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Changes in opening hours for on-premise drinking places may influence the level of alcohol-related violence in two ways. The increased availability of alcohol increases the risks associated with it, while restrictive opening hours may produce more occasions for crime due to overcrowding at closing time. We use a quasi-experimental design with data from 13 Bavarian towns with and without restrictive opening hours and a negative binomial panel model. The outcome measure is violent incidents reported by the police between 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. over the period of 12 years. Incidents at night disproportionally increase over the study period in the sample. After controlling for daily violence as well as for an interaction between policy regime and violence level, we find that restricted opening hours are only beneficial within settings of a low daily violence level.

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While party competition is generally dominated by the conflict between government and opposition parties, the analysis finds interesting variations between opposition parties . Over the last few electoral periods, a clear convergence in the voting behavior of the Greens and the Left Party can be observed, not between the Greens and the liberal FDP . There is a dis- tinct separation between the extreme-right populist AfD and all other parties during the most recent electoral period, as all AfD motions were unanimously rejected by all other parties . Second, the request of roll call votes mirrors the respective parties’ topical agenda . In particular, the AfD requested roll calls on their core issues (especially migration) and on topics that ranked high in popular salience (especially in the context of the Covid-19 pan- demic) . Moreover, the data indicate that a cross-party consensus on policy reaction to Cov- id-19 during the initial phase of the pandemic quickly gave way to typical patterns of gov- ernment-opposition conflict while also indicating some intra-party conflicts, especially within the Christian Democrats .