Thomas König

University of Mannheim · Department of Political Science

Highlighting the strength of “partyism” in many democracies, recent scholarship pays keen attention to increasing hostility and distrust among citizens across party lines, known as affective polarization. By combining a conjoint analysis with decision-making games such as dictator and trust games, we design a novel survey experiment to systematical...

As European integration has become politicised over the last several decades, scholars have paid keen attention to the role of identity in shaping political conflicts and contestation in Europe. This article investigates the microfoundation of the political divide over European integration by building on and extending theories of social identity an...

While current research shows that the government dominates the policy agenda in parliamentary democracies, little is known about the role of the opposition in challenging this dominance. Taking a closer look at the parliamentary policymaking process, we examine whether opposition support to partisan control of committee chairmanship makes challenge...

Although democratic governance imposes temporal constraints, the timing of government policy making activities such as bill initiation is still poorly understood. This holds especially under coalition governments, in which government bills need to find approval by a partner party in parliament. We propose a dynamic temporal perspective in which min...

A fair peer-review process is essential for the integrity of a discipline’s scholarly standards. However, underrepresentation of scholarly groups casts doubt on fairness, which currently is raising concerns about a gender bias in the peer-review process of premier scholarly journals such as the American Political Science Review ( APSR ). This study...

Although minority coalition has become a relatively frequent form of governance, it is often considered politically ineffective in policymaking. To obtain sufficient support in parliament, government bills must go through the scrutiny activities initiated by coalition partners and overcome the concerns of external support parties in opposition. By...

We explain the referendums on British membership of the European Communities and European Union from a principal-agent perspective between the Prime Minister and the rank-and-file. We show that announcing a referendum on the Prime Minister's membership proposal helps the incumbent party to win the general election when the rank-and-file is divided...

American Political Science Review - Volume 53 Issue 3 - Thomas König, Kenneth Benoit, Thomas Bräuninger, Sabine Carey, Leigh Jenco, Benjamin Lauderdale, Ingo Rohlfing, Alyssa Taylor

In comparative studies, causal evaluations attempt to improve our understanding of the effectiveness of structural reforms by counterfactually inspecting post-treatment effects. Yet, even if comparative scholars find similar treatment and comparison units, the interpretation of the post-treatment trajectory is difficult as short-term estimates can...

In the face of the discourse about the democratic deficit and declining public support for the European Union (EU), institutionalist scholars have examined the roles of institutions in EU decision making and in particular the implications of the empowered European Parliament. Almost in isolation from this literature, prior research on public attitu...

What type of trade agreement is the public willing to accept? Instead of focusing on individual concerns about market access and trade barriers, we argue that specific treaty design and, in particular, the characteristics of the dispute settlement mechanism, play a critical role in shaping public support for trade agreements. To examine this theore...

Gender and Editorial Outcomes at the American Political Science Review - Thomas König, Guido Ropers

This article compares the formation of national preferences and interstate bargains for the two historical decisions on British membership, the accession of the UK to the European Communities and British exit from the European Union. While both resemble in their procedure to overcome intra-party division by announcing a referendum about the outcome...

American Political Science Review Editors’ Report 2016–17 - Volume 51 Issue 2 - Thomas Koenig, Kenneth Benoit, Thomas Bräuninger, Sabine Carey, Leigh Jenco, Benjamin Lauderdale, Ingo Rohlfing

This study compares the explanatory power of intergovernmentalism and national partyism for European integration in the post‐Maastricht era. Using data on the issue‐specific positions of all heads of state and government at the Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon conferences, I identify a common policy space with latent preferences and outcomes on two integ...

This study examines the implications of EU decision-making for national parties’ support for European integration. We argue, first, that EU decision-making promotes the support of parties that were closely located to EU outcomes. Second, we expect higher support of parties with governmental experience due to their access to key offices in EU decisi...

Comparative studies report the rise of left- and right-wing Eurosceptic parties that have transformed national party competition in Europe toward an inverted U-shaped configuration: peripheral parties at the left and right of the party spectrum oppose while centrist parties support several features of European integration. To describe the tempo and...

RILE estimates based on party manifesto data suggest that political parties leapfrog on the left-right scale over time. This implausible finding has raised questions about the efficacy not only of RILE for estimating left-right positions but of coded party manifestos for political science research in general. The recently developed Manifesto Common...

Models of coalition governance suggest that political parties pursue the interests of their electorate through the ministerial control of policy in their portfolios. Yet, little is known whether voters reward or punish coalition parties for policy performance in their portfolios. This study investigates voters’ evaluations of the policy priorities...

While some countries of the Eurozone were punished for their violations of the fiscal rules and others were not, we introduce a novel perspective on voters' preferences over fiscal solidity and European integration to understand both governments' compliance and enforcement of compliance by the European Commission. Because governments are spending f...

This article investigates under which conditions it is possible to overcome the inherent interest divergence among chancellors, ministers and experts. Following a model of Fang and Stone (2013), the existence of a reform-prone minister is a necessary condition for chancellors to trust experts' reform recommendations. Using data on the recommendatio...

The European sovereign debt crisis continues to hold Europe and the world captive. Will the euro and the fiscal mechanism of the eurozone survive? And how effective is the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP)? Do the euro countries generally fail to comply with the rules of fiscal governance, or does the eurozone need a more member-specific fiscal mecha...

According to the literature on parliamentary government, legislatures provide political parties with veto and amendment rights, which counterbalance executive power. This institutional feature is also said to help overcome ministerial “drift” within coalition governments. While this literature has focused on the situation of an unconstrained enviro...

How does legislative gridlock affect the type of legislative output? Do bureaucratic actors expand their activities when the legislature is unlikely to overrule them? This article investigates the impact of legislative gridlock on bureaucratic activities, combining data on all secondary and tertiary legislative acts of the European Union in the per...

This compliance study models correct and timely implementation of policies in a multilevel system as a strategic game between a central monitoring agency and multiple implementers and evaluates statistically the empirical implications of this model. We test whether compliance is determined by the anticipated enforcement decision of the monitoring a...

We examine the extent to which governments consider the role of bicameral conflict resolution procedures in legislative agenda-setting. We argue that governments may use these institutions to promote policy change in the event of bicameral conflict, especially when facing uncertainty over bicameral policy preferences. We test our arguments using co...

This article presents a new method for estimating positions of political parties across country- and time-specific contexts by introducing a latent variable model for manifesto data. We estimate latent positions and exploit bridge observations to make the scales comparable. We also incorporate expert survey data as prior information in the estimati...

We introduce a new model of coalition policy-making that explains why ministers may strategically refrain from initiating policy. Political parties disagree over policy, but such disagreement is dependent on their knowledge about the true state of the world. While ministers learn the true state from bureaucratic expertise, coalition partners can on...

Expertise plays an important role in legislative policy-making. Apart from reducing implementation uncertainty, this kind of information can stimulate politicians to change the status quo. In this paper, we examine the role of expert recommendations in the policy-making process. Rather than (just) perceiving expertise as information provision which...

Although member states are obliged to transpose directives into domestic law in a conformable manner and receive considerable time for their transposition activities, we identify three levels of transposition outcomes for EU directives: conformable, partially conformable and non-conformable. Compared with existing transposition models, which do not...

How do political parties with different policy-making interests and veto power respond to international terrorism—can coalition parties and bicameral legislatures overcome their policy-making tensions and form a unified front for adopting counterterrorist measures? This study examines German counterterrorist legislation before and after the attacks...

This article introduces a novel approach for generating agenda-related estimates of the policy positions of political parties from party manifestos and expert surveys. We show that current party estimates provide for little variation across policy areas and over time. In response, we propose to relate the issue-specific ideological preference profi...

Much of the Europeanization debate revolves around the impact of Brussels on the domestic legislatures of the member states, in particular the domination of their legislatures by the binding and enforceable activities of the EU. Because this impact is a direct result of the amount of legislative activities at the EU level, this chapter documents EU...

This chapter investigates the level of Europeanization of the German legislature and the consequences of Europeanization for the governmental–parliamentary relationship in the period from 1986 to 2005. Some authors fear an erosion of democratic control via Europeanization (i.e., Scharpf 1999; Zürn and Wolf 1999), and others quote the mythical numbe...

Since the beginning of the 1990s numerous theoretical and normative debates on European integration and the “democratic” distribution of power among the European Commission, the Council of Ministers, and the European Parliament have entertained scholars, politicians, and opinion leaders alike. The “democracy deficit” concept stems from the hypothes...

The aim of this book is the empirical evaluation of Brussels’ influence on domestic legislatures. The previous chapters have empirically determined the amount of legislative activities at the EU level, which potentially impact the activities in the domestic legislatures. Formally, we saw that the EU has deepened the relationships among the member s...

This study presents a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative research on compliance with EU directives. We identify and code 12 theoretical arguments tested in 37 published compliance studies and evaluate the robustness and representa- tiveness of their findings. Our synthesis reveals robust findings for the ‘goodness-of-fit’ and ‘institutional...

For decades the European Union tried changing its institutions, but achieved only unsatisfying political compromises and modest, incremental treaty revisions. In late 2009, however, the EU was successfully reformed through the Treaty of Lisbon.Reforming the European Unionexamines how political leaders ratified this treaty against all odds and shows...

This chapter describes the positions of a diverse set of actors relevant to the analysis of the multistage reform process, which began in autumn 2003 and resulted in the Treaty of Lisbon in autumn 2009. These include decision makers who actively shaped either the outcome or the decision-making process and the veto players who defined the set of fea...

This chapter examines the transformation of the Convention's proposal on the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe to the Lisbon Treaty in the aftermath of the two negative referendums from a principal-agent perspective. It shows that the common view of unitary member states, in which principals and agents share interests in the revision of...

This chapter focuses on political leaders' responses to the European Convention's proposal of revising the Treaty of Nice via the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe in spring 2003. To understand the announcements of popular votes by political leaders, it investigates their choice of ratification paths from a strategic perspective, which...

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and considers the implications of the Treaty of Lisbon both generally and specifically against the background of Europe's future policy agenda. It argues that under the rules of the Treaty of Lisbon, Europe is better prepared than it would be under the Treaty of Nice. The Lisbon reforms are likely to he...

For decades the European Union tried changing its institutions, but achieved only unsatisfying political compromises and modest, incremental treaty revisions. In late 2009, however, the EU was successfully reformed through the Treaty of Lisbon. This book examines how political leaders ratified this treaty against all odds and shows how this victory...

This chapter analyzes the last stage of the reform process: the role of the German Presidency in managing the reform crisis by proposing the Treaty of Lisbon and the subsequent reaction by the Irish government and voters. On 21 June 2007 the political leaders met in Brussels and agreed on a reform proposal replacing the Treaty Establishing a Consti...

This study presents a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative research on compliance with EU directives. We identify and code 12 theoretical arguments tested in 37 published compliance studies and evaluate the robustness and representativeness of their findings. Our synthesis reveals robust findings for the ‘goodness-of-fit’ and ‘institutional de...

For decades the European Union tried changing its institutions, but achieved only unsatisfying political compromises and modest, incremental treaty revisions. In late 2009, however, the EU was successfully reformed through the Treaty of Lisbon. Reforming the European Union examines how political leaders ratified this treaty against all odds and sho...

Description : "In ten years 80 per cent of the legislation related to economics, maybe also to taxes and social affairs, will be of Community origin." This declaration has been largely quoted, paraphrased and deformed by different authors, creating a persistent myth according to which 80 per cent of the legislative activity of the national legislat...

This study investigates the strategic interaction between management and supervisory board in the German Landesbanken during the financial crises. Compared to private banks, state banks of this type became famous for their extraordinary financial losses, but closer inspection reveals large variations in losses across those state banks. From a strat...

In the literature on Council conflict resolution, several studies observe a remarkable high capacity of the Council to find solutions which are almost consensually supported by the member states (see e.g. Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace 1995; Hayes-Renshaw et al. 2006; Heisenberg 2005; Lewis 2000; Naurin and Wallace 2008; Westlake 1995). According to the...

 This article sheds light on the relationship between politicians and scientific advisors in the second stage of reform of Germany's fiscal federalism. Based on the principal agent theory and a specific model presented by Bueno de Mesquita we derive two hypotheses. Concretely, we expect that policy change depends on both the homogeneity of the expe...

We recapitulate the main findings of the contributions of this book, which provides an evaluation of the current state of veto player theory for the analysis of reform making in modern democracies. The contributions of this book provide for further insights into three central aspects of veto player analysis in order to explain reforms in modern dem...

George Tsebelis’ veto players approach has become a prominent theory to analyze various research questions in political science. Studies that apply veto player theory deal with the impact of institutions and partisan preferences of legislative activity and policy outcomes. It is used to measure the degree of policy change and, thus, reform capacity...

Testing veto players theory in parliamentary systems requires researchers to have accurate estimates of policy preferences of political parties. In empirical studies, however, political scientists use remarkably context-free and invariant estimates of party positions. As a consequence, they must make assumptions about the nature of policy conflict....

Why do the member states with veto power usually support a policy change proposed by a Commission initiative when their own position is located closer to the status quo? Why do we frequently witness consensus in the Council and rarely observe a rejection of Commission initiatives even after additional veto players, such as new member states or the...

This article presents a new approach for estimating the policy positions of political actors in the German multi-party policy space. The approach consists of two steps, ‘smart tagging’ in the data generation process and Bayesian factor analysis in the estimation process. ‘Smart tagging’ relates the statements of political parties and governments to...

Many empirical studies are ambiguous about whether good formal institutions are conducive to subjective well-being or not. Possibly, this ambiguity is caused by cross-section models that do not account for unobserved cultural and institutional effects. Using the World Value Survey 1980-2005, this paper supports a positive relation in a country pane...

Inhalt: - Analyserahmen: Effizienz und Transparenz - Option 1: Forcierte Ratifikation - Option 2: Nachverhandlungen eines „Substanz-Vertrags“ - Schlussfolgerungen

In seinem Kommentar „Europäisierung hat viele Gesichter. Anmerkungen zur Widerlegung des Mythos einer 80-Prozent-Europäisierung“ geht Daniel Göler davon aus, dass sich die oben zitierte 80-Prozent-These nicht auf die Gesetzgebung, sondern allgemein auf die Europäisierung nationaler Regelungsrahmen und Policies beziehen würde. Dadurch „(…) kann sie...

EC directives must be transposed into the national legal order of the member states within a specified deadline. Although member states are obliged to notify their transposition measures, they often fail to comply with these deadlines. Distinguishing between domestic and EU-related factors, this study examines transposition failure and delay of EC...

This study empirically investigates the two options which were considered by the German presidency for finding a solution to the crisis of the EU's reform process. Our findings reveal that making concessions to the remaining eight ratification countries and renegotiating the text with all Member States were feasible solutions for reform.

This is the first study which provides a strategic view on the empowering of the EP by the member states. Compared to the consultation procedure, in which the Council adopts Commission proposals, the EP has become a co-legislator in the codecision procedure, in which it usually promotes an integrationist position favouring policy change. According...

Governance beyond the nation state is intensively discussed with regard to the degree of Europeanization of the member states. For some scholars, the Europeanization degree of German legislation has already reached a share of 80 percent. This article applies a quantitative perspective and investigates, whether and to what extent German legislation...

Legislative decision making creates a classical principal agent-problem in the EU. To achieve the compromise solution for the common goal of European integration, member states with diverging interests nominate and delegate important powers to Commissioners, thus raising the possibility that Commissioners attempt to pursue policies favored by their...

Why do member states so frequently support Commission proposals? Do all outcomes perfectly match their preferences, or do member states abstain from using their veto power due to a culture of consensus? And can we include omitted variables, such as the voting weights of the member states and the saliencies they attach to the issues at stake in orde...

EU legislative analysis has been enriched by insightful controversies over the interpretation of the policy process. This debate has concentrated on the interpretation of the process by focusing on the identification of the agenda setter and the relevance of voting weights, but little attention has been paid to the accurate specification of the sec...

This study evaluates discontinuity induced by the two-stage law-making process of EU directives, which is discussed in the jurisprudential literature as another source of democratic deficit. Directives must be transposed into national law, but lengthy deadlines raise normative questions about the extent to which governments of today can politically...

What drove the preferences over institutional choices of EU Constitutional Convention delegates in the area of foreign policy? We examine delegate preferences and find strong evidence that partisan identity rather than government positions drove delegates' preferences for both the role of the Commission and the voting rule in the Council. We also f...

The EU currently experiences a reform dilemma which is common to many international organizations composed of a large number of veto players who must adopt a change of the status quo. After the accession of ten countries in May 2004, the 25 governmental veto players adopted a modest reform text that proposes as many changes as it retains provisions...

  This article examines different views of the European Union (EU) legislative decision-making process through a quantitative analysis of all Commission proposals initiated between 1984 and 1999. Using the positions of Member States, the analysis is innovative in two respects: the identification of the relative importance of institutions and prefer...

This article is a study of bicameral conflict resolution between the Council and the European Parliament in the European Union, which has established a bicameral conciliation process under the co-decision procedure. Scholars commonly agree that the European Parliament has gained power under the co-decision procedure, but the impact of the conciliat...

This article investigates the conditions for the choice between parliamentary and executive transposition measures for the implementation of EC directives in the various contexts of EU member states. Applying a transaction cost-approach we ask whether this choice is influenced by either domestic or EU-related factors and examine several reasons whi...

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Eine der Hauptaufgaben der Politikwissenschaft ist die Beschreibung und Erklärung von politischen Entscheidungen, durch die in Gesellschaften die Verteilung von öffentlichen und privaten Gütern geregelt wird. Die Fokussierung auf politische Entscheidungen ist eine disziplinäre Gemeinsamkeit von Politikwissenschaftlern, ohne daraus einen disziplinär...

This article investigates the potential for decisive policy change after the 2005 German election. Using party manifestos, the analysis concentrates on the size of the winset of the Grand Coalition in legislation with and without mandatory Bundesrat consent. One of its innovative aspects is the systematic distinction between political parties as un...

Research on European legislative decision-making has entered a stage of quantitative analysis. The quantitative approach promises to advance the current dialogue by allowing for the evaluation of competing approaches across multiple policy domains and over time. At the same time, the quantitative study of EU decision-making introduces a number of d...

European legislation affects countless aspects of daily life in modern Europe but just how does the European Union make such significant legislative decisions? How important are the formal decision-making procedures in defining decision outcomes and how important is the bargaining that takes place among the actors involved? Using a combination of d...

In mid-1996, the Commission initiated a package of proposals on food products known as the ‘breakfast directives’, proposing regulations on honey, preserved milk, certain sugars, fruit juices and jams. Aiming to facilitate the free movement of these products in the internal market, the breakfast directives were typical examples of regular European...

European legislation affects countless aspects of daily life in modern Europe but just how does the European Union make such significant legislative decisions? How important are the formal decision-making procedures in defining decision outcomes and how important is the bargaining that takes place among the actors involved? Using a combination of d...

We present a new model of Council decision-making which attempts to reflect the political processes inside the Council more accurately. For the analysis of EU legislative decision-making we propose a two-stage exchange model assuming that actors know the outcome of the spatial model in which the Commission makes a proposal requiring the support of...

In spite of the recent failure of two referendums, the drafting of a constitution for the second biggest economic power in the world, the European Union (EU), remains a major event in the history of European integration. Whether the constitution or a revised version of it will come into force or not, several important questions emerge. How did an i...