Documents Goerres, Achim 2 results

"What can donation strategies tell us about corporate political preferences, as seen from the perspective of power resource and varieties of capitalism theories? This article tests six hypotheses within an Olsonian framework for corporate donations to political parties with new data from the 100 largest German firms between 1984 and 2005. The findings reveal that only a minority of firms donate, and donation amounts are surprisingly small given the financial assets of these companies, which suggests the presence of a collective action dilemma with small selective and arguably larger collective benefits. Management ties between firms are an important way of making firms overcome the collective action dilemma. Firms distribute their donations if any – mainly on the right side of the political spectrum, particularly if the firms are personally interwoven with other large companies or if they are family owned. However, some firms, particularly those belonging to the automobile sector, donate across the political spectrum."

"This article is about the relative impact of age and income on individual attitudes towards welfare state policies in advanced industrial democracies; that is, the extent to which the intergenerational conflict supercedes or complements intragenerational conflicts. On the basis of a multivariate statistical analysis of the 1996 ISSP Role of Government Data Set for 14 OECD countries, we find considerable age-related differences in welfare state preferences. In particular for the case of education spending, but also for other policy areas, we see that one's position in the life cycle is a more important predictor of preferences than income. Second, some countries, such as the United States, show a higher salience of the age cleavage across all policy fields; that is, age is a more important line of political preference formation in these countries than in others. Third, country characteristics matter. Although the relative salience of age varies across policy areas, we see -within one policy area- a large variance across countries."