Volume 9, Issue 1

This study examines why credit rating agencies offered optimistic assessments of some US states during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. Focusing on the creditworthiness of state governments, we argue that because states are procyclic spenders, growth in a state’s economy is actually harmful to that state’s ability to maintain its fiscal promises. As the federal government spends more heavily in a state, however, the procyclic tendencies of that state matter less to credit raters, and the negative effects of growth in a state’s economy diminish. We test our theory in two ways. We first model the Great Recession as an intervention, finding that states receiving less money from the federal government are more likely to experience increases in their credit scores following the crisis. We then test whether this pattern holds outside of the financial crisis for the years 1990–2006. We observe that increases in gross state product are negatively correlated with credit ratings when there are little to no changes in federal dollars flowing into a state.

We try to calculate the position of the six largest German political parties to each other in 2013 and 2017, based on data of Wahl-O-Mat, a German Voting Advice Application. Different to other existing approaches, we do not try to locate these parties in an Euclidean space, but rather on topological trees (with the straight line, the usual left-right model, being the simplest one). This approach has the advantage that – different to two- or higher dimensional spaces – our model allows betweenness information, keeping the parties linearly ordered at least at parts of the tree, with possible conclusions about center or periphery of the political landscape, and possible coalitions. We do not focus primarily on distance but after the topological model is found, we attempt to approximate these distances, in a second step.

Building on the spatial model of party competition, we investigate the structure of political conflict in German subnational politics. Little research has examined the conflict dimensionality at the Länder level. Moreover, the few studies which have done so predominantly rely on a deductive approach that pre-structures the conflict space using presumed conflict dimensions. In this paper, we put these dimensionality assumptions to the test with an inductive approach that capitalizes on parties’ preference expressions in vote advice applications. We circumvent the common concern that data from vote advice applications is too sparse for assessing political conflict structures by estimating a space that bridges multiple elections. Unlike previous research, we find that political conflict is defined by a comprehensive left-right dimension and a secondary dimension separating mainstream parties from fringe competitors. This anti-establishment dimension is characterized by diverging preferences over democratic institutions and policies considered consensual among the political mainstream.