Research on intra-coalition control shows that monitoring increases with the ideological distance between coalition partners. However, the focus of scholarship has been primarily on parliamentary regimes, not mixed regimes. In mixed regimes, intra-coalition control becomes more complex due to a dual executive. Parties must simultaneously monitor each other and the directly elected Head of Executive (HoE). This article examines intra-coalition control in mixed regimes by analyzing parliamentary questions from 21 German city councils. The German local level resembles a mixed regime. The executive consists of the coalition cabinet supported by the council majority and the directly elected mayor as the HoE. The results show that the division of governmental responsibilities affects intra-coalition control. When a coalition party is aligned with the HoE, the balance of power within the coalition is affected, and the other partners intensify controlling the aligned party. Additionally, policy divisiveness and issue salience are driving factors for intra-coalition control.

In 2021, the German and Namibian governments published a Joint Declaration as a result of their negotiations on reparations. Ovaherero and Nama representatives strongly criticized the violation of their participation rights during the negotiations and the reproduction of colonial racism. In 2023, a lawsuit was filed with the Namibian High Court. This litigation could become a milestone in the history of legal struggles for reparations for colonial crimes worldwide. In addition to the litigation, several United Nations Special Rapporteurs were contacted and published their joint communication in April 2023, essentially confirming the lack of effective participation and the obligation to grant reparations.

This Article gives an overview of the most important historical events during German colonial rule and the most significant efforts to legally come to terms with it since 2006. It analyzes the main legal issues in this context: Have the acts committed by German colonial troops violated the laws in force at the time? Is the current application of the doctrine of intertemporal law by the governments a reproduction of racism? Might it be a new act of racism? What challenges and limits do courts face when they attempt to retrospectively reconstruct legal systems and legal norms in force 100 years ago? Does the German state have a legal obligation to enter into negotiations over reparations? What participation rights do affected communities have in processes of legal reappraisal of colonialism?

In view of the growing demands for reparations worldwide, it is timely to deal with the underlying legal issues in an exemplary manner. The legal intervention of the German-Namibian reappraisal could set a precedent. The Article aims at establishing minimum legal standards for reparations processes for colonial crimes worldwide.

Informal care plays an important role in the provision of care. However, previous research has mainly focused on middle- or older-aged informal carers and less is known about informal care among young adults, its consequences on educational achievement and employment transitions and whether this varies across country contexts. Using data from the 2009–2018 waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (N = 25,856) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (N = 16,666), we investigated the influence of informal care responsibilities of 17–29 year olds on their chances of achieving a university degree using logistic regression and employment transitions using Cox proportional hazard regression models. Our results revealed that young adulthood caring was negatively associated with the likelihood of obtaining a university degree, reduced the likelihood of entering employment and increased the likelihood of unemployment. These associations were more pronounced if people reported caring for more weekly hours (especially in the UK) or caring for longer durations (especially in Germany). The potential negative influence of caring in young adulthood on education was stronger for women than for men in Germany, and the influence of caring on entering unemployment was stronger for women than for men in the UK.

This article illustrates preliminary results of the interdisciplinary research project ‘Science for society, society for science at the Site of National Remembrance in Łambinowice’. It presents the material traces of prisoner-of-war, resettlement and forced labour camps that functioned between 1870 and 1946 in Lamsdorf (now Łambinowice, Poland) and explains their modern social significance.

The notion of ‘place’ has become a central concern in research on the populist radical right (PRR), but scholars seem to have different things in mind when talking about how geography affects individual political attitudes. In our paper, we therefore aim to structure the debate on the impact of place and to understand exactly how place affects PRR attitudes (nativism, right-wing authoritarianism, and populism). Conceptually, we identify four potentially relevant aspects of ‘place’ that underpin much of the current literature: place-related attitudes (localism and resentment), place-specific living conditions, socio-demographic composition, and characteristics unique to a particular place, i.e., its local history and culture. We also discuss how these aspects are related and how they may interact. Empirically, we assess the relative importance of these four aspects of place for PRR sentiment in Germany, a country that is particularly well suited to this type of analysis. Using fine-grained geocoded survey data collected prior to the 2017 election, we find that (1) there is considerable spatial variation and clustering in PRR attitudes, (2) a place’s socio-demographic composition and (3) place resentment account for much of this, while (4) localism has weaker effects. We find (5) no relevant interaction between localism and place resentment, (6) no substantial evidence that mediation through place-related attitudes leads to an underestimation of the other aspects, and (7) no evidence for effects of the unique culture or history of the places we studied. Moreover, (8) location in the former GDR still has a substantial impact, whereas (9) other place-specific conditions (deprivation, demographic decline, migration, rurality) that could be addressed by policy interventions have no or rather weak effects. We conclude that PRR sentiment in ‘places that don’t matter’ results also, though by no means exclusively, from a lack of recognition.

Fragmentation in health systems leads to discontinuities in the provision of health services, reduces the effectiveness of interventions, and increases costs. In international comparisons, Germany is notably lagging in the context of healthcare (data) integration. Despite various political efforts spanning decades, intersectoral care and integrated health data remain controversial and are still in an embryonic phase in the country. Even more than 2 years after its launch, electronic health record (elektronische Patientenakte; ePA) users in Germany constitute only 1 per cent of the statutorily insured population, and ongoing political debates suggest that the path to broader coverage is fraught with complexities. By exploring the main stakeholders in the existing (fragmented) health system governance in Germany and their sectoral interests, this paper examines the implementation of ePA through the lens of corporatism, offering insights based on an institutional decision theory. The central point is that endeavours to better integrate health data for clinical care, scientific research and evidence-informed policymaking in Germany will need to address the roles of corporatism and self-governance.

This article examines the spectrum of suicidal behaviors in Germany at the outbreak of World War I. It argues that the recorded suicides of August 1914 highlight core vectors that eventually led to Imperial Germany's collapse in 1918: the mass shattering of socioemotional ties and moral certainties, engendered by political and military authorities’ decisions to prosecute the war, as well as those they undertook during the conflict. But the spectrum extended beyond these recorded suicides and ironically included the quintessential “war-enthusiastic” figure: the warvolunteer (Kreigsfreiwilliger), who willingly joined the military despite widespread public knowledge of the new war's massive lethality. The self-destructiveness of this volunteerism was then largely concealed by its emotionally resonant moral coding by both state and nonstate actors as “national sacrifice,” in line with the “spirit of 1914.” Right from the beginning, suicide was not the “flipside” of sacrifice, but its largely unspoken, implicit shadow: what sacrifice risked becoming in the absence of an adequate victory.

The Covid-19 pandemic placed responsibility on the European Union (EU) to effectively mitigate this common challenge. An important aspect of the common fight against the virus was the collective procurement of vaccines. The initially slow process of vaccine delivery may have caused overall frustration within societies and may also have had a profound effect on people’s assessment of their country’s EU membership. This paper examines this assumption via unique panel data collected in Germany in three waves between November 2020 and August 2021. We show that citizens evaluated their country’s EU membership negatively especially when the EU’s progress on vaccinations was in its early stages. In addition, public assessment was particularly negative when vaccination progress was compared to the situation in the United Kingdom (UK). Overall, our findings point to volatile levels of EU support depending on respondents’ perceptions of the success of the UK outside the EU.