Thomas Bräuninger Homepage

	Sachpolitik oder Parteipolitik? Eine Bestimmung des Parteidrucks im Bundesrat mittels bayesianischer Methoden, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 51/2 (2010): 223-249 (with Thomas Gschwend and Susumu Shikano) [URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/ s11615-010-0011-2] Abstract [Policy or Partisanship? Analyzing Party Pressure in the German Bundesrat Using Bayesian Methods]: The article analyses the roll call voting behavior of German Länder governments in the Bundesrat from 1990 to 2005. We seek to examine whether and if so, when and to what extend the German Bundesrat is dominated by federal party politics rather than a proper conflict of policy interest between states and state governments. We develop and apply a method to separate the effect of policy preferences and parties politics on the voting behavior of Länder governments. Replication, Replication! Replication files are available here (Data set, R and WinBugs code) and a preprint is available here.
	Legislative Agenda-Setting in Parliamentary Democracies, European Journal of Political Research 48/6 (2009): 804-839 (with Marc Debus) [URL: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1475-6765.2009.00850.x] Abstract: Various strands of literature in comparative politics regard governments as the only noteworthy initiators and mainsprings of legislative policy-making in parliamentary democracies. Opposition activity in policy-making is more often associated with the intention to prevent, rather than to shape, policy. Does this perception reflect real life politics? To answer this question, we discuss different arguments that link institutional and policy-related characteristics to the incentives and constraints of different government and parliamentary actors to initiate or co-sponsor legislative bills. More specifically, we relate policy-, office- and vote-related incentives, as well as institutional and resource constraints of legislative actors, to the likelihood that these actors will take the lead in legislative agenda-setting. We confront these arguments with original data on the universe of all legislative bills in four parliamentary systems over one and a half decades. We find that opposition and in particular bipartisan agenda-setting is indeed rare. Yet, in contrast to widely held maxims, it is neither absent nor spurious but related to the allocation of power and the intensity of ideological conflict both within and between the (coalition) government and parliament.
	Challenges for Estimating Policy Preferences: Announcing an Open Access Archive of Political Documents, German Politics 18/3 (2009): 441-454 (with Kenneth Benoit and Marc Debus) [URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644000903055856] Abstract: We provide a comparative perspective on the contributions of the special issue with regard to their applied methods and findings. In addition, we discuss problems that arise when using ‘wrong’ or at least ‘incorrect’ versions of election manifestos by presenting replications of estimated policy positions of German parties. We show that the latter can result in biased estimates that may affect the outcome of theoretical models. On the basis of those findings, we present the idea of the open access archive polidoc.net to build up a common database for political texts.
	Intra-Party Preference Heterogeneity and Faction Membership in the 15th German Bundestag: A Computational Text Analysis of Parliamentary Speeches, German Politics 18/3 (2009): 385-402 (with Julian Bernauer) [URL: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/09644000903055823] Abstract: In a broad range of research in comparative politics, political parties are conceptualised as unitary actors with consistent preferences. We depart from this sometimes accurate, at other times overly strong assumption by studying patterns of intra-party heterogeneity of preferences within parliamentary parties in the German Bundestag from 2002–05. For this purpose, we use the Wordscores method, a form of computational text analysis, to estimate policy positions of 453 individual legislators based on plenary speeches. We then study the link between intra-party faction membership and expressed policy positions. We find that there is a limited, but consistent effect of intra-party factionalism in the German Bundestag. According to random effects ANOVA, faction membership determines about 3 per cent of the variance of positions on economic policy in the present study.
	Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie. Band 5: Schwerpunkt Theorien der Verfassungsreform. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2009 (edited with Joachim Behnke and Susumu Shikano) Der vorliegende Band des Jahrbuchs für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie widmet sich schwerpunktmäßig dem Thema der Verfassungsreform. Vier Beiträge beschäftigen sich aus unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln mit der Frage, welche allgemeinen Erklärungsansätze den graduellen Wandel und die explizie Änderung konstitutionell verankerter Institutionen beleuchten können. Dabei werden neben der vergleichenden Analyse von Verfassungsänderungen in der Welt einzelne Reformen in Deutschland, der Schweiz und Frankreich behandelt. Außerhalb des Rahmens, den der Schwerpunkt setzt, beschäftigen sich weitere Beiträge mit der Entstehung von Präferenzen, der Rationalität von Selbstmordattentätern und der Handlungsmotivation von politischen Akteuren in Koalitions- und Gesetzgebungsprozessen.