There has been little comparative policy research hitherto on the substantial differences in law and order policies between Western industrialised countries. Instead, criminologists have filled this void and used concepts such as Esping-Andersen's worlds of welfare or Lijphart's patterns of democracy to interpret cross-country variation. However, the state of the art has two weaknesses: it almost exclusively relies on imprisonment data as dependent variable and it remains silent as to why welfare state regimes or types of democracy should be responsible for similarities in law and order policies. The present article tackles these shortcomings by (1) examining differences and commonalities in law and order policies in twenty Western industrialised countries and by (2) investigating whether the clustering of countries is associated with features of the welfare state or the political system. We find three distinct clusters and show that their formation is related to the characteristics of the political economy of the countries.

Why have some German Land constitutions been changed more frequently than others? This is the basic research question addressed in this article. In addition and maybe even more importantly, for the first time the article will apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to the study of comparative constitutional policy, and thus will investigate what conditions explain the changeableness of subnational constitutions. Overall, I will argue that subnational constitutional policy is not just a manifestation of Germany’s consensus democracy. On the contrary, it seems that a crucial element of majoritarian democracy – that is, a low number of effective parties – appears to be a core condition for the changeableness of constitutions. In addition, the findings suggest that any theory striving to explain the frequency and scope of constitutional amendments in a comparative perspective should include both institutional and party factors.

Democracies come in all shapes and sizes. Which configuration of political institutions produces the highest democratic quality is a notorious debate. The lineup of contenders includes ‘consensus’, ‘Westminster’, and ‘centripetal’ democracy. A trend in the evaluation of the relationship between empirical patterns of democracy and its quality is that the multidimensional nature of both concepts is increasingly taken into account. This article tests the assertion that certain centripetal configurations of proportionality in party systems and government, and unitarism in the remaining state structure, might outperform all other alternatives both in terms of inclusiveness and effectiveness. Analyzing 33 democracies, the results of interactive regression models only partially support this claim. Proportional–unitary democracies have the best track record in terms of representation, but there are little differences in participation, transparency, and government capability compared with other models.

In the debate about the relationship between institutions and overall economic performance, the dependent variable has received scant attention – in contrast to the independent variable(s). This paper tries to enhance the understanding of the link between institutions and performance by presenting and assessing a substantively grounded conceptualization and operationalization of overall economic performance based on economic growth, employment, and public debt. A fuzzy-set ideal-type analysis of performance of 19 OECD countries between 1975 and 2005 reveals substantial variation across countries and over time that cannot sufficiently be accounted for by two key institutional features: corporatism and consensus democracy. Corporatism and consensus democracy may account for policy formation and implementation, but hardly for economic performance.

The inauguration of Germany's grand coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) raises questions about the public policy performance of a coalition of ideological opposite. This paper turns attention to influence of coalition governments on the size of government in the German Laender from 1992 to 2005. We investigate whether grand coalitions at the sub-national level in Germany systematically affect government spending for education (including cultural affairs) and internal security. The article argues that the effects of grand coalitions on the size of the public sector are moderated by partisan politics but sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, government spending in the field of education is reduced when leftist parties are powerful in the Laender.

This article attempts to examine the relationship between the most important political institutions and direct democracy in 23 modern OECD democracies by expanding Lijphart’s concept of majoritarian and consensus democracy. The article updates Lijphart’s data collection for the most recent period (1997–2006); it responds to criticisms of Lijphart’s measurement of a number of variables and of case selection, and it integrates direct democracy as an additional variable. Based on factor analysis, the main finding is that there are not just two, but three dimensions of democracy in advanced democracies. The horizontal dimension comprises the disproportionality of the electoral system, the number of parties, the executive–legislative relationship, the interest groups, and the degree of central bank independence. In the vertical dimension of democracy, we find federalism, decentralization, bicameralism, the rigidity of constitutional provisions, and the strength of judicial review. The top-to-bottom dimension of democracy comprises the type of cabinet government and the strength of direct democracy. In contrast to earlier research, our empirical analysis furnishes the hypothesis that direct democracy is not a variable that is independent of all other political institutions. While active direct democracy goes hand-in-hand with broadly supported multi-party governments, purely representative constitutions frequently appear in conjunction with minimal winning cabinets.