Portfolio Entrepreneurship in Family Firms: A Resource-based Perspective

The phenomenon of portfolio entrepreneurship has attracted considerable scholarly attention and is particularly relevant in the family fi rm context. However, there is a lack of knowledge of the process through which portfolio entrepreneurship develops in family firms. We address this gap by analyzing four in-depth, longitudinal family firm case studies from Europe and Latin America. Using a resource-based perspective, we identify six distinct resource categories that are relevant to the portfolio entrepreneurship process. Furthermore, we reveal that their importance varies across time. Our resulting resource-based process model of portfolio entrepreneurship in family firms makes valuable contributions to both theory and practice.

Handbook of Swiss Politics

Approaching Switzerland as a “laboratory” for democracy, this Handbook contributes to a refined understanding of the res publica. Over the years, the Handbook of Swiss Politics has established itself as a classic work. This new and extended second edition of the Handbook comprises 32 chapters, all by leading Swiss political scientists. The contributors write about fundamentals, institutions, interest groups, political parties, new social movements, the cantons and municipalities, elections, popular votes, policy processes and public policies. They address several important issues in the current international debates, such as the internationalization of domestic politics, multi-level governance, and the role of metropolitan agglomerations. Nine new chapters enrich this second, completely updated version. The section on public policies has been significantly extended, and covers a dozen of policy domains. Grounded on the latest scientific knowledge, this volume also serves as an indispensable reference for a non-academic audience of decision-makers, diplomats, senior officials and journalists.

How Welfare States Shape the Democratic Public: Policy Feedback, Participation, Voting and Attitudes

This crucial volume significantly advances the study of policy feedbacks. With contributions from many subfields and methodological approaches, it offers both sophisticated theorizing and new empirical examples that show how policies make politics in a variety of ways. Innovative research designs provide more convincing inference than ever. And the normative questions engaged about welfare performance, evaluation, participation, and accountability could not be more important or timely in this era of austerity and discord over the future of welfare states.’

Moral Politics: The Religious Factor in Referenda Voting

This article combines the research strands of moral politics and political behavior by focusing on the effect of individual and contextual religiosity on individual vote decisions in popular initiatives and public referenda concerning morally charged issues. We rely on a total of 13 surveys with 1,000 respondents each conducted after every referendum on moral policies in Switzerland between 1992 and 2012. Results based on cross-classified multilevel models show that religious behaving instead of nominal religious belonging plays a crucial role in decision making on moral issues. This supports the idea that the traditional confessional cleavage is replaced by a new religious cleavage that divides the religious from the secular. This newer cleavage is characterized by party alignments that extend from electoral to direct democratic voting behavior. Overall, our study lends support to previous findings drawn from American research on moral politics, direct democracies, and the public role of religion.

Electoral and Financial Bookkeeping: A Comparison of Pre-Electoral Pledges on Public Spending and the Outcome of Post-Electoral Budget Debates

In the wake of the financial crisis, budgetary discipline has taken centre stage in politics. More than ever a country's budget mirrors the true policy preferences of the legislative majority beyond all political discourse and cheap talk. The paper sheds light on mandate fulfilment in the field of public spending and fiscal policy in general. Based on previous work on pledge fulfilment in Switzerland the paper compares publicised pre-electoral statements of MPs on public spending and the development of the public finances with their post-electoral legislative behaviour during budget debates and votes. The findings of the paper confirm the results of the aforementioned earlier studies and point to the potential of budgetary statements for future mandate fulfilment research.