The contribution that coal miners made to the reconstruction of Europe is hard-wired into popular memory, with widespread tales of the selfless sacrifice that saw miners conduct extra shifts and work longer hours for the nation. This article compares three conflicts that arose when miners were ordered to go the extra mile: the campaign to have miners in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais basin (France) make up public holidays in early 1945, the extension of the Saturday shift in the coal mines of the Ostrava-Karviná basin (Czechoslovakia) in late 1946, and the calls on miners in the Ruhr basin (Germany) to conduct extra shifts to provide the population with coal for the winter of 1946/47. Where trade unionists invoked patriotic sentiments and, when that failed, ethnic resentments to motivate miners to go the extra mile, this article shows that generational conflict between old and young miners was the driving force behind these disputes.

Negative out-group attitudes are often attributed to perceptions of competition or threat. We propose an alternative source: culture, conceptualized as cultural scripts—interconnected networks of meanings that link particular group identities to negatively connoted phenomena. Evidence comes from three studies on the reactivation of the cultural script of traditional antisemitism in Germany. We begin our analysis by isolating the cultural script through automated analysis of a corpus of antisemitic texts. Next, using survey data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic (n = 17,800), we document an increase in antisemitism among Christian believers. This, we argue, is due to the pandemic activating the cultural script of traditional antisemitism, which links Judaism with the spread of disease. By means of an additional survey (n = 2,000) and a concept association task, we demonstrate the presence of the cultural script in the minds of Christian believers. Two priming experiments explore how elements of the script can be triggered. Our work demonstrates the deep cultural roots of negative out-group attitudes and suggests a novel set of methods for studying them.

This article examines the work of Emil Schlagintweit (1835–1904), one of Germany's most prominent nineteenth-century Tibetologists in order to challenge some common assumptions regarding Orientalist scholarship and its relationship to nineteenth-century nationalism and imperialism. Schlagintweit began to work on Tibetan religion and language in the wake of an expedition led by three of his brothers in the 1850s, and his work can provide important nuances to existing understandings of German Orientalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that German scholars did indeed emphasize rigorous analysis in line with the notion of Wissenschaftlichkeit, yet it also demonstrates that their work could go beyond this and rely on a wider array of methodologies and traditions. Interpretations which treat German Orientalists as fundamentally different from other European scholars should therefore be treated with caution. At the same time, the relationship between Orientalist knowledge and imperial realities remained ambivalent for scholars such as Schlagintweit.

In 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to allow over a million asylum seekers to cross the border into Germany. One key concern was that her decision would signal an open‐door policy to aspiring migrants worldwide – thus further increasing migration to Germany and making the country permanently more attractive to irregular and humanitarian migrants. This ‘pull‐effect’ hypothesis has been a mainstay of policy discussions ever since. With the continued global rise in forced displacement, not appearing welcoming to migrants has become a guiding principle for the asylum policy of many large receiving countries. In this article, we exploit the unique case study that Merkel's 2015 decision provides for answering the fundamental question of whether welcoming migration policies have sustained effects on migration towards destination countries. We analyze an extensive range of data on migration inflows, migration aspirations and online search interest between 2000 and 2020. The results reject the ‘pull effect’ hypothesis while reaffirming states’ capacity to adapt to changing contexts and regulate migration.

Recent research on executive–legislative relations in parliamentary democracies has shown that members of majority parties submit amendments to government bills to police the coalition compromise and to distinguish themselves from their coalition partners. It is poorly understood, however, what motivates members of the opposition to engage in the resource‐intensive work of proposing changes to government bills. Not only are amendment proposals by the opposition often unsuccessful (lack of policy motivation), they are largely invisible to the electorate (lack of vote motivation). We argue that amendments by the opposition are best understood as reflecting office motivations of legislators. Ambitious legislators draft amendments to signal skill and expertise to their party peers, which is rewarded with promotions to higher office. We confirm our argument with original data from a German state parliament. The findings further our understanding of legislative review, individual legislative efforts and career trajectories.

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 the level and the equality of political responsiveness. Using a dataset containing public opinion data on around 450 fiscal policy proposals in Germany between 1980 and 2016, we investigate whether policymakers are more responsive on issues with budgetary consequences under conditions of low fiscal pressure than under conditions of high fiscal pressure. We find that responsiveness indeed varies systematically with the degree of fiscal pressure and that policymakers are less responsive on fiscal issues when fiscal pressure is high. This holds for both left‐wing and right‐wing governments. In contrast, we do not find strong effects of fiscal pressure on political inequality: responsiveness is not more equal in fiscally more permissive times. However, since different types of policy proposals are adopted in times of high fiscal stress, unequal responsiveness has different policy implications in times of high and low fiscal pressure.

Political disagreement in interpersonal communication increases attitudinal ambivalence and can depress voter turnout. These effects seem to be driven by a wish to avoid social controversy rather than informational gains from encountering other opinions. This article shows that political disagreement in interpersonal communication increases the difficulty of deciding for which party to vote. Moreover, this effect is a result of social disapproval of one's party preference, while political expertise in interpersonal communication has no effect. For voter turnout, no direct effect of social disapproval of one's party preference is found. However, disapproval has an indirect influence on turnout via difficulty of vote choice. In sum, both political attitudes and political behaviour are affected by social pressures. Students of political attitudes and behaviour should try to include interpersonal discussion in their models in greater detail than is common practice today.

Individual legislators can be important agents of political representation. However, this is contingent upon their responsiveness to constituency requests. To study this topic, an increasing number of studies use field experiments in which the researcher sends a standardized email to legislators on behalf of a constituent. In this paper, we report the results of an original field experiment of this genre with the members of the German Bundestag. Supplementing previous research, we explore whether constituency requests in which voters mention a personal vote intention (rather than a partisan vote intention) increase legislators’ responsiveness, and how this treatment relates to electoral system's incentives. We find that legislators treated with a personal vote intention were more likely to respond (67 per cent) and respond faster than those treated with a partisan vote intention (59 per cent). However, we also show that the treatment effect is moderated by electoral system incentives: it is larger for nominally‐elected legislators than for those elected via a party list. Our results suggest that electoral system's incentives matter for legislators’ responsiveness only when constituents explicitly signals an intention to cast a personal vote.

Little is known about the careers of parliamentarians after they leave parliament. We analyse the post‐parliamentary careers of German and Dutch parliamentarians over the last 20 years and document the presence of a persistent and substantial gender gap. This gap exists regardless of party, country or political position and persists even when the status of the pre‐parliamentary profession and achievement within parliament are controlled for. Aside from demonstrating our findings, we offer new insights into possible explanations for the dynamics behind them. Additionally, we show that parliament only serves as a stepping stone for a more successful career for a relatively small share of politicians: only 32 per cent of MPs obtain more attractive positions in the public or private sector after their legislative service.

Scholarly interest in political secularism is currently growing. Political secularism is not the absence of religious belief, membership or practice, but the conviction that politics and religion should be kept separate and that religious arguments should have no standing in political debates. Little is known about the roots of this attitude, particularly outside the United States. This is unfortunate because politically secular attitudes strongly affect citizens' views on so‐called morality policies (e.g. the regulation of abortion, assisted suicide or experiments with stem cells) which are often highly controversial.

In this research note, I focus on the link between political secularism and basic human values. From Schwartz's own work and from the extant literature on religion, secularism and basic human values, I derive two hypotheses: self‐direction should be linked to higher levels, and tradition should be linked to lower levels of political secularism.

Multivariate analysis of current survey data from Germany, a prototypical ‘religious‐world country’, supports both hypotheses. Crucially, the relationships hold when controlling for three main facets of religion, for region (east vs west), and for socio‐demographics. The results show that net of their well‐documented association with religion, basic human values contribute to our understanding of political secularism. More generally, the findings demonstrate once more the impact of basic human values on all areas of political life.

While it is generally admitted that governments in most democracies make extensive use of public opinion research, we do not know much about the way they mobilize this resource. When and why do they want to learn about public opinion? What determines differences in the intensity of government polling over the electoral cycle? Are government opinion polls primarily a tool for testing the reception of government proposals or for learning more about issues that are important to citizens? And what does this tell us about the way political representation works? Understanding governments as actors in the production of public opinion, not just as passive consumers, our focus is on polls commissioned directly by governments. We argue that government polls can help us to better understand how contemporary political representation works since they can play an important role as ‘update instrument’ in anticipatory representation or as a decision‐making aid in promissory representation. By studying government polls as dependent variable, we develop an innovative research design and systematically analyse the factors that explain whether the intensity of government polling (the number of questions asked) varies across different stages of the electoral cycle and whether the issues they ask about correspond more to the government's priorities or those of the public. We present evidence from Germany, mobilizing an original database of all survey questions directly commissioned by the German government during the 18th and 19th legislative periods (2013–2021). Our findings help to better understand the factors that determine the intensity of government polling at different moments of the electoral cycle and to identify the different logic of representation behind this activity. The transition from the post‐election period to the routine period and from the routine period to the pre‐election period correspond to turning points in the German government's use of this instrument. While we could not observe any direct effects of the electoral cycle on the intensity of government polling, the interplay between the former and different types of policy issues proves to be insightful. The government commissions significantly more survey questions on government priorities during the first 3 months in office than during routine times and significantly more survey questions on salient issues as federal elections approach. Moreover, we show that governments commission fewer questions on issues they ‘own’, which points in the same direction as previous studies showing that governments are less interested in public opinion on these issues.

Can the diffusion of broadband internet help explain the recent success of populist parties in Europe? Populists cultivate an anti‐elitist communication style, which, they claim, directly connects them with ordinary people. The internet therefore appears to be the perfect tool for populist leaders. This study shows that this notion holds up to rigorous empirical testing. Drawing on survey data from Italy and Germany, a positive correlation is found between use of the internet as a source of political information and voting for populist parties. By instrumenting internet use with broadband coverage at the municipality level, the study then demonstrates that this relationship is causal. The findings suggest that part of the rise of populism can be attributed to the effect of online tools and communication strategies made possible by the proliferation of broadband access.

A well‐established body of research has highlighted the importance of geographic representation in party‐centred political systems. In party‐centred systems, geographic ties are commonly expressed through non‐binding legislative instruments such as parliamentary questions. While this literature has advanced our understanding of representation in parliamentary systems, there are notable gaps in the existing research. Most importantly, previous studies have almost exclusively analysed geographic representation in national politics, where legislators represent comparatively large electoral districts. In contrast, this study focuses on patterns of geographic representation at the local level to understand whether and how specific neighbourhoods are represented in local politics. By studying parliamentary questions in 12 German city councils, we assess party efforts to represent their electoral strongholds. Methodologically, we go beyond existing research on geographic representation by building comprehensive dictionaries to assess geographic representation based on geolocated data from Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. The results show that geographic representation is a common feature of local politics and that parties tend to focus on areas where they are electorally strong, particularly when they are incentivized to do so by the electoral system and when their electorate is highly localized.

Comparing educational experience, culture and academic practice within Europe can often be an interesting and rewarding exercise. The observations in this article are based on the author's experience of six and half years' teaching at two universities in Bavaria, the completion of a doctorate at the Free University Berlin, two degrees at the University of Edinburgh (one in history, the other in social sciences), and, most recently, two years' teaching in the Politics and Contemporary History Subject Group at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom. The aim is to reflect on the experience of teaching in two different European academic systems, with a view to making some comparisons as well as observations on the changes which have taken place in the UK higher education system over the last two decades.