Ludger Helms
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 408978 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Ludger Helms |
| NOMBRES | Ludger |
| APELLIDO | Helms |
| FIRMA | HELMS L |
| AFILIACIONES | Universität Innsbruck |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8634-9267 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 74 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 377 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 69 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1996 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
The Hapless Prince
Most earlier assessments of the Scholz chancellorship (2021–2025) have, implicitly or explicitly, focused on a comparison between Olaf Scholz and his long-term predecessor Angela Merkel. This article develops a wider perspective, which puts the Scholz chancellorship in the context of the Federal Republic's three previous Social Democratic chancellorships (Brandt, Schmidt, and Schröder). Such a comparative assessment casts a different light on Sch…
From Scholz to Merz
The performance of chief executives depends on the resources and skills incumbents bring to bear, and the contexts in which they operate. Regarding the latter, the legacies of former leaders mark an understudied factor that shapes the opportunity structures of their successors. This article provides an assessment of the evolution of the German chancellorship since the departure of long-term leader Angela Merkel (2005–21). Her two successors in th…
Managing the Legacy of Long-Term Leaders
Long-term leaders tend to cast long shadows that give their successors a hard time. This article puts forward an argument that assesses the nature of those challenges and the different ways of dealing with them, with a focus on incumbents' leadership styles. At its core, the article looks into the historical evolution of the German chancellorship, which has been marked by three extended incumbencies (Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel…
Making sense of comeback prime ministers
Comeback prime ministers (CBPMs), who return to office after a break, have been a notable, but conspicuously understudied, feature of several parliamentary democracies. This article provides the first ever comparative study of CBPMs. To make sense of the varying frequency of CBPMs in 18 established democracies from 1945 to 2024, we refer to competing party rationales of (re-)selecting prime ministers in different contexts, with the latter shaping…
Twenty‐First Century Autocrats and Their Followers
Leadership and followership have long been considered to be defining features of democratic politics. However, more recently, both conceptual redefinitions and real-world developments have put issues of leadership and followership in regimes from beyond the family of established liberal democracies center-stage. This article looks into the nature of authoritarian leadership and followership from a comparative perspective and in light of theories …
Prime ministers in waiting? Women leaders of the opposition in Westminster systems
This article focuses on this crucial element of Westminster democracy and applies a gender perspective, looking into women Leaders of the Opposition in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (1975–2022). As this inquiry reveals, there have been few and mostly short-lived women Leaders of the Opposition. Further, contrary to plausible assumptions, there have been more women Leaders of the Opposition from conservative than from left-wing partie…
Cabinet Reshuffles in Parliamentary Democracies
While previous research on cabinet reshuffles has offered valuable distinctions in terms of their timing, other defining features of reshuffles have largely escaped comparative inquiry. This article seeks to develop a more complete comparative assessment of cabinet reshuffles in parliamentary systems that reaches beyond the ‘classic’ samples of Westminster democracies. We seek to distinguish different ‘types’ of cabinet reshuffles that account fo…
The Comparative Politics of Cabinet Reshuffles
This special collection is devoted to cabinet reshuffles, which are understood as personnel-related changes within the lifetime of a cabinet. Scholars agree that cabinet reshuffles matter in many respects. To begin, they may shape intra-governmental relations, by either intensifying or helping solve cabinet conflicts. Further, they are important instruments for party leaders to promote or demote party representatives, with far-reaching possible c…
Political Oppositions in Democratic and Authoritarian Regimes
Political opposition has long been one of the most dramatically understudied elements of real-world politics in contemporary democratic and authoritarian regimes. The past decade or so has, however, witnessed an upsurge of new opposition research that begs for a major state-of-the-field review. Interestingly, recent scholarship has focused more on manifestations of opposition in authoritarian and hybrid than in democratic systems, which indicates…
Parliamentary Women Opposition Leaders
While women have increasingly gained access to the position of opposition leader, we still know very little about their pathways to that office. Therefore, this article seeks to uncover the dynamics and patterns that distinguish the ascendency of women politicians to the office of opposition leader from a comparative perspective. In this article, opposition leaders are understood as the parliamentary party group leaders of the largest non-governi…
Women Opposition Leaders
This thematic issue provides the first comprehensive overview of women opposition leaders and their performance. Setting the stage for a new research agenda, this editorial piece integrates theoretical and empirical insights at the intersection of three distinct research areas: political opposition, political leadership, and gender and politics. It discusses various notions of opposition leaders and identifies three main lines of inquiry: (a) car…
Why do Parties Select Non-Partisan Ministers? The Paradox of Ministerial Selection in Austria
This article seeks to contribute to the bourgeoning debate about technocratic, non-political and non-partisan ministers in party government regimes. At the centre of this study is the identification and analysis of a major paradox – a sizeable number and share of non-partisan ministers operating at the core of an otherwise exceptionally party-centered regime, the Second Austrian Republic, which has widely been considered to mark the epitome of th…
Pathways to the Chancellorship
Olaf Scholz emerged as the Federal Republic's ninth chancellor from a context marked by several "firsts," including in particular the absence of an incumbent chancellor seeking re-election and a competition between three chancellor candidates. While few, if any, individual elements of Scholz's profile were exceptional, the combination of elements was as unique as the wider political context. Echoing similar experiences from the Merkel years, the …
Introduction
At the level of regime typologies, the uncertain status and inherent weakness of the opposition mark defining features of regimes beyond liberal democracy. However, even the performance and evolution of the latter tend to be shaped by oppositions and the regime’s approach to dealing with them. This article offers a bird’s-eye view of political oppositions in contemporary electoral democracies and competitive autocracies. It focuses on patterns of…
The limits of institutionalizing predominance
This article offers an institutionalist assessment of the more recent chapters of political opposition in Erdoğan’s Turkey. There is good reason to suppose that the institutional features of a given regime can explain the performance of opposition parties to a significant extent. That said, the case of Turkey provides impressive evidence that there are striking limits to institutionalizing political predominance, to undermining political oppositi…
The Oxford Handbook of Political Executives
The existence of a political executive is a key feature of any political system: from eminently democratic regimes to totalitarian dictatorships, and every shade in between. In recent decades the long-term trend of putting constitutional and democratic constraints on the political executive is reversed. In addition to an autocratic turn in some countries, internationalization, securitization and a growing need for coordination shift the balance b…
Oxford Handbook of Political Executives
This handbook provides definitive reference work on political executives and their key role in political systems. It records the current theoretical and methodological debates and sets the agenda for future research in this prominent and extremely wide-ranging field of research.
Leadership succession in politics
Leadership succession marks a truly ubiquitous phenomenon with manifold and wide-ranging implications, which explains the major attention that issues of succession have received in the international literature. Most contributions to the field continue, however, to focus on political succession in either democratic or non-democratic regimes. This article develops an integrated perspective on key aspects of leadership succession at the level of pol…
Spitzenkandidaten beyond Westminster
Top candidates of political parties are increasingly identified as a preeminent factor in electoral campaigns and with regard to winning governmental office; yet they have always been important to a deeper understanding of party competition. This article looks into German and Austrian post-war chancellor candidates, that is, the parties’ lead candidates reaching out for the top job in the executive branch. The more particular focus is on the poli…
Heir Apparent Prime Ministers in Westminster Democracies
While the grand narratives of political leaders and leadership in parliamentary democracies tend to centre on victorious campaigners, prime ministers ‘inheriting’ the office from their predecessor between two parliamentary elections are a widespread occurrence in constitutional practice. Focusing on four Westminster democracies (Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), this article inquires how such heirs apparent have fared in terms of prime…
When less is more
From the perspective of resource-oriented approaches to political leadership, leaders are powerful and likely to be seen as eminent if they command a decent set of resources and are able to use these resources adroitly. Constraints are usually conceptualized as the exact opposite to resources and considered to shackle leaders, limit their capacity, and make them less eminent. This article launches two related criticisms of this widely held view: …
Merkel III
For most of her political career Angela Merkel has been perceived as a pragmatic political leader, avoiding tough and divisive decisions wherever possible, and joining decision-making coalitions on contested issues when they emerged. To some extent, this remarkable ability appears to explain her extended hold on the German chancellorship. In the midst of her third term, however, her behaviour changed suddenly and unexpectedly, or so it seemed. Wh…
Alpine Troubles
For all their differences, both Austria and Switzerland have long been considered to represent key examples of consociational democracy. Since the 1990s, both countries have however faced major challenges to their respective consociationalist regimes. One of the shared features of regime evolution and change in Austria and Switzerland, which can be meaningfully referred to as ‘de‐consociationalisation’, concerns the successful exploitation of ext…
The Importance of Consociationalism for Twenty‐First Century Politics and Political Science
Five decades after the term consociationalism made its debut in the comparative politics of divided societies, the huge body of international literature it has sparked continues to grow. In an era of populism and polarization, interest in the many facets of consociationalism is at an all‐time high. This introduction to the special issue of Half a Century of Consociationalism: Cases and Comparisons gives an impression of the contemporary state of …
Is there a ‘German school’ of comparative politics? An institutional perspective
Looking at scientific research in terms of ‘schools’ marks an established way of evaluating larger research areas. In this paper, we deliberately use a soft concept of ‘school’, designed to capture possible peculiarities of the discipline of Comparative Politics in Germany, and its impact at the international level of political research. The focus of our inquiry is on three major sub-areas of comparative political studies—comparative executive po…
Studying Parliamentary Opposition in Old and New Democracies
There can be no real democracy without opposition. In representative democracies, the parliamentary opposition holds a special place, if not always in empirical terms, certainly when looked at from a normative perspective. Its relevance has been eclipsed by more recent paradigmatic shifts in the field of comparative politics. However, a careful revisiting of the arguments put forward suggests that the notable neglect of 'opposition issues' is not…
Everyday Life in British Government
Everyday Life in British Government By R.A.W. Rhodes Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011, 368 pp., £25.00, ISBN 9780199601141 (hbk) Important books usually derive their importance from the fact t
Five Ways of Institutionalizing Political Opposition
Legitimate political opposition constitutes a key component of any form of liberal democracy, which has, however, received surprisingly scant attention in the more recent political science literature. In an attempt to revitalize the debate about the various forms of political opposition, this paper starts with distinguishing five different ways or models of institutionalizing political opposition in liberal democratic systems. It goes on to look …
Merkel III
For most of her political career Angela Merkel has been perceived as a pragmatic political leader, avoiding tough and divisive decisions wherever possible, and joining decision-making coalitions on contested issues when they emerged. To some extent, this remarkable ability appears to explain her extended hold on the German chancellorship. In the midst of her third term, however, her behaviour changed suddenly and unexpectedly, or so it seemed. Wh…
Democratic Political Leadership in the New Media Age
This article looks into the ambiguous effects that ‘mediatisation’ in its various forms has had, or may have, on the conditions for good democratic political leadership by prime ministers and presidents in established western democracies. For the purposes of this article, good democratic political leadership is defined in terms of three fundamental criteria: authenticity, effectiveness and responsibility. Whereas the ‘new media age’ offers politi…
The politics of leadership capital in compound democracies
This article offers a contextualization of the recently introduced leadership capital concept within the wider field of political leadership research, and a demonstration of its usefulness for studying leadership performances and patterns in different institutional and political contexts. At the centre of this piece, is an application of the leadership capital approach to studying the conditions and manifestations of executive leadership in the F…
Governing in the Media Age
The effects of old and new media on governing and executive leadership have remained curiously under-studied. In the available literature, assessments prevail that consider the media to have developed a strongly power-enhancing effect on incumbent chief executives. A careful reconsideration of mass media effects on the conditions and manifestations of political leadership by presidents and prime ministers in different contemporary democracies sug…
The Importance of Consociationalism for Twenty‐First Century Politics and Political Science
Five decades after the term consociationalism made its debut in the comparative politics of divided societies, the huge body of international literature it has sparked continues to grow. In an era of populism and polarization, interest in the many facets of consociationalism is at an all‐time high. This introduction to the special issue of Half a Century of Consociationalism: Cases and Comparisons gives an impression of the contemporary state of …
Introduction
At the level of regime typologies, the uncertain status and inherent weakness of the opposition mark defining features of regimes beyond liberal democracy. However, even the performance and evolution of the latter tend to be shaped by oppositions and the regime’s approach to dealing with them. This article offers a bird’s-eye view of political oppositions in contemporary electoral democracies and competitive autocracies. It focuses on patterns of…
Heir Apparent Prime Ministers in Westminster Democracies
While the grand narratives of political leaders and leadership in parliamentary democracies tend to centre on victorious campaigners, prime ministers ‘inheriting’ the office from their predecessor between two parliamentary elections are a widespread occurrence in constitutional practice. Focusing on four Westminster democracies (Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), this article inquires how such heirs apparent have fared in terms of prime…
When less is more
From the perspective of resource-oriented approaches to political leadership, leaders are powerful and likely to be seen as eminent if they command a decent set of resources and are able to use these resources adroitly. Constraints are usually conceptualized as the exact opposite to resources and considered to shackle leaders, limit their capacity, and make them less eminent. This article launches two related criticisms of this widely held view: …
Right‐wing populist parties in Austria and Switzerland
This article analyses the electoral support and parliamentary representation of right‐wing populist parties in Austria (FPO) and Switzerland (SD, AP/FPS, Lega dei Ticinesi). Contrary to the empirical evidence in many other fields of the political systems in these two Alpine republics, the analysis reveals strong differences rather than similiarities in the electoral support of right‐wing populist parties in both countries. This is explained by th…
Cabinet Reshuffles in Parliamentary Democracies
While previous research on cabinet reshuffles has offered valuable distinctions in terms of their timing, other defining features of reshuffles have largely escaped comparative inquiry. This article seeks to develop a more complete comparative assessment of cabinet reshuffles in parliamentary systems that reaches beyond the ‘classic’ samples of Westminster democracies. We seek to distinguish different ‘types’ of cabinet reshuffles that account fo…
Leadership succession in politics
Leadership succession marks a truly ubiquitous phenomenon with manifold and wide-ranging implications, which explains the major attention that issues of succession have received in the international literature. Most contributions to the field continue, however, to focus on political succession in either democratic or non-democratic regimes. This article develops an integrated perspective on key aspects of leadership succession at the level of pol…
Parliamentary Opposition and its Alternatives in a Transnational Regime
The contention that there is no such thing as parliamentary opposition at the European level belongs to the more established hypotheses concerning European governance, which have rarely and only more recently been challenged. This paper tries to demonstrate that it is possible to discern manifestations of parliamentary opposition, both at the national and the European level. That said, the overall status of parliamentary opposition within the Eur…
Global political leadership in the twenty-first century
While issues of political leadership have recently powerfully reclaimed ground in international political science, global political leadership has remained strikingly understudied. This article starts with a reconstruction of the diffusive leadership debate in international relations and eventually arrives at the fundamental distinction between structural leadership, relating to the material power capabilities of an actor, and behavioural leaders…
Why do Parties Select Non-Partisan Ministers? The Paradox of Ministerial Selection in Austria
This article seeks to contribute to the bourgeoning debate about technocratic, non-political and non-partisan ministers in party government regimes. At the centre of this study is the identification and analysis of a major paradox – a sizeable number and share of non-partisan ministers operating at the core of an otherwise exceptionally party-centered regime, the Second Austrian Republic, which has widely been considered to mark the epitome of th…
The Presidentialisation of Political Leadership
The Grand Coalition
While the Federal Republic has been famously characterized as a "grand coalition state," the Merkel government, formed in the after-math of the 2005 federal election, is only the second CDU/CSU-SPD coalition at the federal level since 1949. A comparison of the present administration with the first grand coalition government (1966-1969) reveals a wealth of differences that include some of the basic parameters of governing and governance in Germany…
Women Opposition Leaders
This thematic issue provides the first comprehensive overview of women opposition leaders and their performance. Setting the stage for a new research agenda, this editorial piece integrates theoretical and empirical insights at the intersection of three distinct research areas: political opposition, political leadership, and gender and politics. It discusses various notions of opposition leaders and identifies three main lines of inquiry: (a) car…
Democracy and innovation
Democracies are, by definition, marked by a strong normative commitment to innovation and change, and all democratic regimes must seek to generate innovations both to keep their fundamental promise and to secure their own survival. In response to the latent crisis of representative democracy, recent political research has devoted eager attention to innovating democratic institutions, yet with conspicuously little regard for the likely effects of …
Understanding Public Leadership
The federal election in Germany, September 2002
The Changing Chancellorship
Applying an analytical approach to studying the German chancellorship that focuses on the resources and constraints of individual chancellors, this article offers an assessment of the current state of the chancellorship. From a historical perspective at least five aspects may be highlighted as core features of the Schroder chancellorship: a (slightly) decreasing importance of 'coalition rounds' and 'coalition talks' as informal decision-making ar…
Is there Life after Kohl? The CDU Crisis and the Future of Party Democracy in Germany
There are few Chapters of the Federal Republic'S History that could be written without a prominent reference to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Since 1949 Christian Democratic chancellors have led German governments for no less than 37 years. Even when in opposition, the Christian Democrats - composed at the national level of the CDU and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU)1 - constituted more often than not the strongest parliamentary…
Executive leadership in parliamentary democracies
This article analyses and compares the most important features of the British prime ministership and the German chancellorship since 1945/49. Beginning with a comparison of the constitutional provisions relating to the chancellor and the prime minister, it then examines the way in which incumbents came to and departed from office, their means of parliamentary control, their role within the government‐building process and finally their resources a…
Wettbewerb und Kooperation
Bei der vorliegenden Arbeit handelt es sich um eine leicht gekürzte Fassung meiner Dissertation, die im Wintersemester 1996/97 von der Philosophisch Historischen Fakultät der Ruprecht-Karls-Universitä
Wettbewerb und Kooperation
Right‐wing populist parties in Austria and Switzerland
This article analyses the electoral support and parliamentary representation of right‐wing populist parties in Austria (FPO) and Switzerland (SD, AP/FPS, Lega dei Ticinesi). Contrary to the empirical evidence in many other fields of the political systems in these two Alpine republics, the analysis reveals strong differences rather than similiarities in the electoral support of right‐wing populist parties in both countries. This is explained by th…
Perspectives on Government and Opposition in Unified Germany
This paper is dedicated to the analysis of the configuration of government/opposition relations in unified Germany. It seeks to assess the impact of institutional, political as well as more situational factors on the relationship between the two key actors of the parliamentary arena. In the concluding section, the performance of government and opposition during the 1990s will additionally be judged against the background of the basic normative co…
Keeping Weimar at Bay
Learning from the Weimar experience, the founding fathers of theFederal Republic eliminated the chance of a renewed institutionalizedconflict between the head of state and the federal governmentthrough the creation of the Basic Law [Grundgesetz ]. They primarilystrengthened the power of the chancellor and his cabinet by introducingthe "constructive" vote of no confidence and abolishing theprinciple of individual ministerial responsibility, while …
Parteien und Fraktionen
Parteien und Fraktionen
Turning indifference into a minor landslide
Parliamentary party groups and their parties
This article presents a comparative study of the interrelationship between parliamentary party groups and their extra‐parliamentary party organisations in liberal democracies. Starting with a historical overview of the most important party changes that have taken place since the 1960s, a typology of parliamentary party/party organisation relations is suggested. The following variables are identified as being of particular importance in shaping th…
Is there Life after Kohl? The CDU Crisis and the Future of Party Democracy in Germany
There are few Chapters of the Federal Republic'S History that could be written without a prominent reference to the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Since 1949 Christian Democratic chancellors have led German governments for no less than 37 years. Even when in opposition, the Christian Democrats - composed at the national level of the CDU and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU)1 - constituted more often than not the strongest parliamentary…
The Changing Chancellorship
Applying an analytical approach to studying the German chancellorship that focuses on the resources and constraints of individual chancellors, this article offers an assessment of the current state of the chancellorship. From a historical perspective at least five aspects may be highlighted as core features of the Schroder chancellorship: a (slightly) decreasing importance of 'coalition rounds' and 'coalition talks' as informal decision-making ar…
Politische Opposition
Historische Herausbildung einer institutionalisierten politischen Opposition - Theoretisch-analytische Kategorien der Oppositionsforschung - Oppositionsprofile in westlichen Demokratien - Grossbritannien - Deutschland - USA - Frankreich - Schweiz
Chief Executives' and their Parties
Based on a combination of two analytical perspectives on the relationship between chief executives and their parties, this article offers a historical assessment of chancellor/party relations in Germany since 1949. The case study provides only modest support for the popular assumption that the leaders of left-wing governments are generally more constrained by their parties than their 'bourgeois' counterparts. There is also little evidence support…
Demokratien des 21. Jahrhunderts im Vergleich
Demokratiequalitat in Osterreich. Zustand und Entwicklungsperspektiven
In den letzten Jahren sind Fragen zu Demokratie und Demokratiequalität in Österreich wesentliche Themen der innenpolitischen sowie politikwissenschaftlichen Diskussion geworden. Das Buch analysiert einige ausgewählte Politikbereiche bezüglich ihrer Demokratiequalität: politischen Wechsel und Wettbewerb, Parlamentarismus, politische Partizipation, Auswirkungen des EU-Beitritts, Geschlechterdemokratie und politische Erwachsenenbildung. Es werden je…
Germany
Historically, executive–legislative relations used to mark one of the least understood and most problematic areas of democratic politics in Germany. However, as in many other fields, the post-war period has seen the transformation of Germany's rather unimpressive historical legacy in the field of executive leadership and legislative politics into a respected model of democratic parliamentary government. Whereas the existing institutional paramete…
Five Ways of Institutionalizing Political Opposition
Legitimate political opposition constitutes a key component of any form of liberal democracy, which has, however, received surprisingly scant attention in the more recent political science literature. In an attempt to revitalize the debate about the various forms of political opposition, this paper starts with distinguishing five different ways or models of institutionalizing political opposition in liberal democratic systems. It goes on to look …
The federal election in Germany, September 2002
Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors
How have the American presidency, the British premiership and the German chancellorship changed over the last half-century? Has there been convergence or divergence in the development of political lea
The Presidentialisation of Political Leadership
The Changing Parameters of Political Control in Western Europe1
Journal Article The Changing Parameters of Political Control in Western Europe Get access Ludger Helms Ludger Helms Heisenberg Fellow and Visiting Professor in the Department of Politics, University of Göttingen Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 59, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 78–97, https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsj011 Published: 04 November 2005
The Grand Coalition
While the Federal Republic has been famously characterized as a "grand coalition state," the Merkel government, formed in the after-math of the 2005 federal election, is only the second CDU/CSU-SPD coalition at the federal level since 1949. A comparison of the present administration with the first grand coalition government (1966-1969) reveals a wealth of differences that include some of the basic parameters of governing and governance in Germany…
Wie verändert die Internationalisierung von Politik, Gesellschaft und Ökonomie die liberale Demokratie in Europa? Eine Problemskizze
ZPol Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft , Seite 1119 - 1139
The German federal election, September 2005
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