Die politisierte Sozialstruktur als mittelfristig stabile Basis einer deutschen Normalwahl

A normal vote is a hypothetical election result following exclusively from predispositions of voters towards political parties which result from long-term or middle-term influences. The influence of short-term factors like attractive candidates or issues from the recent campaign have to be eliminated within the abstract model. As an operationalization for German Bundestag elections for this purpose the average vote intentions of population groups are used which are part of the politicized German social structures such as catholics, especially when they attend church frequently, or employees (Arbeitnehmer) and union members who have formed enduring coalitions with a political party. This operationalization is compared with a model originally developed for the United States. According to this model, the long-term factor is measured by party identification. All Bundestag elections of the Kohl era are analyzed, for which the Politbarometer surveys of the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, Mannheim, immediately before the Bundestag elections are used as a data basis. The vote intentions which can be derived from the politicized social structure are shown to be a stabile basis for a German normal vote so that it makes sense to compute normal vote results from 1983 to 1998.     

Editorial

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Diagnosis and therapy of male gamblers in a university psychiatric hospital

From 1980 to mid-1990 fifty-one gamblers were evaluated and treated at the psychiatric university hospital of Homburg/Saar in Germany. All were men with a mean age of 33.7 years. Gambling had lasted 5.2 years on average. Most patients were motivated to undergo therapy by members of their family. The majority of them had been in psychotherapeutic treatment before. Thirty-six of the 51 patients had committed punishable acts including fraud and embezzlement and, in 7 cases, robbery. The sample could be divided into three clinical subgroups. The first group consisted of patients with severe psychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia, manic-depressive illness or organic brain disorder. Patients of the second group suffered from serious personality disorders. Those of the third group showed deep-rooted problems in their current relationships.This article is an extension of the special issue on Gambling in Europe edited by Iver Hand, M.D.     

Public pensions in transition

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze problems of financing an old-age insurance when birth rates are low and population declines or fertility fluctuates with time. A government then searches for optimal policies to cope with such problems. A first criterion could be seen in the Pareto principle. But we all know that there is no way out of PAYG unless at least one generation has to pay for the transition. Therefore an optimal policy is concerned with intergenerational redistribution and optimal growth.In the absence of public pensions the economy will in the long run converge to a steady state which is not optimal in the sense of a golden rule. This dynamic in-efficiency results from the decentralized decision making by the consumers and the firms. If the PAYG system influences the savings ratio of the economy, public pensions can be seen as an instrument to implement a modified golden rule.Paper presented at the ISPE-conference on The Fiscal Implications of an Ageing Population, Vaalsbroek, The Netherlands, May 30–June 1, 1990. I am obliged to Dieter Bös, Friedrich Breyer, Christian Keuschnigg, Wolfgang Kitterer, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Financial support through Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, SFB 303 is gratefully acknowledged.     

New High-Speed Computing Devices

“One method of error analysis (not the one we will use) is based upon the principles of mathematical statistics. Unfortunately, statistical methods can only be meaningfully applied when one has large amounts of data for a given system. In many cases … these large quantities of data are not available … then statistical methods are not applicable, and some other methods must be devised.”