party groups, and, by extension, the composition of the parliament: The Bundestag is much more urban than it would be under equal geographic representation. The bias is caused by the distribution of...

Political responsiveness is highly unequal along class lines, which has triggered a lively debate about potential causes of this political inequality. What has remained largely unexplored in this debate are the structural economic conditions under which policymakers operate. In this contribution, we hypothesize that budgetary pressures affect both...

Contemporary political behavior is often affected by historical legacies, but the specific mechanisms through which these legacies are transmitted are difficult to pin down. This paper argues that historical political conflicts can affect political behavior over several generations when they trigger an enduring organizational mobilization. It studi...

Western Europe is experiencing growing levels of political polarization between parties of the New Left and the Far Right. In many countries, the socio-structural foundations of this divide (class, education, residence) are by now so clear that many interpret this divide as a fully mobilized new electoral cleavage. However, cleavage formation also...

The well‐known German aversion to inflation has attracted a lot of interest and is often attributed to a specific historical memory: Weimar. Yet we do not know much about why hyperinflation seems to overshadow the Great Depression in German collective economic memory. To answer this question, we study what exactly it is that Germans believe to reme...

What are the political effects of fiscal consolidations? Theoretical considerations suggest that consolidations should reduce the public’s support for their governments, but empirical studies have found surprisingly small effects on government support. However, most of these studies analyze electoral outcomes, which are separated from the consolida...

Contemporary political behavior is often affected by historical legacies, but the specific mechanisms through which these legacies are transmitted are difficult to pin down. This paper argues that historical political conflicts can affect political behavior over several generations when they trigger an enduring organizational mobilization. It studi...

Als Grund für das tiefe Misstrauen vieler Deutschen gegenüber dem derzeitigen Kurs der EZB wird oft auf die kollektive Erinnerung an die Hyperinflation der Weimarer Republik verwiesen. In unserem Policy Paper zeigen wir anhand neuer Umfragedaten, dass diese Erinnerung von einem großen Missverständnis geprägt ist. Viele Deutsche ziehen daher die fal...

This article challenges the focus on budget deficits that permeates the literature on the comparative political economy of fiscal policy. It analyzes countries running budget surpluses and asks why some preserved these surpluses while others did not. Whereas several OECD members recorded surpluses for just a few years, balanced budgets became the n...

This paper analyzes fiscal policy from a growth model perspective, with a particular focus on taxation. It argues that tax policies channel resources into specific sectors of the economy and thereby affect the distribution of market incomes. Tax policy can thus be a mid-range form of industrial policy which does not leave resource allocation entire...

Comparative political economists typically analyze taxation as a matter of distribution. This article, by contrast, develops an allocational explanation of tax policy choices: as taxes channel resources into some economic activities and restrain others, they become subject to the allocational concerns of different sectors of the economy. We argue t...

The literature on the comparative political economy of taxation often links consumption taxation to the welfare state. It argues that the expansion of consumption taxation paid for the expansion of welfare states and that bigger welfare states therefore tax consumption more heavily. We challenge this perspective by looking at the introduction of th...

This paper sheds new light on the massive increase of progressive taxation in the first half of the twentieth century. Existing studies have explained this increase with the mass mobilization during the World Wars and the call for a fair sharing of the burdens of these wars. My analysis suggests that this effect was not uniform across mobilizing co...

Berlin entwickelt sich zum Totem der Elitenkritik. Die Stadt repräsentiert nicht bloss die Dinge, die der Populismus verachtet, sie bringt sie tatsächlich hervor.

Als sich abzeichnete, dass Finanzminister Wolfgang Schäuble schon 2014 einen Haushalt ohne neue Schulden geschafft hatte, klopften sich die Politiker der großen Koalition enthusiastisch auf die Schultern: Von einem »Meilenstein« war die Rede, von einem »Quantensprung« und von einer »historischen Zäsur«. Im Land der schwäbischen Hausfrauen verkörper...

In the wake of the financial crisis, many developed countries have embarked upon ambitious fiscal consolidation programs. While the success of austerity programs is still unclear, it is also an open question what success would mean for activist government in the long run. This study rejects the progressive belief that successful fiscal consolidatio...