Dragnet-controls and government ideology

Niklas Potrafke

No 288, ifo Working Paper Series from ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich

Abstract: In many European countries established leftwing and rightwing parties have been threatened by policy convergence and, in turn, new populist parties that offer more polarized platforms. I investigate whether government ideology influences dragnetcontrols – controls of persons conducted by the police without having any suspicion that the controlled person committed a crime. They took effect after the Schengen Agreement in 1995. I propose dragnet-controls to be a prime example of ideologyinduced policies implemented by established parties. Dragnet-controls confine citizens’ liberties, but may help to detect criminals. Using data from the 16 German states over the period 1995–2017, I show that rightwing governments have been active in implementing dragnet-controls and leftwing governments have denied dragnetcontrols since the mid 1990s. When evaluating how government/party ideology influences individual policies, previous econometric studies ignored initiatives in parliament. My study also considers initiatives in parliament. I conjecture that, since 2015, the rightwing CDU has used initiatives to introduce/extend dragnet-controls to also deal with the upcoming threat of rightwing populism. Future research should examine policy-differences between the established parties regarding more finegrained policy measures also in other European countries.

JEL-codes: D72 F22 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/wp-2019-288-potrafke-dragnet-controls-government.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Dragnet-Controls and Government Ideology (2020)
Journal Article: Dragnet-Controls and Government Ideology (2020)
Working Paper: Dragnet-Controls and Government Ideology (2019)
Working Paper: Dragnet-Controls and Government Ideology (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ifowps:_288

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