@misc{GanghofEppnerSteckeretal.2019,
  author    = {Ganghof, Steffen and Eppner, Sebastian and Stecker, Christian and Heeß, Katja and Schukraft, Stefan},
  title     = {Do minority cabinets govern more flexibly and inclusively?},
  series = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe},
  journal   = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe},
  number    = {114},
  issn      = {1867-5808},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-43417},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-434175},
  pages     = {541 -- 561},
  year      = {2019},
  abstract  = {A widespread view in political science is that minority cabinets govern more flexibly and inclusively, more in line with a median-oriented and 'consensual' vision of democracy. Yet there is only little empirical evidence for it. We study legislative coalition-building in the German state of North-Rhine-Westphalia, which was ruled by a minority government between 2010 and 2012. We compare the inclusiveness of legislative coalitions under minority and majority cabinets, based on 1028 laws passed in the 1985-2017 period, and analyze in detail the flexibility of legislative coalition formation under the minority government. Both quantitative analyses are complemented with brief case studies of specific legislation. We find, first, that the minority cabinet did not rule more inclusively. Second, the minority cabinet's legislative flexibility was fairly limited; to the extent that it existed, it follows a pattern that cannot be explained on the basis of the standard spatial model with policy-seeking parties.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{Ganghof2012,
  author    = {Ganghof, Steffen},
  title     = {Does public reason require super-majoritarian democracy?},
  series = {Politics, philosophy \& economics},
  volume    = {12},
  journal   = {Politics, philosophy \& economics},
  number    = {2},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-477860},
  pages     = {18},
  year      = {2012},
  abstract  = {The project of public-reason liberalism faces a basic problem: publicly justified principles are typically too abstract and vague to be directly applied to practical political disputes, whereas applicable specifications of these principles are not uniquely publicly justified. One solution could be a legislative procedure that selects one member from the eligible set of inconclusively justified proposals. Yet if liberal principles are too vague to select sufficiently specific legislative proposals, can they, nevertheless, select specific legislative procedures? Based on the work of Gerald Gaus, this article argues that the only candidate for a conclusively justified decision procedure is a majoritarian or otherwise 'neutral' democracy. If the justification of democracy requires an equality baseline in the design of political regimes and if justifications for departure from this baseline are subject to reasonable disagreement, a majoritarian design is justified by default. Gaus's own preference for super-majoritarian procedures is based on disputable specifications of justified liberal principles. These procedures can only be defended as a sectarian preference if the equality baseline is rejected, but then it is not clear how the set of justifiable political regimes can be restricted to full democracies.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{GieblerRuthTanneberg2018,
  author    = {Giebler, Heiko and Ruth, Saskia P. and Tanneberg, Dag},
  title     = {Why choice matters},
  series = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe},
  journal   = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe},
  number    = {104},
  issn      = {1867-5808},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-42789},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-427891},
  pages     = {10},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {Measures of democracy are in high demand. Scientific and public audiences use them to describe political realities and to substantiate causal claims about those realities. This introduction to the thematic issue reviews the history of democracy measurement since the 1950s. It identifies four development phases of the field, which are characterized by three recurrent topics of debate: (1) what is democracy, (2) what is a good measure of democracy, and (3) do our measurements of democracy register real-world developments? As the answers to those questions have been changing over time, the field of democracy measurement has adapted and reached higher levels of theoretical and methodological sophistication. In effect, the challenges facing contemporary social scientists are not only limited to the challenge of constructing a sound index of democracy. Today, they also need a profound understanding of the differences between various measures of democracy and their implications for empirical applications. The introduction outlines how the contributions to this thematic issue help scholars cope with the recurrent issues of conceptualization, measurement, and application, and concludes by identifying avenues for future research.},
  language  = {en}
}