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Party Competition and Government Formation in Germany: Business as Usual or New Patterns?
Abstract
The process of coalition formation following the 2017 Bundestag election was the most difficult in German post-war history. For the first time Germany saw negotiations fail, a minority government being discussed as a real possibility, and the federal president involved as formateur in coalition politics. The aim of this contribution is to explain why government formation was so intricate after the 2017 election. To this end, we trace patterns of party politics and the development of the German party system since 2013. We then study general patterns of government formation at the regional and national levels since the 1990s and evaluate whether these have changed with the advent of the right-wing populist party, Alternative for Germany. Our analysis of the 2017–18 government formation process is based on a novel expert survey of the policy profiles of German parties on various issue dimensions, conducted in 2017. The results show that the continuation of the incumbent coalition government of Christian and Social Democrats was the most likely outcome, and that the Social Democrats were indeed able to enforce a surpassing share of their policy positions in the final negotiation rounds.
... This is due to the parties' strong interest in implementing their policies during the legislative term. Thus, it is important how close the parties are positioned to each other regarding certain policies (Bräuninger et al. 2019;Debus and Müller 2013). Parties, however, have to make certain concessions when they become part of a coalition. ...
... Both the CDU/CSU and the SPD made it crystal clear that they will not govern together following the election. Additionally, this time -unlike in 2017 -the polls unequivocally showed that several other three-party coalitions would obtain an absolute majority in parliament, indicating that there would be no need for Christian and Social Democrats to return to the 'grand coalition' as a last resort as they were forced to in 2017/2018 (see Bräuninger et al. 2019). ...
... First, our study solely focussed on majority government constellations, at least implicitly. By conducting the conjoint experiment in Germany, a country where minority and single-party majority governments are highly unusual at all political levels (Bäck et al. 2013;Bräuninger et al. 2019;Gross 2023), we most likely deal with voters not considering these two government constellations as viable outcomes of post-election bargaining. Even though coalition governments holding a majority in parliament are quite common (see Thürk et al. 2021), our theoretical arguments should additionally be tested in countries with a tradition of minority governments or single-party governments. ...
Do voters want their party to be office- or policy-seekers in coalition negotiations?
This question has been left unstudied in political science research
so far. While existing research shows that policies matter for voters when
forming their preferences for coalitions, in this study it is argued that voters
find it at the same time important that their preferred party gains offices.
Specifically, voters’ office-seeking considerations are expected to increase the
more indifferent they are to the policy content of a coalition agreement. To
test this assumption, an original conjoint experiment among Green Party
voters in the context of the German federal election in 2021 has been conducted.
The findings demonstrate that voters’ office-seeking considerations
become more important the more similar coalition agreements are with regard
to their policy content. These findings have important implications for the
understanding of voters’ preferences regarding coalitions.
... die Sitzstärke der Parteien, auf die sich die an der Maximierung von politischen Ämtern ausgerichteten Koalitionstheorien konzentrieren (von Neumann und Morgenstern 1944;Riker 1962); (2) die sachpolitisch-inhaltliche Positionierung der parteipolitischen Akteure, was dem policy-orientierten Ansatz der Koalitionstheorie entspricht und wo zwischen der (parteispezifischen) Bedeutung eines Politikfelds (Salienz) und der Position einer Partei zu den entsprechenden Sachfragen unterschieden wird (vgl. Axelrod 1970;De Swaan 1973;Laver und Shepsle 1996;Bräuninger et al. 2019a); (3) die institutionell-kontextuellen Faktoren des politischen Prozesses im Allgemeinen und des Regierens im Besonderen (vgl. Strøm et al. 1994;Bäck und Dumont 2008); (4) die seitens der Parteien mitunter geäußerten, positiv wie negativ formulierbaren Koalitionsaussagen (Golder 2006;Debus 2009). ...
... 2 Einem auf der Grundlage des Wordscores-Verfahrens bereits erstellten Datensatz, der die Positionen der deutschen Bundes-und Landesparteien seit Januar 1990 umfasst (Bräuninger et al. 2020), wurden die zu den Bundestagswahlen 2021 verfassten Wahlprogramme von CDU/CSU, SPD, AfD, FDP, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen und Die Linke sowie das separate Wahlprogramm der CSU hinzugefügt. Zudem erlaubt dieser Datensatz mithilfe bedingter logistischer Regressionen die Ermittlung der Determinanten der Koalitionsbildung in Bund und Ländern, auf deren Grundlage sich wiederum die jeweilige Wahrscheinlichkeit für jede mögliche Koalitionsoption ermitteln lässt, die sich aus der Anzahl der parlamentarisch vertretenen Parteien ergibt (Bräuninger und Debus 2008, S. 328-330;Linhart et al. 2010, S. 248-250;Debus und Müller 2011;Debus 2017;Bräuninger et al. 2019a). ...
... Dies verringert die Kompromissbereitschaft der Freien Demokraten in dem für sie wichtigen Politikfeld Wirtschaft, Finanzen und Soziales insofern, dass Parteien wie Grüne oder SPD, die tendenziell staatsinterventionistische Positionen in diesem Politikfeld einnehmen, aus Sicht der FDP noch weiter von der Position der Freien Demokraten entfernt liegen. Dies führte -in Kombination mit weiteren Faktorenbereits 2017 zu einem vorzeitigen Ende der Verhandlungen über eine "Jamaika-Koalition"(Bräuninger et al. 2019a;Faas und Klingelhöfer 2019). Dass für die Grünen die Gesellschaftspolitik von größerer Bedeutung als die Wirtschafts-und Sozialpolitik ist, mag wiederum die Kompromissfindung mit der CDU/CSU trotz deren im Vergleich zu 2017 deutlich moderateren Position erschweren, gleichzeitig aber eine Grundlage für eine Ampelkoalition bilden, die der FDP-Vorsitzende Christian Lindner nach der Wahl als "fortschrittliches Zentrum" beschrieb und so indirekt auf die großen Schnittmengen von FDP, Grünen und SPD in Fragen der Gesellschaftspolitik hinwies. ...
Zusammenfassung
Das komplexer gewordene bundesdeutsche Parteiensystem und die Angleichung in der Stärke der Parteien bei Wahlen führt zu einem ebenfalls komplexeren Koalitions- und Regierungsbildungsprozess auf Bundes- wie Landesebene. Diese Kurzanalyse präsentiert die programmatischen Profile der im Bundestag vertretenen Parteien auf der Grundlage ihrer zur Bundestagswahl 2021 verfassten Wahlprogramme. Im Anschluss daran wird – auf der Basis der Determinanten der Regierungs- und Koalitionsbildung in Deutschland in den Bundesländern und auf Bundesebene seit 1990 – mit Rückgriff auf unterschiedliche Szenarien der Sitzverteilung im 20. Deutschen Bundestag, die neben den sich aus dem Wahlergebnis ergebenden Parteienkonstellationen auch andere Koalitionsoptionen umfassen, die jeweils wahrscheinlichste Regierungskoalition ermittelt. Die Ergebnisse verdeutlichen, dass die Regierungsbildung in Deutschland von office- und policy-orientierten Koalitionstheorien sowie den institutionell-kontextuellen Rahmenbedingungen entscheidend beeinflusst wird und eine „Ampelkoalition“ das wahrscheinlichste Ergebnis des Regierungsbildungsprozesses 2021 ist, wenn eine „große Koalition“ aus Union und SPD als ausgeschlossen betrachtet wird.
... I refer here to Druckman and Warwick's (2005, 39-40) measurement of portfolio salience in Italy, based on an expert survey: excluding the premiership and non-partisan ministers from the calculation, one finds that the average weigh of the portfolios controlled by the M5S is 1.00 (while the prime ministership's value is the highest, with a score of 2.48); the League scores 0.86. 11 It can be argued that the just mentioned quantitative 'bonus' for the League was counterbalanced from a qualitative viewpoint. ...
... However, the proposal was refused by the two parties, which prompted Conte to step back from being formateur, leading to a temporary interinstitutional conflict (Valbruzzi 2018, 474). 11. If two or more portfolios of the list of Druckman and Warwick"s (2005) were unified, I have considered the most salient ones. ...
... The first is length: I expect longer documents when party preferences are divergent (Falcó-Gimeno 2014; Bowler et al. 2016); this is the case in both Italy and Germany (Giannetti et al. 2018;Bräuniger et al. 2019). The Italian contract was 58 pages long. ...
In West European context, the first fully-fledged populist government that entered office in Italy in 2018 (Conte I) has been presented as a peculiar case. After discussing party dilemmas within coalitions, the article analyses – in comparative perspective – how the two partners M5S and League managed inter-party relations despite their divergent policy preferences. The work focuses on both structural and dynamic mechanisms of coalition governance. Particular attention is paid to the coalition agreement, which is compared to the benchmark case of the German Merkel IV cabinet. Findings show that the Conte I cabinet diverged from the Italian tradition, but approached other European models, despite its rhetoric of exceptionality. Yet, poor definition of policy goals and ambiguous governance mechanisms are observed.
... Gross 2011). Ähnliches kann für eine Parteikombination aus CDU, FDP und Grünen gelten, die auf Bundesebene programmatisch sehr heterogen ist, die drei Parteien in Schleswig-Holstein jedoch programmatisch so kohärent ausgerichtet sind, dass eine Koalitionsbildung dort 2017 im Gegensatz zur Bundesebene im selben Jahr möglich war (Bräuninger et al. 2019b). Auch können Parteien aufgrund ihrer Verbundenheit mit bestimmten sozialen Milieus in Abhängigkeit der Größe dieser Gruppen ihre programmatische Haltung je Politikfeld variieren. ...
... • Promotes taxes to increase public services (1) • Promotes cutting public services to cut taxes (20) Bei Benoit und Laver (2006) und Bräuninger et al. (2019b waren die Extrempositionen bezeichnet mit: ...
... • Favours liberal policies on matters such as abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia (1) • Opposes liberal policies on matters such as abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia (1) Bei Benoit und Laver (2006) und Bräuninger et al. (2019b) ist die Skala begrenzt durch: ...
Das vorliegende Buch beschäftigt sich mit der Entstehung, wechselseitigen Abhängigkeit und Entwicklung der programmatischen Ausrichtung der Landesverbände der deutschen Parteien. Mit einer Inhaltsanalyse der Bundes- und Landtagswahlprogramme der Parteien über einen Zeitraum von 30 Jahren (1990–2019) wurde aufzeigt, in welchem Ausmaß sich die inhaltlichen Ausrichtungen von Landesparteien unterscheiden, was mögliche Ursachen für die Varianz sind und welche Konsequenzen sich aus den landesspezifischen Mustern des Parteienwettbewerbs für den Regierungsbildungsprozess ergeben.
... Gross 2011). Ähnliches kann für eine Parteikombination aus CDU, FDP und Grünen gelten, die auf Bundesebene programmatisch sehr heterogen ist, die drei Parteien in Schleswig-Holstein jedoch programmatisch so kohärent ausgerichtet sind, dass eine Koalitionsbildung dort 2017 im Gegensatz zur Bundesebene im selben Jahr möglich war (Bräuninger et al. 2019b). Auch können Parteien aufgrund ihrer Verbundenheit mit bestimmten sozialen Milieus in Abhängigkeit der Größe dieser Gruppen ihre programmatische Haltung je Politikfeld variieren. ...
... • Promotes taxes to increase public services (1) • Promotes cutting public services to cut taxes (20) Bei Benoit und Laver (2006) und Bräuninger et al. (2019b waren die Extrempositionen bezeichnet mit: ...
... • Favours liberal policies on matters such as abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia (1) • Opposes liberal policies on matters such as abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia (1) Bei Benoit und Laver (2006) und Bräuninger et al. (2019b) ist die Skala begrenzt durch: ...
In Ländern, in denen sich politische Parteien auf mehreren Ebenen eines föderalen oder dezentralen politischen Systems eigenständig konstituieren, beeinflussen Wahlen, aber auch sach- und personalpolitische Entscheidungen einzelner Parteien auf der einen Ebene regelmäßig die Entwicklung der Partei oder des gesamten Parteienwettbewerbs auf anderen Ebenen. Das Parteiensystem der Bundesrepublik mit seinen vielfältigen Verschränkungen von Bundesparteien und Landesverbänden bietet hierfür zahlreiche Beispiele. So war die Karriere von Gerhard Schröder maßgeblich mit der parteiinternen Bewertung der Wahlausgänge in zwei Bundesländern verknüpft.
... Gross 2011). Ähnliches kann für eine Parteikombination aus CDU, FDP und Grünen gelten, die auf Bundesebene programmatisch sehr heterogen ist, die drei Parteien in Schleswig-Holstein jedoch programmatisch so kohärent ausgerichtet sind, dass eine Koalitionsbildung dort 2017 im Gegensatz zur Bundesebene im selben Jahr möglich war (Bräuninger et al. 2019b). Auch können Parteien aufgrund ihrer Verbundenheit mit bestimmten sozialen Milieus in Abhängigkeit der Größe dieser Gruppen ihre programmatische Haltung je Politikfeld variieren. ...
... • Promotes taxes to increase public services (1) • Promotes cutting public services to cut taxes (20) Bei Benoit und Laver (2006) und Bräuninger et al. (2019b waren die Extrempositionen bezeichnet mit: ...
... • Favours liberal policies on matters such as abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia (1) • Opposes liberal policies on matters such as abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia (1) Bei Benoit und Laver (2006) und Bräuninger et al. (2019b) ist die Skala begrenzt durch: ...
Unterscheidet sich die CDU im Saarland in ihren programmatischen Standpunkten und ihrem Themenprofil von den Christdemokraten in Schleswig-Holstein oder in den Stadtstaaten Berlin, Bremen und Hamburg? Steht die SPD in Baden-Württemberg oder Hessen weiter links als der sozialdemokratische Landesverband im benachbarten Rheinland-Pfalz? Gibt es programmatische Unterschiede zwischen den AfD-Landesverbänden? Wenn ja, warum ist das der Fall und welche Konsequenzen ergeben sich daraus? Das Buch untersucht die bundeslandspezifischen Eigenheiten des Parteienwettbewerbs anhand einer Analyse aller zwischen 1990 und 2019 verfassten Landtagswahlprogramme. Dies geschieht vor dem Hintergrund der historischen Entwicklung der Parteiensysteme in den Ländern einerseits und auf der Grundlage theoretischer Modelle andererseits. Die Ergebnisse zeichnen ein differenziertes Bild des Parteienwettbewerbs im deutschen Mehrebenensystem. So zeigen sich Unterschiede in den zentralen Politikdimensionen, die ihre Ursachen in der Sozialstruktur der jeweiligen Wählerschaft, aber auch in taktischen Bestrebungen der Parteien haben. Diese Variation beeinflusst wiederum die Regierungsbildung und die Muster des Regierens in Koalitionen in den deutschen Bundesländern.
Der Inhalt
• Einleitung
• Parteienwettbewerb in Mehrebenensystemen
• Dimensionen des politischen Wettbewerbs
• Parteiensysteme und Parteienwettbewerb in den Bundesländern von 1990 bis 2019
• Vergleichende Analysen
• Schlussbetrachtung
Die Autoren
Dr. Thomas Bräuninger ist Professor für Politische Ökonomie an der Universität Mannheim.
Dr. Marc Debus ist Professor für Vergleichende Regierungslehre an der Universität Mannheim.
Dr. Jochen Müller ist Inhaber der Juniorprofessur für Politische Soziologie an der Universität Greifswald.
Dr. Christian Stecker ist Research Fellow und Projektleiter am Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung der Universität Mannheim.
... A left-authoritarian party would effectively address this distinct representation gap. The Left can be characterised as a socioculturally liberal party, as shown by its positions on immigration and social policies, which fall between those of the Greens and those of the Social Democrats (Bräuninger et al. 2019). The majority of The Left's leadership emphasises their distinction from the right-authoritarian AfD party and rejects the notion of a political horseshoe. ...
... We included the respondents' self-positioning on these scales as a subjective component in our analyses. These indicators aim to cover the twodimensional German political space (Bräuninger et al. 2019). Furthermore, because Wagenknecht has frequently opposed immigration to Germany, we tested whether those who more strongly agree with anti-immigration policies are more likely to support her. ...
The prospect of a new party can significantly change political landscapes. In Germany, a potential new party is currently being widely discussed—Sahra Wagenknecht may splinter off from her party, The Left, to form a new radical party in Germany. Above all, Wagenknecht is known for her anti-immigration stance and could potentially bridge the gap between the right and left by forming a left-authoritarian party. What does the demand for such a left-authoritarian party look like in Germany? To explore this, we examined individual-level data to understand the structural factors that cause people to rate Wagenknecht higher than her current party, The Left. The results indicate that Wagenknecht is preferred over The Left by individuals who are more socioculturally right-wing, critical of migration, and dissatisfied with democracy. These findings provide valuable insights into the electoral potential of a potential left-authoritarian party led by Wagenknecht.
... We include four explanatory variables in the selection stage of the statistical model. These four variablesinclusion of the largest parliamentary party in the coalition, intracoalition programmatic heterogeneity, incumbency status of the coalition, and missing congruence of the coalition with the partisan composition of the government and opposition camp on the national level ("cross-cutting coalitions")reflect not only standard theoretical accounts on government formation, but are also very good predictors of the outcome of the coalition formation process in the German states (see Bräuninger et al., 2019bBräuninger et al., , 2020Debus, 2022). ...
... To evaluate our expectations, we need data on the partisan composition of the coalition governments, and information on whether some parties are considered as 'pariahs' by one or more other parliamentary parties. The dataset on party competition in the German Federal States (Bräuninger et al., 2020) provides data for testing our expectations, including information on the pre-electoral commitments of parties and numerous features of the governments formed in each state and on the federal level (see also Bräuninger et al., 2019b). This information was collected from state election reports, published regularly in the Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen (https://zparl.de/). ...
Most parliamentary democracies have seen a rise of populist radical parties during the past decades. Many countries have also experienced severely delayed government formation processes, with caretaker governments in office for extended periods of time. Are these delays related to the rise of radical parties? We argue that the rise of populist radical parties may prolong the bargaining process, due to the fact that these parties are often treated as pariahs by other parties during election campaigns, which creates a complex bargaining situation after the election. We evaluate this claim by studying 121 government formation processes in the German States from 1990 until 2021, using original data which includes statements made by parties during election campaigns. The findings show that a higher share of seats allocated to parties from the radical right and radical left results in an increasing amount of days until a new government is voted into office. We also find that when a party that has been characterized as being 'non-coalitionable' during the election campaign ends up among the negotiating parties, the government formation process is severely delayed. These findings suggest that the rise of populist radical parties may create severe challenges for parliamentary democracy.
... In the case of the 2017 German federal election, Bräuninger et al. (2019) observed that parties' stances on economic and social policy, as well as their positions toward immigration and the parties' weighting of these policies, had great explanatory power for the prediction of coalition formation. The differences between the CDU/CSU (especially the latter of the two "Union parties") and the Greens on the issue of immigration and large distances on economic policy between the FDP and the Greens can be one explanation for the failure of negotiations on a Jamaica coalition. ...
... Beyond that, research on coalition formation illustrates the role of salience at the elite level. Not only does the success of the bargaining depend on the weighting of issues in question by the parties (see Bräuninger et al. 2019), but parties are also more likely to allocate portfolios on domains to which they attribute importance (Bäck et al. 2011). Furthermore, Greene et al. (2021) show that voters take this into account in their evaluation of government parties and reward the parties if they managed to receive their salient portfolios. ...
The 2021 German federal election led to the formation of the so-called traffic-light coalition between the Social Democratic Party, the Green Party, and the Free Democratic Party, which had never before been agreed upon at the federal level. Over a long period, German parties had competed for government in relatively clear and ideologically homogeneous camps. However, fragmentation of the party system made majorities for two-party alliances more and more unlikely, and party elites needed to reassess new partnerships. Most of these novel coalitions, like the traffic-light coalition, are also cross-cutting dimensions of political competition in Germany. This raises the question of how voters reflect upon these novel government alternatives and make up their minds about which of them they would like to see in office.
In this paper, I argue that a nuanced view on issues rather than general ideology offers more precise insights on the origins of voters’ coalition preferences. Furthermore, as salience theory suggests, not every issue is equally important for every part of the citizenry. Therefore, it is expected that the effects of voter–coalition distance as well as intracoalition heterogeneity on specific issues are moderated by individuals’ saliency of the respective issues. These expectations are tested using data from the 2021 preelection cross-section survey of the German Longitudinal Election Study. The results emphasize the relevance of specific issues as well as salience in the formation of voters’ coalition preferences.
... Initially a neoliberal anti-EU party (Bremer and Schulte-Cloos, 2019), the AfD established itself as an anti-immigration and anti-Islam party already before the crisis and entered parliament in the 2017 election. However, none of its competitors considered the option of a coalition with the AfD, given its pariah status (Bräuninger et al., 2019). ...
... This may be a result of coalition considerations. As the AfD was considered a pariah party, none of its competitors considered the option of a coalition in the near future (Bräuninger et al., 2019). This allowed parties to be less responsive both in terms of salience, where contagion effects are not significant for Germany, and in terms of positions, where parties may have found it easier to confront the AfD. 9 While we do find short-term contagion in terms of salience, our findings also speak to limitations regarding the broader effect of crises: After a short period, most parties' attention to immigration peters out, despite the leap in salience at the beginning of the crisis. ...
While the structure of party competition evolves slowly, crisis-like events can induce short-term change to the political agenda. This may be facilitated by challenger parties who might benefit from increased attention to issues they own. We study the dynamic of such shifts through mainstream parties’ response to the 2015 refugee crisis, which strongly affected public debate and election outcomes across Europe. Specifically, we analyse how parties changed their issue emphasis and positions regarding immigration before, during, and after the refugee crisis. Our study is based on a corpus of 120,000 press releases between 2013 and 2017 from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. We identify immigration-related press releases using a novel dictionary and estimate party positions. The resulting monthly salience and positions measures allow for studying changes in close time-intervals, providing crucial detail for disentangling the impact of the crisis itself and the contribution of right-wing parties. While we provide evidence that attention to immigration increased drastically for all parties during the crisis, radical right parties drove the attention of mainstream parties. However, the attention of mainstream parties to immigration decreased toward the end of the refugee crisis and there is limited evidence of parties accommodating the positions of the radical right.
... After an ineffectual programmatic turn leftwards, the SPD remained on a steadfast moderate platform up until and including the 2017 federal election with Martin Schulz as chancellor candidate. Initially, this seemed to generate support for the party, which experienced a jump, starting in the low twenties and rising to around 30% within weeks (Bräuninger et al. 2019). However, a significant difference between Labour and the SPD in 2017 lies in the fact that while Corbyn was comparatively more successful in gaining unaffiliated voters, unaffiliated voters are significantly more inclined to vote for Merkel over an SPD candidate (Hansen and Olsen 2019). ...
... However, a significant difference between Labour and the SPD in 2017 lies in the fact that while Corbyn was comparatively more successful in gaining unaffiliated voters, unaffiliated voters are significantly more inclined to vote for Merkel over an SPD candidate (Hansen and Olsen 2019). In 2017, the SPD fell to a post-war low with 20.5% of the votes, and this was an indication that the party needed to end its grand coalition and become an opposition party (Bräuninger et al. 2019). Nevertheless, the SPD entered coalition with Angela Merkel's CDU again in 2017. ...
Social Democratic parties have long been steady pioneers of European democracy, but over the past decade they have suffered a humiliating collapse. It is commonly asserted that European countries have entered a classless society. Subsequently, mainstream left parties adopted broad electoral strategies to appeal widely to the median voter, exemplified by the Blair-Schröder Third Way. Electoral backlash following the British and German social democratic party’s 1990s neoliberal shift, their approach to globalization as well as their handling of the financial crisis and refugee crisis have eroded their popularity. Subsequent frustration with the political establishment is exemplified by the cultural backlash thesis. However, a countermovement signified by postmaterialism and social liberalism calls for transformative social and political change. The two convictions clash on binary issues, exacerbating a righteous divide between sociocultural liberals and conservatives, recently popularized as the “anywheres” and the “somewheres”. This paper puts forth the necessity for social democratic parties to re-engage with the cleavage politics of today. This is particularly important as today’s cleavages are largely ideologically driven. Questions of electoral strategy, ideological positioning and mobilisation tactics are contested intra-party. Attention is paid to Corbyn’s Labour, whose move towards traditionalism at first earned electoral support, only to be discredited in 2019. In comparison, the German SPD embraced centrism in 2017 and were penalized for it. They must now respond and offer a strategic alternative following competition from the Greens and Die Linke.
... While Wordscores has been successfully validated in the case of German (sub-)national manifestos (Hjorth et al., 2015;Bräuninger et al., 2019Bräuninger et al., , 2020, it is important to note that its assumptions and output have weaknesses (e.g., Lowe, 2008). For instance, when different words are used to describe the very same policy, the estimated position will be somewhat different. ...
Political parties commonly experience internal disagreements. Recently, evidence is accumulating that outright internal discord makes a party much less attractive to voters. However, we do not understand well when citizens perceive a party to be internally conflicted in the first place. We here explain citizens’ perceptions from a democratic life cycle perspective: Factors related to the periodic conduct of elections induce higher levels of intra-party conflict and make it more visible to citizens. To test this argument, we combine survey data on citizens’ perceptions of political parties in Germany spanning 16 years with indicators moderating (the visibility of) intra-party conflict. The analysis shows that citizens perceive more internal conflict when parties are heterogenous, when they are governing, when election day is distant, and when electoral losses accumulate. This demonstrates the recurring patterns in citizens’ perceptions of political parties and suggests self-reinforcing dynamics between citizen assessments and election outcomes.
... The 2017 federal elections seemed to inaugurate a new era of political turmoil. The main parties, the CDU/CSU and SPD, attracted only 53 per cent of the votes, and-six months after the election-both parties agreed to renew the incumbent Grand Coalition (Bräuninger et al., 2019). In one of the most fragmented parliamentary party systems in Germany's post-war history, the shadow of a premature end to the coalition threatened the stability of Angela Merkel's final cabinet (Schmitt-Beck et al., 2022b). ...
This open access book focuses on the importance that EU politicization has gained in European democracies and the consequences for voting behaviour in six countries of the EU: Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. Most of the studies which research the way the EU is being legitimised focus on the European Parliament elections. In this book we argue that to understand how EU accountability works, it is necessary to focus instead on national elections and the national political environment. Through a detailed, multimethod analysis this book establishes rigorously the paths of European accountability at the national level, its propitious contexts in the media and parliamentary debates, and whether the paths are similar from Greece to Germany. The findings have implications for both national and European Union democracy, underlining the importance that national institutions have in enabling citizens to hold the EU accountable.
... The 2017 federal elections seemed to inaugurate a new era of political turmoil. The main parties, the CDU/CSU and SPD, attracted only 53 per cent of the votes, and-six months after the election-both parties agreed to renew the incumbent Grand Coalition (Bräuninger et al., 2019). In one of the most fragmented parliamentary party systems in Germany's post-war history, the shadow of a premature end to the coalition threatened the stability of Angela Merkel's final cabinet (Schmitt-Beck et al., 2022b). ...
The decision-making processes employed by German politicians and voters in elections to the German Bundestag matter decisively for policy-making at the European level. When casting their vote, German voters choose their representatives and are in a position to use federal elections to keep European Union (EU) policy accountable and better defend their national interests. Nevertheless, the German press and political parties—with the exception of those on the radical right, like the Alternative for Germany (AfD—Alternative für Deutschland)—tend not to use EU issues to mobilize voters and do not politicize EU integration policy. This pro-European vocation would suggest there is no place for EU issue voting in Germany; however, this is not the case. This contribution disentangles the apparent consensus about the EU and assesses the nuances that indicate the Europeanization of German elections. First, we find that parties behave strategically in respect of the prominence they give to European integration issues and in the way they talk about them. Second, we provide evidence supporting the influence of EU issue voting in the last federal elections. Finally, we show how the opinions of individuals on immigration policy moderate the effect of support for the EU on the vote.
... Thomas Bräuninger et al. argue that the threat of new elections-as well as pressure from Federal President Steinmeier, himself a former spd chancellor candidate, to consider joining a grand coalition in the national interest-led the spd to its volte-face, and, perhaps as a result of this reluctance, it was especially successful in shaping the coalition treaty that resulted. 27 The party's conference delegates and membership still had to be dragged into the coalition with the greatest reluctance: 362 delegates voted in favor of taking up negotiations, while 279 voted against it, and at a special conference in January 2018, 28 66 percent of members voted in favor of the final agreement. 29 For much of the 2018-2021 government, the spd appeared to be furnishing itself with evermore unwanted evidence of the electoral price of being a junior coalition partner. ...
Germany’s Social Democratic Party, the SPD, was in government between 2013 and 2021, but until just weeks before the federal election of 2021, its electoral prospects seemed poor. The party was able to turn things around and surge, in the final period of the campaign, to a remarkable victory. This article sets out structural challenges faced by social democrats in Europe in general and in Germany in particular, focusing on policies and voters, coalition politics, and questions about party organization. It argues that in each area, the spd, with a mixture of sound strategic choices and good fortune, was to some extent able to extricate itself from the challenges it faced, and that its success owed much to the peculiarities of the 2021 election.
... For the first time in the country's post-war history, it appeared seriously doubtful whether the federal parliament would be able to fulfill its crucial electoral function of creating a new government (Bagehot 2001). For almost six months, and thus exactly twice as long as during the hitherto most complicated process of government formation (which had followed the previous election), Germany and its international partners had to get by with a caretaker government without the ability and mandate to act on important issues and the lingering fear that a new election might need to be called to leave it to the electorate to cut the Gordian knot that it had laced in the first place (Siefken 2018;Bräuninger et al. 2019;Linhart and Switek 2019). After the government had finally set to work, the tension hardly eased, and the possibility of premature cessation of the coalition was always in the air. ...
This concluding chapter discusses changing German voters’ behavior in the context of changing parties, campaigns, and media during the period of its hitherto most dramatically increased fluidity at the 2009, 2013, and 2017 federal elections. It summarizes the book’s findings on three questions: How did the turbulences that increasingly characterize German electoral politics come about? How did they in turn condition voters’ decision-making? How were electoral attitudes and choices affected by situational factors that pertained to the specifics of particular elections? Discussing the consequences of these developments the chapter finds that the ideological and affective polarization of the party system has increased, leading to a dualistic structure that pits the right-wing populist AfD against all other parties. It also shows how the formation of governments under the German parliamentary system of governance gets increasingly difficult. The chapter closes with speculations about the prospects of electoral politics in Germany.
... For the first time in the country's post-war history, it appeared seriously doubtful whether the federal parliament would be able to fulfill its crucial electoral function of creating a new government (Bagehot 2001). For almost six months, and thus exactly twice as long as during the hitherto most complicated process of government formation (which had followed the previous election), Germany and its international partners had to get by with a caretaker government without the ability and mandate to act on important issues and the lingering fear that a new election might need to be called to leave it to the electorate to cut the Gordian knot that it had laced in the first place (Siefken 2018;Bräuninger et al. 2019;Linhart and Switek 2019). After the government had finally set to work, the tension hardly eased, and the possibility of premature cessation of the coalition was always in the air. ...
Choosing the “right” party has been especially challening for German voters due to considerable changes in the German political landscape, with the AfD’s rise in 2013 being just the tip of the iceberg. The chapter aims to answer the question of how these changes have influenced attitude-consistent voting in Germany and specifically whether the reasons for (in-)consistent voting have changed between the German federal elections of 2009, 2013, and 2017. Using GLES cross-sectional survey data and online tracking surveys, the chapter suggests that, regardless of the crises and the rise of a new political actor, most German voters voted (or would have voted) consistently between 2009 and 2017. In 2009 and 2017, inconsistent voting was strongly associated with low levels of political knowledge. By contrast, in 2013 inconsistent voters were primarily dissatisfied with democracy and the political elites and sympathetic to the AfD.
... German governments are mostly based on minimum winning coalitions. After a federal election, parties engage in exploratory negotiation talks (Sondierungsgespräche) and subsequent coalition negotiations (Koalitionsverhandlungen) resulting in a coalition agreement (Bräuninger et al., 2019). The cabinet formation processes combine bargains over policies in the governmental program with negotiations over offices and the selection of cabinet ministers. ...
In this paper we examine the effects of political change on name changes of units within central government ministries. We expect that changes regarding the policy position of a government will cause changes in the names of ministerial units. To this end we formulate hypotheses combining the politics of structural choice and theories of portfolio allocation to examine the effects of political changes at the cabinet level on the names of intra-ministerial units. We constructed a dataset containing more than 17,000 observations on name changes of ministerial units between 1980 and 2013 from the central governments of Germany, The Netherlands, and France. We regress a series of generalized estimating equations (GEE) with population averaging models for binary outcomes. Finding variations across the three political-bureaucratic systems, we overall report positive effects of governmental change and ideological positions on name changes within ministries.
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... politikfeldspezifischen Positionen der Parteien sowie ihr parteispezifisches Gewicht ein und prognostizieren die Wahl von Koalitionen mit geringer Heterogenität (vgl. für eine Anwendung zur Bundestagswahl 2017 Bräuninger et al. 2019b). ...
Der Beitrag zeichnet die Entwicklung des Parteienwettbewerbs in Baden-Württemberg zwischen 2016 und 2021 nach und verfolgt dabei die Fragen, ob sich bestimmte Muster hinter den programmatischen Verschiebungen der Par-teipositionen verbergen und welche Koalitionsoptionen nach der Landtagswahl 2021 wahrscheinlich sind. Auf der Grundlage von Theorien des Parteienwett-bewerbs und der Koalitionsbildung werden Erwartungen formuliert, die mit Hilfe eines Datensatz zu Parteienwettbewerb und Regierungsbildung in den deutschen Bundesländern seit 1990 getestet werden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sich die Positionen der Parteien in Richtung von Bündnis 90/Die Grü-nen und damit des Wahlgewinners der Landtagswahl 2016 verschoben haben, sowie die Grünen ebenfalls-möglicherweise unter dem Eindruck des Antre-tens der Klimaliste und/oder der Covid-19-Pandemie-linkere Positionen in ökonomischen Fragen zur Wahl 2021 eingenommen haben. Des Weiteren ver-deutlicht die Analyse, dass eine Neuauflage von Grün-Schwarz wahrscheinlich ist, sofern der Amtsinhaberbonus für die amtierende Koalition gilt.
... On the federal level, the surge of the AfD changed politics considerably. With almost 13% vote share in the 2017 federal election and considered by all other parliamentary parties as not a potential coalition partner, the entrance of the AfD in the Bundestag prevented any two-party coalition despite the so-called "Grand Coalition," composed of CDU/CSU 52 and SPD, which was originally meant to be a coalition only to be formed in times of emergency (Bräuninger et al. 2019). After an attempt at forming a novel coalition comprised of CDU/CSU, the liberal FDP, and the Greens had failed, CDU/CSU and -grudgingly-SPD agreed to form yet another coalition government-after an unprecedentedly long process of government formation (Gärtner, Gavras, and Schoen 2020). ...
Populist discourse—which tends to benefit anti-systemic parties—has been on the rise in the world’s democratic states. Powerful non-democratic states have both the means and the incentive to spread such discourse to democratic states. We clarify the incentives illiberal states have to produce such communication, and delineate how this type of political communication fuses traditional state-to-state propaganda with election interventions. We draw on the case of Kremlin-sponsored communication on the issue of refugees in Germany to illustrate the mechanisms through which the discourse operates in target countries. We create a corpus of over a million news stories to identify the prevalence of illiberal discourse and its timing relative to Germany’s elections. We show that the Kremlin intervened in the 2017 federal elections by promoting refugee stories over and above the rate at which German outlets did. We discuss the broader implications for the use of directed political communication as a form of election intervention.
... Time and again, openings in the different arenas of party competition have created new strategic opportunities for political entrepreneurs to exploit. In that respect, several authors (Bäck et al., 2013;Bräuninger et al., 2019; demonstrate that statewide parties provide (programmatic) leeway to their regional affiliations in order to successfully compete with popular regionalist parties. Research on governing statewide parties in Western democracies such as Spain (Verge, 2013), Italy (Basile, 2015) and Canada (Dion, 1996) shows that they 'accommodate' their issue priorities and policy positions on the territorial dimension of politics to demands from opposition parties. ...
This article investigates the relationship between regionalist parties and the minister portfolios they control in government. A novel dataset was constructed which inventories a comprehensive collection of their minister posts (N = 1779). These stem from 77 different regionalist parties across 10 Western multilevel democracies throughout the post-Second World War period (1945–2020). An in-depth analysis shows that governing regionalist parties adhere closely to their ideological core business: territorial, cultural and institutional affairs form a major part of their ministerial responsibilities. The kind of ministries that regionalist parties hold differs between the regional and national levels of government. They obtain more key leadership positions regionally than nationally. Regionalist parties own a disproportionately high number of minister posts at the national level when compared with their actual seat share in parliament. The results from this study improve our understanding of the portfolio preferences and party strategies that regionalist parties employ when they participate in government.
... First, it does not account for pariah parties that might be office seeking but unable to take part in a coalition because it its ostracised by established parties (Downs 2001). Two parties in this sample, Front National and the German Left, are considered to be ostracised (Akkerman and Rooduijn 2015;Bräuninger et al. 2019;van Spanje and de Graaf 2018). The results are, however, similar when I control for pariah party status (Online appendix 8). ...
Although research on interest group influence has had a revival in recent decades, little is known about interest group influence on political parties. This study considers how parties’ goals can affect interest groups’ ability to influence these actors. Interest groups are expected to be more likely to influence parties that are ideologically approximate to the interest groups as well as parties that are more willing to make policy compromises; the access that interest groups have to parties mediates these effects. Results from the empirical analysis of 5000 party-interest group observations from Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom support these expectations. In addition to contributing to the literature on parties and interest groups, the findings shed light on party position taking and when the link between citizens and parties is likely to be affected by interest groups.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1921496 .
... Recent studies proved that especially the German GCs are ideologically closer than any other potential coalitions that had a majority in parliament (cf. Bräuninger et al., 2019). Moreover, as another example: would a coalition between the two major Irish parties FF and FG, which have similar positions on a left-right scale, not be a GC? Certainly not. ...
Over the last two decades, the formation of grand coalitions has grown in the European Union (EU), even in countries with no previous political experience with them. Alongside a significant rise in both new and radical parties, grand coalitions signal the increasing fragmentation of contemporary European politics. We, therefore, investigate the electoral performance of both mainstream and new parties entering and leaving grand coalitions. We find that mainstream parties do not appear to enter grand coalitions after negative election results. They are, however, punished in the following elections, albeit not as heavily as previous findings have shown. This post-grand coalition electoral penalty is true for both major and minor grand coalition members. These findings contribute to the literature on party competition and provide insights into the choices mainstream parties' have been making in response to recent and rapid changes in the electoral landscape of the EU.
... Source: Data is retrieved from the Local Manifesto Project (see Gross and Jankowski 2020a) and calculated using the percentage of text about immigration and integration based on a dictionary comprising 173 terms (see Bräuninger et al. 2019). ...
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a relatively new and the first fully established right-wing populist actor in the German party system. While the electoral success and position-taking of the AfD at the national level has received much scholarly attention, little is known about the behaviour of the AfD at the local level. We address this research gap by providing an overview of the AfD at the local level. First, we focus on the electoral performance of the AfD in their first local elections. Second, by drawing on party manifestos of the AfD in local elections, we use automated text analysis methods for mapping the policy positions and issue salience of the AfD. One of our main conclusions is that the AfD is not fully established in the German party system at the local level, because the AfD mainly mobilizes voters and party members with issues regarding national politics. However, due to the second-order nature of local politics and the lack of an electoral threshold, the AfD is still successful in these local elections.
... President Frank-Walter Steinmeier-a former SPD politician who took an unusually strong role as German head of state-pressured the party chairs both publicly and privately to uphold their political responsibility to form a functioning government. Steinmeier acted as the coalition's formateur (Bräuninger et al. 2019) and the SPD's party chair entered the exploratory talks on December 15, 2017. ...
Research on coalition negotiations after general elections in parliamentary systems usually focuses on the parties’ utility maximization as corporate actors. However, the most recent process of government formation after the German general election in 2017 followed a different type of logic and led to an outcome unlike that of other coalition negotiations. Regarding policy seeking, office seeking, and vote seeking, the outcomes of both the exploratory talks between Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU)/Christlich‐Soziale Union (CSU), Freie Demokratische Partei, and the Greens and the negotiations between CDU/CSU and Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands are at least partly irrational from a cost–benefit analysis. This article examines the formation of Germany’s government in 2017–2018 and reveals the paradoxical outcomes of each phase of the negotiations. Empirical data to underpin the argument stem from interviews with negotiators and statements of direct participants in the formation of the coalition. Instead of the parties’ utility maximization, negotiations were largely dominated by intraparty conflicts, in which individual interests and personal trust rather than partisan unitary programs were most relevant to the negotiation process and outcome. Our work answers the question of why the grand coalition was unexpectedly renewed in the end—contrary to what might be predicted based on established theories of coalition building. The observations and conclusions set forth are of general interest not only for future coalition negotiations in Germany but also for other European parliamentary democracies facing increasing party fragmentation. Most importantly, the analysis yields insights into negotiations undertaken in the absence of rationalist behavior.
In this chapter, the individual experience of presidents with informal powers is investigated in five Western European democracies. The qualitative analysis is developed to understand to what extent contextual and personal factors are key in each presidential intervention. The findings confirm that popularity and political professionalism along with the absence of cohabitation affected the positive outcome of each presidential intervention. However, other factors mattered as well, for example, among contextual factors, the heterogeneity of government, the capacity of the PMs to control their own parties and their partner in government and the capacity of presidents to favour their own party. Among personal factors, the reputation of presidents and the personal relations between presidents and PMs resulted important as well. The major findings are that favourable contextual factors are not a sufficient condition to determine the positive outcome of an informal intervention by presidents, whereas personal factors and, in particular, presidential high public support, often can lead to a positive outcome even in the case of unfavourable contextual conditions.KeywordsParliamentary fragmentationHeterogeneity of governmentsCohabitationUnited government popularityReputationPersonal relationsPolitical professionalism
This introduction to the special issue first describes the cumbersome process of forming the fourth and final Merkel government. Both coalition partners experienced severe electoral losses in 2017 and were not particularly close to one another programmatically. This made the formation of a new coalition difficult. Next, the to-do-list is discussed. It turns out that, as a response to the Fridays-for-Future protests, voters considered climate change to be the most important problem in 2019, while the Corona pandemic dominated the agenda from early 2020. Interestingly, none of the coalition parties ‘owned’ either of these issues and this could have made policy-making even more intricate. In the third part, we summarise the policy profile of the fourth Merkel government, based mostly on the contributions to this special issue. It turns out that the policies of the fourth Merkel government mirrored those of its predecessor. In the socio-economic dimension a gentle de-liberalisation continued, while the policies on the social dimension followed a moderately liberal path. In the final section, the plan of the special issue is outlined.
A comparison of French and German health policy between 1990 and 2020 reveals the institutions under which programmatic action occurs. Expert interviews allow for an in-depth analysis of which institutions and processes are necessary for programmatic action to take place. In presenting the results of these expert interviews, this chapter shows how different systems of elite recruitment and policy advice are relevant to programmatic action by at the same time stressing that decentralized and corporatist structures are less directly related to programmatic action.
The Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) is a theoretical lens on policy processes developed at the intersection of policy process research, public administration, elite sociology, and social psychology. This chapter is particularly devoted to outlining the foundations of the PAF and putting them in context with other existing theories of the policy process. There are two main bases of PAF assumptions: Firstly, the role of bureaucracy in areas close to the state in formulating policy and the related desire for increased authority gained through advancement in individual careers. Secondly, social psychological perspectives on social identities of groups formed on the basis of shared characteristics are adopted by the PAF to outline the role of shared biographies and resulting policy programs, which are identity-forming, in policy processes and policy change. The particular focus of this study is on the institutional conditions under which such actors form programmatic groups and use their policy programs to shape the policy process over time.
In order to shed light on this missing link between programmatic action and political institutions, this chapter reviews how institutions are currently discussed in policy process research in order to derive hypotheses that may explain under which institutional conditions programmatic action should or should not take place. The goal of this overview of the state of the art is twofold. On the one hand, it serves to assess the contribution of the PAF to existing theories of the policy process and the understanding of institutions in it. In doing so, it becomes clear why a new theoretical lens is needed and where and why the PAF is able to fill gaps left by others. On the other hand, the established approaches to explaining policy change and stability with respect to policy processes contain assumptions and hypotheses about the role of institutions that can be integrated into the PAF and help sharpen the analytical power of a look at the institutional conditions for programmatic action. They do this by formulating mechanisms between theoretical concepts that can also be adapted, or at least assumed to be relevant, to the formation of programmatic groups and the success of the group and its program. At the very least, they lay the groundwork for the question that asks about the influence of institutional settings familiar in comparative politics on policy change.
Which institutions are necessary for programmatic action to take place? This chapter summarizes the “institutions of programmatic action”, which are the institutionalization of bureaucratic recruitment systems and scientific impulses through policy advice, and argues that the political institutions of federalism and corporatism are not directly related to the occurrence of programmatic action. At the same time, institutional changes may present both a challenge and an opportunity for programmatic groups.
Taking a look at the history of health policy in Germany from 1990 to 2020, this chapter outlines the existence of programmatic action and identifies the programmatic actors relevant to the changes in health policy. The empirical study is based on a discourse network analysis, an in-depth analysis of the biographical trajectories of individuals, as well as a systematic connection of the programmatic content to the individual programmatic actors. Thereby, this chapter provides an explanation for 20 years of health policy developments in Germany. However, it also notes that programmatic action in German health policy has ended in the 2010s, and it provides explanations for why this is the case.
The political systems of France and Germany and their respective organization of health care present important preconditions for the potential formation and success of programmatic groups and for the success of policy programs. This chapter reviews the health policy institutions in France and Germany in order to identify the positions in which programmatic actors can be found, which positions help them to implement their policy program, and which positions should be occupied for programmatic actors to achieve their goal of increased authority.
Taking a look at the history of health policy in France from 1990 to 2020, this chapter outlines the existence of programmatic action and identifies the programmatic actors relevant to the changes in health policy. The empirical study is based on a discourse network analysis, an in-depth analysis of the biographical trajectories of individuals, as well as a systematic connection of the programmatic content to the individual programmatic actors. Thereby, this chapter provides an explanation for 30 years of health policy developments in France.
The German party system has experienced considerable changes in the past years. A decline of the two larger parties CDU/CSU and SPD, the rise of the smaller parties, and the entrance of new parties into parliament cause a significant increase of party system fragmentation. This trend affects well-established routines of government formation, since traditional two-party camp coalitions fail to gain majorities oftentimes. We argue that the most common reaction to such missing majorities, the formation of a so-called grand coalition between the two largest parties, is problematic as a permanent solution. To give advice how alternatives can succeed, we compare coalitions on the German state level and search for factors which favour the formation of such alternative coalition models. Our results indicate that the smaller parties are most crucial and that, besides standard office and policy factors, also questions of relative strength play a role.
Under the premise that the use of alternative news frames is a key characteristic of alternative media, this study examines frame repertoires of alleged mainstream media and right-wing alternative media (RAM) in Germany. This endeavor is based on quantitative content analyses of eighteen news websites, including seven RAM, on two issues: immigration and the coalition talks following the German federal elections 2017. In multidimensional scaling models, we inspect how the media outlets relate to each other. The results show two types of RAM that deviate from the mainstream in different ways. The first type is clearly distinguishable by its interpretive style and heavy use of alternative frames. Media of this type openly oppose immigration, the German government and mainstream media. The second type, consisting of international news providers like RT, exhibits a more descriptive style and frame repertories that are similar to conservative mainstream media. We discuss this as a strategy to establish credibility and highlight perspectives for further research on RAM.
Will the Alternative for Germany (AfD) soon be actively involved in forming Germany’s governments? The findings of this article illustrate that the established German parties would be well advised not to form a coalition involving the AfD as their own voters strongly oppose it. For the first time, coalition preferences for a so-called Black–Blue coalition (CDU, CSU and AfD) as well as a Bahamas coalition (CDU, CSU, FDP and AfD) are examined. Using regression models to explain the emergence of preferences for such coalitions, the findings indicate the following: (1) while an identification with the AfD leads to a higher desirability for such coalitions, the opposite is the case if an individual identifies with the CDU; (2) a positive impression of the AfD’s candidates leads to a stronger coalition preference, whereas the rejection of the CDU’s then chancellor-candidate Angela Merkel has no significant effect; and (3) opposing migration leads to a stronger preference for such coalitions.
Zusammenfassung
Diese Research Note berichtet zentrale Ergebnisse des Open Expert Surveys 2021 (OES21). In diesem Expert:innen-Survey, der vor der Bundestagswahl 2021 durchgeführt wurde, haben mehr als 300 Politikwissenschaftler:innen die wichtigsten Parteien entlang zentraler politischer Sachfragen verortet und deren Wichtigkeit für die jeweilige Partei geschätzt. Der OES21 unterscheidet sich von gängigen Expert:innenbefragungen in zweierlei Hinsicht. Zum einen umfasst der Survey zahlreiche themenspezifische Items, die in anderen Befragungen bislang keine Beachtung fanden. Zum anderen ist die Anzahl der Expert:innen sehr hoch, wodurch Zusammenhänge in der Positionierung auf Ebene der einzelnen Expert:innen analysiert werden können.
Die Landtagswahlen in Baden-Württemberg 2016 brachten eine neue Koalitionsvariante auf Landesebene mit sich: Grün-Schwarz, eine von einem grünen Ministerpräsidenten angeführte Landesregierung mit der CDU als „Juniorpartner“. Dieser Artikel analysiert, wie sich die grün-schwarze Regierungsbildung als „Komplementärkoalition“ in die Ergebnisse der internationalen und nationalen Regierungsbildungsforschung einsortiert. Zunächst wird das parlamentarische Parteiensystem und seine Auswirkungen auf die Regierungsbildung betrachtet. In einem zweiten Schritt werden die Dauer des Regierungsbildungsprozesses und der Koalitionsvertrag analysiert. Drittens wird die Ministerienverteilung sowohl quantitativ als auch qualitativ untersucht. Aus dem Blickwinkel der Regierungsbildungsforschung betrachtet, stellt die grün-schwarze Zweiparteienkoalition nichts Besonderes dar, sondern entspricht dem „typischen“ Koalitionsmuster im deutschen Mehrebenensystem im Sinne einer kleinstmöglichen Gewinnkoalition.
Eine Fülle von Studien hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten mit der zurückgehenden Erklärungskraft der Zugehörigkeit von Bürgern zu bestimmten sozialen Gruppen für das individuelle Wahlverhalten in westeuropäischen Demokratien beschäftigt. Während die empirische Evidenz dieser Studien weitgehend gemischt ausfällt, bleibt festzuhalten, dass der wirtschaftliche und gesellschaftliche Wandel zu einem teils deutlichen Rückgang der über den cleavage-Ansatz definierten Kerngruppen von traditionellen Anhängern der Christ- und Sozialdemokraten – in Deutschland Katholiken mit hoher Kirchenbindung bzw. gewerkschaftsnahe (Industrie-)Arbeiter – an der Gesamtbevölkerung geführt hat. Ein immer größer werdender Teil der Wählerschaft ist damit parteiungebundener geworden, was nicht nur eine höhere Fluktuation in den Stimmenanteilen der Parteien wahrscheinlicher macht, sondern auch den Erfolg neuer Parteien bei Wahlen begünstigen kann. In diesem Beitrag wird – mit Rückgriff auf jüngere Studien zur Wahl- und Einstellungsforschung, die sich insbesondere mit den Determinanten der Wahl Obamas und Trumps beschäftigen – der Frage nachgegangen, inwiefern Indikatoren, die vordergründig unpolitische, die Freizeitaktivität von Bürgern widerspiegelnde Faktoren einen Beitrag dazu leisten können, die Wahlabsicht gegenüber etablierten oder neuen Parteien besser zu erklären.
This article seeks to assess and explain territorial policy dynamics in five European countries—Italy, Spain, Germany, France and the United Kingdom—from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic up to early 2021. The crisis has clearly highlighted well-known differences between centralized and decentralized systems. Yet focusing on this dichotomy is not sufficient. It is suggested that, while the distribution of authority between central and regional governments matters, policy dynamics—that is, how different territorial levels interact in policy-making processes—are even more important in driving multi-level responses to the emergency. Whether these dynamics are hierarchical (France), competitive (Italy and Spain), cooperative (Germany) or mixed (the United Kingdom) depends on how pre-crisis institutional, sectoral and political “causal forces” moderate the impact of an exogenous shock.
The vice and virtue of incrementalism have been the subject of a long-standing academic debate. This debate, however, lacks a dynamic perspective that analyzes how the transformation of politics-mainly in the form of increasing levels of political fragmentation within decision-making arenas and increasing complexity of policy-mixes-affects the role of incremental-ism. We argue that both of these trends make the virtues of incrementalism politically even more valuable than they have always been. At the same time, this proliferation of incrementalism comes at the costs of overlooked second-order effects. Since the empirical reality of incrementalism is primarily one that results in incremental policy accumulation, it continuously adds implementation burdens, enhances the demand-ingness of substantive policy debate, and makes effective science communication more difficult. Thereby, accumulative incrementalism becomes one source of pressure on three cornerstones of legitimate gover-nance: effective policy implementation, sophisticated policy debate, and evidence-based policymaking.
While prior work on coalition theories focuses either solely on office or on policy motivations of parties, more elaborate theories combine both types of motivation. Said combination makes them much more appropriate for explaining coalition formation but also more complex. One possibility to make these models broadly applicable are coalition tools. Since existing tools do not incorporate advances from such theories, we present a new coalition tool called Coalizer which takes both office and policy motivations into account and reflects the state of coalition theory. Among others, Coalizer includes features like the computation of policy utility values basing on party positions (supporting different estimation modes), the combination of office and policy utility values, and the indication of utility maximizing strategies for parties. In this paper, we present our coalition tool and illustrate its functionality with the example of the German federal elections in 2017. Coalizer is available online at www.mytuc.org/mcbz
Unequal and declining electoral turnout has spurred numerous initiatives to reverse the trend. Voting advice applications (VAAs) are one prominent attempt. VAAs match the opinions of voters with those of candidates or parties. As the popularity of VAAs increases and research corroborates their effect on turnout and political preferences, it matters at lot who uses VAAs and, thus, experiences these effects. The early VAA literature found that VAA users tend to be young, well-educated, politically interested men. For the first time, this article assesses whether this pattern changes over time. Using German election data, it measures whether age, gender, education, and political interest still explains VAA use. Age remains important, while gender is no longer significant. Those with the highest levels of education remain significantly more likely to use VAAs, but this is no longer true for those with moderate levels of education. Political interest remains an important predictor of VAA usage. Overall, we have thus seen a development in which users become more similar to the population as a whole. A development which corresponds to Rogers’ diffusion thesis. This is important in light of the continued interest in unequal political participation as it suggests that VAAs may, in the long term, be able to reach groups in society currently not engaged in the political process.
Previous research found that coalition partners do not only control each other within the government, but also use instruments of the legislative arena. While the literature has mainly concentrated on parliamentary scrutiny, much less is known about the power of committee chairs in the policy-making process. Therefore, thispaper examines if parties use committee chairs to control their coalition partner. Wehypothesize that cross-partisan committee chairs will increase the probability that a legislative proposal is changed by the committee. Our theoretical expectations are tested with the help of a newly compiled, comprehensive data set of committee decisions on legislative proposals from 15 German Bundesländer. The case selection allows us to hold important institutional characteristics constant while increasing the variance of the variables on the government level. Our results confirm that committee chairs act as supervisory body and thus add empirical evidence to our understanding of oversight mechanisms in coalition governance.
Zusammenfassung
Die politikwissenschaftliche Literatur zum deutschen Föderalismus ist überaus vielfältig. Neben Analysen der institutionellen Arrangements, ihrer Veränderungen sowie der Dynamiken des deutschen Verbundföderalismus, finden sich auch zahlreiche Untersuchungen zu einzelnen Politikfeldern, die sowohl die Interaktionen zwischen Bund und Ländern als auch die Varianz zwischen den Policies der Länder samt ihrer Bestimmungsfaktoren untersuchen. Darüber hinaus haben sich in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten eigene Forschungszweige zu Parteien im Bundesstaat und zur Parlamentsforschung auf Länderebene etabliert. Trotz dieser großen Forschungsaktivität sind jedoch einige zentrale Fragen der Politikwissenschaft zum Zusammenspiel zwischen Wählern, Parteien, Parlamenten und Regierungen sowie deren Wirkung auf politischen Outputs und Outcomes weiterhin unbeantwortet. Dies ist, so das Argument dieses Beitrags, insbesondere der fehlenden Zusammenführung einzelner Literaturstränge und der noch unzureichenden empirischen Datenbasis geschuldet. Mittels einer Systematisierung des gegenwärtigen Literaturstands entwirft der Aufsatz ein Forschungsprogramm, das auf eine umfassende Analyse des politischen Willensbildungs- und Entscheidungsfindungsprozesses in den deutschen Bundesländern abstellt und Fragen der Responsivität und Rückkopplung systematisch in den Blick nimmt.
This article charts the rise of the ‘Alternative for Germany’ (Alternative für Deutschland or AfD) from its inception in late 2012 to its unexpectedly strong performance in the 2017 Federal election. In terms of the ‘inward’ aspect of Euroscepticism, the article considers the impact of the emergence of successively more hardline leaderships in 2015 and 2017, which led to a shift beyond opposition to aspects of the European integration process to a more profound critique of German society and politics. In terms of the ‘outward’ aspect, it assesses the significance of these developments in the wider debates around Euroscepticism and populism. The article concludes that the AfD’s Euroscepticism is now nested within an ideological profile that increasingly conforms to the template of an orthodox European right-wing populist party. It argues that the widely unanticipated level of electoral support for the AfD in the 2017 Federal elections and its status as the main opposition party in the Bundestag is a systemic shock and potential critical juncture in the development of the German party system and the contestation of European integration in the Federal Republic.
What influences parties’ issue attention towards immigration and integration? This study provides answers to this question by focusing on the party competition at the regional level in Germany, a country that has been strongly affected by the refugee crisis. Building on a novel data set which covers altogether 510 electoral manifestos during 108 federal and regional elections between 1990 and 2016, we assess the influence of party-specific, situational as well as structural factors on issue attention towards immigration and integration policies. Using descriptive statistics and regression analysis, we find that parties’ attention is significantly associated with citizens’ attention towards these issues. Furthermore, ideologically conflicting parties differ considerably in the share of their manifestos they devote to the issue. Interestingly, the electoral threat by populist radical right parties has no effect on the issue attention of mainstream competitors.
The good result of the recently formed Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was a striking outcome of the 2013 Federal Election. This article explores why AfD supporters chose this party at the 2013 Federal Election and at the 2014 European and eastern German State (Land) Elections. At the Federal Election the AfD's electorate was composed of two groups: a minority of instrumental issue-voters that were drawn to the AfD by its emphasis and positioning on the Euro crisis, and a majority of ‘late supporters’ that decided close to Election Day and were moved more by expressive motives, most notably xenophobic sentiments like those identified in other European countries as a main source of support for right-wing populist parties. The analysis of the subsequent elections shows that, paralleling developments in the AfD's public rhetoric, the Euro crisis ceased to be important for AfD support whereas xenophobic motives became more central.
Finding reliable and valid positions for political actors is of key importance to political scientists. In this paper we compare estimates obtained using the automated Wordscores and Wordfish techniques with estimates from the widely-used Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) as well as voter and expert placements. We estimate the positions of 254 manifestos across 33 elections in Germany and Denmark, two cases with very different textual data available. The paper contributes to the literature on automated content analysis by providing a comprehensive test of convergent validation, both in terms of number of cases analyzed and number of validation measures.
In both cases, Wordscores approximately replicates the CMP, voter and expert assessments of party positions, whereas Wordfish replicates the positions in the German manifestos. The results demonstrate that automated methods can produce valid estimates of party positions, but also that the appropriateness of each method hinges on the quality of the textual data. Additional analyses suggest that Wordfish requires both longer texts and a more ideologically charged vocabulary in order to produce estimates comparable to Wordscores.
This article examines the determinants of coalition formation on the local level. In addition to standard office- and policy-seeking variables, we incorporate the local institutional setting and the constraints on local coalition politics emerging from patterns of party competition at the superior level of the political system. We test our expectations on the basis of a dataset providing information on the characteristics of potential and formed coalitions in 29 German cities. The results show that – even on the local level, which is often described as less politicised – not only office-seeking variables but also the ideological positioning of parties are good predictors for local coalition formation in German cities. Additionally, our findings suggest that local political actors take the party affiliation of the directly elected mayor into account when forming coalitions in local councils. The findings imply that political actors on all levels of political systems try to maximise their payoffs and form coalitions accordingly.
Back H., Debus M., Muller J. and Back H. Regional government formation in varying multilevel contexts: a comparison of eight European countries, Regional Studies. Although governance in multilevel settings has become a prominent research field in political science, there are few comparative studies that focus on explaining sub-national coalition outcomes in such settings. This paper sets out to study regional government formation in eight European countries and it builds on a dataset that covers information on the policy preferences of parties drawn from regional election manifestos. The results show that parties at the regional level are likely to form congruent coalitions, that is, copying' the patterns of national government formation, and that they are more likely to do so in specific regional contexts.
Zusammenfassung??Das deutsche Regierungssystem wird als volles Zweiebenensystem konzipiert, in dem die Landesregierungen ?ber den Bundesrat bundespolitische Entscheidungskompetenzen haben und die Bildung der Landesregierungen f?r die Regierungs- und Oppositionsparteien im Bund deshalb bundespolitisch wichtig ist. Die Frage ist, ob sich ein systematischer Einfluss der Bundesparteien auf die Regierungsbildung in den L?ndern nachweisen l?sst. Die Frage wird mit indirekter Beweisf?hrung beantwortet. Selbst wenn zentrale, koalitionstheoretisch abgeleitete Determinanten der Regierungsbildung konstant gehalten werden, werden in den deutschen Bundesl?ndern A-Mehrheitskoalitionen aus Parteien, die auch im Bund regieren, oder B-Mehrheitskoalitionen aus Parteien, die im Bund nicht regieren, statt gemischten oder Minderheitsregierungen ?berzuf?llig h?ufig gebildet. Dabei wird f?r jede der 182 Regierungsbildungssituationen in den Bundesl?ndern von 1949 bis 2003 die tats?chlich gebildete Regierung in Beziehung gesetzt zu den jeweils m?glichen Regierungen.
Leaders of political parties often have to choose between conflicting objectives, such as influence on policy, control of the government, and support among the voters. This book examines the behaviour of political parties in situations where they experience conflict between two or more important objectives. The volume contains a theoretical introduction and case studies of party leaders in Germany, Italy, France and Spain as well as six smaller European democracies. Each case focuses on the behaviour of one of several parties in situations of goal conflict, such as the 'historic compromise' in Italy, the 1982 Wende in West Germany, the making of the new Swedish constitution in the 1970s, and the termination of the Austrian 'black-red' grand coalition. In their conclusions, the editors discuss how such leadership decisions can be understood and examine the causes of different choices among party leaders.
The cabinet Merkel III (2013–2017) faced several exogenous challenges that called for effective conflict management in this coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU and CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD). Following the SPD’s hesitation to join the ‘Grand Coalition’ in 2013, ideological and strategic differences between the three coalition parties continued to shape policy-making throughout the entire legislative period. Intra-coalition conflict peaked as a result of the increased influx of refugees from late summer 2015 onwards. Despite significant ideological differences and this exogenous shock, the coalition survived its entire legislative term. The present study takes this observation as its point of departure and analyses the mechanisms of conflict resolution that help to understand the stability of the coalition. Based on theoretical literature on delegation and coalition governance, we argue that strategic portfolio allocation and small informal arenas of conflict management played an important role. The relatively extensive coalition agreement, by contrast, was a weak institution since it was especially detailed in policy areas with low potential for conflict.
The 2017 German federal election was followed by a series of coalition talks that, since World War II, were unprecedented. After the exploratory talks between CDU/CSU, FDP and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen had failed, CDU/CSU and SPD started to open negotiations. This decision stood in straight opposition to what the Social Democrats had declared immediately after the election results had been publicized, which was not to be available for coalition talks. An analysis of the parties’ electoral platforms shows that the programmatic positions of CDU/CSU, FDP and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen were set widely apart and that a coalition of these four parties would have demanded heavy concessions from all of the coalition partners. CDU/CSU’s and SPD’s platforms were closer together, which made forming and entering a new Grand Coalition more likely than the originally discussed alliance. However, CDU/CSU and SPD differ much more from each other than is often portrayed by the media. Both parties had to agree to quite some compromises in order to obtain a governing majority as it is necessary in parliamentary democracies. [ZParl, vol. 49 (2018), no. 2, pp. S. 265 – 285]
This paper looks at German regional elections and evaluates the patterns of voting that can be observed in aggregate results and individual behaviour. In the first step, I summarize the characteristic features of political competition in the German multi-level system. I use elections held between 2013 and 2017 to illustrate contextual and election-specific factors that contribute to the observable patterns of voting. In a second step, I evaluate the possible cyclicality of second-order voting using individual data. Based on 139 state election surveys covering 1978 to 2016, I show that the decision-making of German voters changes systematically over the federal election cycle. More specifically, the effect of party identification on vote choice depends on the timing of the election, adding another dimension to the already multi-faceted relationship between Land elections and federal politics.
For a better understanding of coalition formation processes, researchers question whether or not coalitions on the national and sub-national levels are congruent and, if not, which factors trigger incongruence. This work aims to test the congruence hypothesis for the case of Germany. Germany is an important case for different reasons. First, the Länder chamber, the Bundesrat, is important also for a good part of the federal legislation. In order to avoid gridlock situations, Länder parties are confronted with strong incentives to form coalitions congruent to the federal level. Second, party systems in the Länder are largely similar to that on the federal level what is a precondition to form congruent governments. Third, on the other hand, also minor variation in party sizes can lead to very different structures. Given that, in Germany, minimal winning coalitions only are common, this variation is very likely to shrink congruence. Fourth, also policy factors might limit congruence. As different policy fields do matter to different degrees on the different levels, policy oriented parties should make different choices in the federal and the sub-national coalition games. This chapter seeks to investigate whether, empirically, the arguments for or against congruence prevail and what the results imply for the political system.
The Free Democratic Party's 2017 federal election campaign ended in triumph, just four years after the party's comprehensive defeat in the last election. This article examines the FDP's goals, strategic choices and performance in the Bundestag election and considers where the party goes from here.
What motivates political parties in the legislative arena? Existing legislative bargaining models stress parties’ office and policy motivations. A particularly important question concerns how parties in coalition government agree the distribution of cabinet seats. This article adds to the portfolio allocation literature by suggesting that future electoral considerations affect bargaining over the allocation of cabinet seats in multi-party cabinets. Some parties are penalised by voters for participating in government, increasing the attractiveness of staying in opposition. This ‘cost of governing’ shifts their seat reservation price – the minimum cabinet seats demanded in return for joining the coalition. Results of a randomised survey experiment of Irish legislators support our expectation, demonstrating that political elites are sensitive to future electoral losses when contemplating the distribution of cabinet seats. This research advances our understanding of how parties’ behaviour between elections is influenced by anticipation of voters’ reactions.
“Once we cannot organize opposition in the EU, we are then almost forced to organize opposition to the EU.” (Mair 2007, S. 7; kursive Hervorhebung im Originaltext). Zu diesem skeptischen Urteil kommt Peter Mair bezüglich des EU-Institutionengefüges und seiner Unfähigkeit, widerstreitende Interessen zu integrieren. Er argumentiert, dass systemstützende, themenbasierte Opposition – anders als auf nationalstaatlicher Ebene – zwangsläufig zu einer Anti-Systemhaltung führen müsse, da eine themenbasierte Opposition innerhalb der EU nicht möglich sei. Doch stimmt das? Am kritischen Fall der Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) zeigt sich, dass die „Eurokrise“ zwar Anlass, aber nicht Ursache ihrer Gründung war. Entscheidender ist die Entstehung einer neuen kulturellen Konfliktlinie (Bornschier 2012). Mairs Argument unterschätzt gesellschaftliche Veränderung als mögliche Radikalisierungsursache. Im Fall der AfD war die Politisierung des EU- und Eurothemas ein vorrübergehendes Phänomen. Die Europäische Integration ist Teil des auf der Ebene des Nationalstaates entstehenden Konfliktes über kosmopolitische Wertehaltungen.
Dieses Buch thematisiert die Herausforderung, mit der sich die Politik in Deutschland nach der Aufnahme einer historisch hohen Zahl von Flüchtlingen und in der Folge mit der Frage der Integration dieser Menschen in die Gesellschaft konfrontiert sieht. Die Rahmenbedingungen und Charakteristika des Regierens in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft werden entlang der fünf Themenfelder Politikmanagement, Parteien und Willensbildung, Wahlen und Wählen, wissenschaftliche Politikberatung und politische Bildung sowie Sprache und politische Kommunikation mit verschiedenen disziplinären Ansätzen diskutiert. Die Impulse mit ihren unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln schärfen das Verständnis für die anstehenden Herausforderung und skizzieren mögliche Lösungsansätze.
Der Inhalt
Politikmanagement in der Einwanderungsgesellschaft.- Parteien und Willensbildung im Spiegel der Integrationsdebatte.- Die Integrationsdebatte als Wahlkampfthema.- Wissenschaftliche Politikberatung und Politische Bildung zur Einwanderung.- Die Sprache der Einwanderungspolitik
Die Zielgruppen
Studierende, Lehrende und Wissenschaftler der Politikwissenschaft
Politikerinnen und Politiker
Journalistinnen und Journalisten
Die Herausgeber
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Christoph Bieber (Welker-Stiftungsprofessor für Ethik in Politikmanagement und Gesellschaft), Univ.-Prof. Dr. Andreas Blätte (Professor für Public Policy und Landespolitik), Univ.-Prof. Dr. Karl-Rudolf Korte (Professor für das Politische System der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und moderne Staatstheorien / Direktor der NRW School of Governance / Dekan der Fakultät für Gesellschaftswissenschaften), Dr. Niko Switek (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) gehören der NRW School of Governance und dem Institut für Politikwissenschaft an der Universität Duisburg-Essen an.
Anhand einer repräsentativen Bevölkerungsumfrage aus Baden-Württemberg werden Hintergründe und Motive der Unterstützung der AfD im Vorfeld der Bundestagswahl 2017 untersucht. Die Studie testet eine Reihe von Hypothesen, die sowohl strukturelle als auch einstellungsbezogene Faktoren berücksichtigen. Fehlende Parteibindungen machen Wähler für die AfD verfügbar, für Personen mit rechter ideologischer Identifikation ist sie besonders attraktiv. Der bei weitem stärkste Prädiktor ist jedoch eine negative Beurteilung der Leistungen der Exekutiven auf Bundes- und Landesebene. Weniger bedeutsam sind Wahrnehmungen mangelnder Eliten-Responsivität. Es gibt überdies Anzeichen, dass die AfD auch von Personen gewählt wird, welche die Demokratie nicht bedingungslos unterstützen. Erkennbar wird zudem eine ausgeprägte Resonanz zwischen nativistischen, insbesondere ethnozentrischen Einstellungen und der entsprechenden Rhetorik der Partei. Prozesspräferenzen, welche die liberalen Komponenten der Demokratie gering schätzen, hängen ebenfalls mit der Neigung zur AfD zusammen. Die in der öffentlichen Diskussion oft formulierte sozioökonomische Prekaritäts-These sowie eng gefasste Vorwürfe unzureichender Eliten-Responsivität greifen hingegen zu kurz.
This contribution applies the „strength of weakness“ argument to coalition negotiations in the German states. We investigate whether parties with internally disputed platforms are more successful in transferring their policy preferences into coalition agreements. In addition, we examine whether sub-national party branches that (have to) form a coalition rejected by the national party leadership are facing the pressure of performing particularly well in the coalition negotiations in order to justify the outcome of the coalition formation process against the national-level party. These expectations are tested on the basis of statements on the policy positions and coalition preferences made by party representatives before elections in Germany from 2006 to 2015 in combination with characteristics and results of the coalition negotiations on the German state level. The findings provide evidence that programmatically heterogeneous parties are able to achieve better policy compromises in coalition negotiations. However, there is no support for the hypothesis that parties at the state level forming a coalition which is unpopular with the national-level party can better enforce their policy positions in the negotiation process.
This book looks at the organization and strategy of state-wide parties from across some of the most important multi-layered countries in Western Europe. The volume provides the first systematic attempt to study the strategy of state-wide parties on the basis of the comparative literature on issue voting.
Tests systematically whether it is an electoral asset or a liability for a party to be responsible for government. If it is an asset, then the record of post-war elections should show the party in power recurringly successful in electoral terms. If it is a liability, then the record should show that the electoral tides sweeping a party into office at one election will sweep it out again at the next election. Considers the implications of the evidence for the understanding of party government.-from Authors
Deutschland war auf der Landkarte des europäischen Rechtspopulismus jahrzehntelang ein weißer Fleck. Mit Erstaunen und Irritation registrierte man hierzulande, wie sich seit den siebziger Jahren neu entstandene Rechtsparteien rings um unsherum breit machten. Ihre Anführer waren bald in aller Munde: Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jörg Haider, Silvio Berlusconi, Pim Fortuyn.
On the occasion of the Federal Election 2009, Germany experienced a drastic decline in turnout. In 2013, the most recent Federal Election, turnout was thus a political issue hotly debated in the media and the Social Democrats ran an explicit non-voter campaign. Nevertheless, turnout rates remained at a low level, and the election resulted in the second lowest turnout in the entire history of post-war Germany. At the same time the SPD, one of the traditionally cleavage-based parties in Germany, suffered equally dramatic losses in terms of electoral support in 2009 from which it did not recover in the succeeding election. While the sudden decline of the vote share of a cleavage-based party may cast doubt on previous findings of a relative stability of cleavage voting in Germany, the almost parallel decline in turnout points to a blind spot in the cleavage voting literature. This research has focused exclusively on the role of social cleavages in shaping choices between parties, and thus has neglected the possibility that cleavages erode due to a decline in electoral mobilisation of cleavage groups. The present article looks at the long-term and short-term changes in party choice and turnout in the social groups that traditionally formed the constituency of the main cleavage parties, the SPD and the CDU/CSU. In doing so, the article also examines whether and how these changes in party vote and electoral participation are related to cohort and period effects. Empirically, we show that a decline in the support for the SPD among the working class consists of both long-term and short-term components, but it does not lead to vote defection yet mostly to abstention from voting. Further it shows that the CDU/CSU is unaffected by the mobilisation problems that plague Social Democracy in Germany. However, first long-term effects are visible across birth cohorts. Younger core religious groups are increasingly opting for other parties.
When the reform of German federalism was enacted in 2006, the right of the second chamber, Bundesrat, to veto large parts of national legislation had long been identified as a dysfunctional element of the federal system. The need to compromise with an often opposition-controlled Bundesrat was perceived as hurting democratic principles and worsening Germany’s policy performance. Hence, a variety of constitutional amendments was adopted in 2006 to curb the veto threat. This paper sketches how the expansion of the Bundesrat veto emerged and how the reform tried to reduce it. Covering all federal legislation between 1978 and 2016 this paper then analyses the actual effects of the reform. It is shown that the veto threat has been reduced by around 17% but that it remains unchanged at around 65% in the area of tax law.
Scholars of coalition politics have increasingly begun to focus on conflict within coalitions. Here we examine the role of coalition agreements in managing intracoalitional conflict. We argue that there is a trade-off between making policy agreements at the coalition’s formation (e.g., by making very detailed policy platforms) and postponing the issue’s resolution by creating procedures for settling policy disputes. We argue that the trade-off is increasingly likely to be resolved in favor of relying on a formal dispute resolution mechanism when coalitions are ideologically heterogeneous and the coalition parties differ in size. We test our theory using data from the German Länder between 1990 and 2013. These data allow us to isolate the effects of the bargaining situation and ideology while holding the institutional context constant. The empirical results support our main argument: When intracoalition conflict is high, parties write shorter coalition contracts but are more likely to adopt procedures for conflict resolution.
For a better understanding of coalition formation processes, researchers question whether or not coalitions on the national and sub-national levels are congruent and, if not, which factors trigger incongruence. This paper aims to test the congruence hypothesis for the case of Germany. Germany is an important case for different reasons. First, the Länder chamber, the Bundesrat, is important also for a good part of the federal legislation. In order to avoid gridlock situations, Länder parties are confronted with strong incentives to form coalitions congruent to the federal level. Second, party systems in the Länder are largely similar to that on the federal level what is a precondition to form congruent governments. Third, on the other hand, also minor variation in party sizes can lead to very different structures. Given that, in Germany, minimal winning coalitions only are common, this variation is very likely to shrink congruence. Fourth, also policy factors might limit congruence. As different policy fields do matter to different degrees on the different levels, policy oriented parties should make different choices in the federal and the sub-national coalition games. This paper seeks to investigate whether, empirically, the arguments for or against congruence prevail and what the results imply for the political system.
Is the success of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) a protest phenomenon or the mobilization of a political potential? We test both hypotheses on the grounds of the German National Election Study 2013. The analysis reveals that disenchantment with party politics is indeed relatively high among the AfD voters. However, they also hold homogenous positions on the most relevant issues. Moreover, these positions have a significant
impact on the vote choice for the AfD, even when we control for voters’ disenchantment with party politics. This supports the idea of the party’s success being rooted in the mobilization of a neglected political potential rather than just being a protest phenomenon.
This book chapter provides an analysis of cabinet formation after the German election of 22 September 2013. It starts with the observation that the election of 2013 brought a radical change to the German postwar party system as the FDP disappeared from the Bundestag. Given the likely need for more coalitions across the traditional divide between centre-left and centre-right (for example, grand coalitions of CDU/CSU and SPD or new coalitions between CDU/CSU and Greens), the chapter focuses on mechanisms of conflict management. Based on the comparative literature on the issue, he analyses coalition governance in the new grand coalition under Merkel. After the traditional bargaining between party elites, the SPD conducted a vote of all party members for the ratification of the bargaining result. This was an insurance policy for the party leadership vis-à-vis its rank and file, a reassurance for the CDU/CSU that the SPD was really committed to the new coalition, and a relatively successful bargaining tactic on the part of the SPD as it lent credibility to the various 'red lines' formulated by the SPD prior to the negotiations. One key aspect of coalition governance was the allocation of portfolios. Both parties secured control of those ministries whose jurisdictions were crucial to their attempts to claim issue ownership vis-à-vis core voters. After some initial support for the grand coalition, the negotiations were accompanied by growing public scepticism. One key point was that the legislative strength of the new coalition would be overwhelming (with around 80 per cent of the seats in the Bundestag), and that the two opposition parties, the Greens and the Left Party, would be too weak to mount a sustained and effective parliamentary opposition. In addition, media commentators missed the ‘big projects’ which the new government, Merkel III, would tackle. However, the deal the parties agreed on in 2013 seemed more like a package of small, if socially costly, policy measures reminiscent of the collective result of log-rolling. It is also argued that the new coalition is in a precarious situation. Whether it will last its entire term (until 2017) will depend on a number of factors, especially any 'exogenous shocks' that it may be subjected to. In particular, however, it will depend on the parties' constant evaluation of the electoral risks arising from the coalition.
This article starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization 'winners' and 'losers' is expected to constitute potentials for political mobilization within national political contexts, the mobilization of which is expected to give rise to two intimately related dynamics: the transformation of the basic structure of the national political space and the strategic repositioning of the political parties within the transforming space. The article presents several hypotheses with regard to these two dynamics and tests them empirically on the basis of new data concerning the supply side of electoral politics from six Western European countries (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland). The results indicate that in all the countries, the new cleavage has become embedded into existing two-dimensional national political spaces, that the meaning of the original dimensions has been transformed, and that the configuration of the main parties has become triangular even in a country like France.
Research on government formation in parliamentary democracies is replete with theoretical arguments about why some coalitions form while others do not. Unfortunately, this theoretical richness has not led to the development of an empirical tradition that allows scholars to evaluate the relative importance of competing theories. We resolve this problem by applying an empirical framework that is appropriate for modeling coalition choice to evaluate several leading explanations of government formation. Our approach allows us to make conclusions about the relative importance of traditional variables relating to size and ideology and to assess the impact of recent new-institutionalist theories on our ability to explain and predict government formation.
Following conventional models of coalition formation, parties should prefer coalitions that have a parliamentary majority, preferably with few parties that are very similar in ideological terms. However, empirically, we observe astonishing systematic deviations from this prediction. In some countries, coalition formation can hardly be explained on the basis of the rational-choice paradigm. An example of this is the Dutch system of consociational democracy where we observe a prominent role of parties that represent the social pillars. In this article, we analyze coalition formation in the Dutch provinces over the last 20 years and supplement established theories of coalition formation by a consociational democratic perspective. In accordance with this perspective, we find that more inclusive coalitions as well as coalitions that include the three pillar parties are indeed more likely to be formed. However, we detect considerable temporal variation. Coalition formation in the Dutch provinces can increasingly be explained with the help of conventional models, whereas norm-based deviations are less common than in the past. We attempt a pragmatist interpretation of this change. More generally, we join a recent move in the literature showing how more fine-tuned explanations can lead to a more complete picture of coalition formation.
Within less than two years of being founded by disgruntled members of the governing CDU, the newly formed Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has already performed extraordinarily well in the 2013 general election, the 2014 EP election, and a string of state elections. Highly unusually by German standards, it campaigned for an end to all efforts to save the euro and argued for a reconfiguration of Germany’s foreign policy. This seems to chime with the recent surge in far-right voting in Western Europe, and the AfD was subsequently described as right-wing populist and Europhobe.
Do sub-national parties reproduce the programmatic orientation of the party as a whole? Or are they able to adjust their programmatic orientation to their sub-national electorate? I seek to answer these questions based on the policy positions of German sub-national parties and survey data on voters' positions. Referring to these very similar parties – which all have to commit themselves to certain policy positions in the run-up to state elections – allows for a controlled analysis of sub-national parties' autonomy. The analyses reveal that the regional context does play a role; voters' preferences and the unemployment rate appear to influence the dynamics of party positions. However, the results also show that regional branches of the same party change their positions in a similar way and also seek not to distance themselves too far from the national party line. This indicates that German sub-national parties appear first and foremost to be regional party branches of national parties.
We examine the extent to which governments consider the role of bicameral conflict resolution procedures in legislative agenda-setting. We argue that governments may use these institutions to promote policy change in the event of bicameral conflict, especially when facing uncertainty over bicameral policy preferences. We test our arguments using comprehensive original data on forty years of German legislation and find that bicameral conflict resolution committees play a more sophisticated role in governmental policy making than previously suspected.
Studies on coalition formation assume that political parties have two major goals: they aim to maximise office and policy payoffs. This paper shows that decision-making in the government formation game is also determined by the voters’ coalition preferences. Since the coalition formation process is not a one-shot game, parties have to take the coalition preferences of the electorate into account when they evaluate the utility of potential coalitions. If parties fail to comply with the coalition preferences of voters, they are likely to be penalised in future elections. The argument is tested by an analysis of government formation in the 16 German states between 1990 and 2009. The results support the argument: the formation of coalitions – at least in the German states – is not only determined by office- and policy-seeking behaviour of political parties, but also by the preferences of voters regarding their preferred outcome of the coalition game.
Most political parties operate on several territorial levels, but we have only limited theoretical understanding of multi-level party dynamics. This article presents a delegation framework for studying the interaction between the national leadership and regional branches in state-wide parties. Assuming a principal-agent relationship, the national leadership can obtain benefits from delegating tasks to a regional branch, but also faces possible costs in doing this. The rules and conventions regulating the multi-level interaction in parties are possible mechanisms by which to control the actions and policies of regional branches. These include formal party rules, informal party procedures and conventions, and state laws affecting party organizations. The framework provides an agenda and hypotheses for empirical research, research that should focus on crisis situations in parties, on what regional branches cannot do (instead of just documenting the activities of branches), and on the role of parties in shaping state laws and regulations.
This article argues that the mode of decision making within federal sub-units affects the organizational patterns of intergovernmental relations (IGR) through which regional actors engage in cross-jurisdictional co-operation. In a nutshell, majoritarian executive-legislative relations tend to weaken the institutionalization of intergovernmental arrangements (IGAs), while power-sharing executive-legislative relations tend to facilitate it.This is, first, because one-party majority cabinets tend to increase ideological differences between the sub-units. Secondly, complete government alternations—which are less likely given coalition or oversized governments—strongly alter actors' interest constellations over time, thereby increasing the costs of maintaining stable intergovernmental structures. Thirdly, the heavy impact of a potential electoral loss induces politicians to shift the blame to the other governments, thereby undermining the potential for cross-boundary co-operation. Finally, autonomy losses caused by intergovernmental co-operation are higher for parties which govern alone when compared to coalition governments. Based on a typology of power-limiting democracies, which distinguishes federal systems along their respective executive-legislative relations, Spain and Switzerland are selected as cases. The analysis indicates that the much more power-concentrating executive-legislative relations within the Spanish regions and the power-sharing executive-legislative relations within the Swiss cantons help to explain why Spanish regional actors resort to ad hoc co-ordination within a weakly institutionalized environment instead of establishing strong IGAs as the Swiss regional actors.
Coalition theory typically treats political parties involved in government formation in parliamentary democracies as if they were unconstrained players in an institution-free world. Yet actual coalition options are often severely constrained by institutional arrangements and prior commitments. We develop a systematic account of different constraints on government formation and examine their frequency across 10 parliamentary democracies. Hypothetical and empirical examples demonstrate how a small number of constraints can dramatically reduce the range of coalition options and redistribute bargaining power among political parties. More adequate coalition theories need to recognize the effects of such constraints and to build on the theoretical lessons of the neoinstitutionalist approach to legislative behavior.
The formal study of coalitions is active in Europe, whereas the formal study of political institutions preoccupies American scholars. We seek to integrate aspects of these two bodies of research. For nearly thirty years models of coalition government have focused more on coalition than on government. Thus, these theories are essentially extensions of the theory of voting in legislatures. Unlike passing a bill or @'dividing a dollar,@' however, forming a government is not the end of politics but the beginning. During the formation process, rational actors must entertain expectations of subsequent government behavior. We provide a model of rational expectations with an emphasis on the credibility of the policy promises of prospective government partners as determined by the allocation of portfolios in the new government. Portfolio allocation becomes the mechanism by which prospective coalitions make credible promises and so inform the expectations of rational agents in the coalition formation process.