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Presents a study which examined the role of the mass media in the political process in Germany. Discussion of issue selection and the selective emphasis on certain aspects of an issue as central to the process of opinion formation by the media; Content analysis of press editorials in Germany between 1994 and 1998; Findings of the study.

Drawing on the characterisation of the European Council as an arena for 'integrative bargaining', the paper shows the importance of two factors that influence whether a country can act as 'first among equals' or ('Primus Inter Pares') in a system designed to respect national sovereignty: alignment among the 'Big Three', and 'voice opportunities' for smaller member states. We support this argument with view of Germany's divergent role in two recent international crises - the 2011 uprisings in Libya and the violent protests in Ukraine in 2014/2015. On the basis of these findings, we conclude that the ability to create consent among all Member States is both a key prerequisite and a serious challenge for effective leadership in EU foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the height of the migration crisis (between autumn 2015 and summer 2016), Germany's role in EU migration policy and EU-Turkey affairs went through a period of change. Searching for effective instruments, the German government attempted to lead European policies, managing the crisis first through an 'open door' approach and then through an agreement with Turkey. The notion of 'Merkel's migration deal' and a 'German Alleingang' became prominent in political, public and academic debate. With the aim of assessing whether or not these terms correctly describe Germany's role, this article unpacks the complex Ankara-Berlin-Brussels triangle. It examines how structural and institutional power influenced the German role. We argue that, under extreme time pressure, Germany took refuge in a constrained type of leadership. Positions of other EU member states and institutions, as well as domestic factors (social tension, public opinion and the rise of the far right) inhibited the leadership potential. Additionally, the paper elaborates on differences between the EU's internal and external crisis management. In external migration policy, German leadership took the form of a flexible 'institutional directoire', through which Germany successfully negotiated an EU-Turkey statement on migration, in consultation with EU institutions and selected national leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the peculiarities of the territorial dimension of Christian Democracy in Germany is the fact that it is represented by not one, but two parties: the CDU and the Bavarian CSU. This article focuses on the CSU and discusses the pressures for transformation that it has been subjected to, by focusing on the question of whether it can still be considered as a Volkspartei. The article disaggregates this term around the notions of a majority party (Smith), office-holding party (Fröhlich), membership party (Wiesendahl), cross-class party (Nipperdey) and Kirchheimer's catch-all party. The paper concludes that the CSU remains a Volkspartei, albeit with some qualifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grand coalitions are highly debated in Germany, where large parts of the media and the political world expect negative effects of grand coalitions on parliamentary party systems. This did not happen either with Merkel's grand coalition resulting from the 2005 election or with other grand coalitions in the German Länder. On the contrary, only the SPD suffered heavy losses in 2009. Most experts agree that those losses were caused by the SPD's participation in the grand coalition. Still, it remains largely unclear how Merkel's grand coalition affected the 2009 federal election. To close that gap, this paper thoroughly analyses the effects of Merkel's grand coalition by looking at a crucial but mostly neglected factor in that regard, the evaluation of the grand coalition by voters. It can be shown that the CDU/CSU was mostly unaffected whereas the SPD suffered from being perceived as the less influential party in Merkel's grand coalition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the role of candidate orientations, issue orientations and party identification in shaping voting behaviour in the 2009 federal election. In line with the notion that the 2009 campaign was rather 'issue-less' and candidate-centred, the analysis shows that candidate orientations were more effective as predictors than issue orientations. Moreover, preferences for Chancellor Angela Merkel and her challenger, the Social Democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier, exhibited somewhat different effects. Taking a closer look at Chancellor Merkel, the analysis demonstrates that she had become much more popular during her first term. Given this increase in popularity and the substantive effect of candidate preference on vote choice, Merkel was an electoral asset for the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) in 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, it is argued that Germany has undergone a series of large-scale institutional changes under 11 years of Social Democratic governance, weakening all of its core Continental principles and effectively triggering a process of regime hybridisation. Elements of these reforms include the recalibration of its labour market governance system, as well as a two-fold path-correction toward (a) a Nordic ideal type through the introduction of an activation pillar, a comprehensive, state-led childcare strategy, and a desire to improve lifelong learning opportunities, and (b) a liberal welfare ideal type through the curtailment of status-preserving privileges, increased benefit conditionality, and (more hesitantly) a move toward a relaxation of employment protection legislation, especially for labour market 'outsiders'. As the path corrections toward the Nordic ideal type came far too late in the Social Democrats' reign, the party leadership lost the trust of many voters, its party base, and the union movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution introduces the development of German party competition and coalition politics in recent decades on the one hand and the latest techniques for estimating the preferences of political actors on the other. It argues that, for reasons of social change, the preferences of the electorate were reshaped and political actors therefore had to adopt programmatic changes. In addition, the establishment of a new socialist party in the eastern German states, and since 2005 also in the western part of Germany, resulted in new coalition strategies for the 'traditional' political parties, which are discussed between and within the parties. Researchers can apply various methods to test what programmatic position political actors adopted and whether they changed their programmatic orientation over time. The paper discusses the advantages and drawbacks of the major strategies in estimating preferences of political actors and provides an overview of the contributions to this issue of German Politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a method based on the CMP data to identify parties' ideological signals. Although our approach uses the same data as others, our method is different in that we distinguish the methods for the directional and proximity models which have long been relevant for the theoretical literature. We apply our method for all German Bundestag parties between 1949 and 2005. One problem with policy preferences is that various - and sometimes only slightly deviating - approaches lead to rather different results. Thus, we test our method in terms of its robustness using the Jackknife method. We also show confidence intervals around policy positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the effects of the first step of the reform of German federalism on economic policy-making. It turns out that the overall ratio of bills needing Bundesrat approval to all bills decreases substantially, but the necessity of Bundesrat approval for key decisions in economic policy is unlikely to decrease due to the reform (with the exception of health care reforms). Furthermore, it is argued that even if the reform were to reduce the need of Bundesrat approval to a larger extent than expected here, the permanent electoral campaign in which German governments find themselves continues to make coherent and far-reaching reforms difficult. Therefore, the politics of German economic policy are unlikely to change fundamentally in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to analyse the existence of political milieus in the eastern and western German electorate by using the concepts of lifestyle and social milieu. After introducing these ideas a theoretical approach will be taken which integrates them by pointing out their similarities and differences. Finally, empirical analyses of lifestyle groups and social milieus in the eastern and western German population will be carried out with the aim of ascertaining the existence of political social milieus in reunified Germany. The results indicate that the German electorate to some extent is still characterised by political milieus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing the careers of members of the Bundestag Standing Committee for Labour and Social Affairs, the paper demonstrates that the ties between social politicians and social policy organisations such as trade unions, faith-based social policy organisations, independent charity organisations, works councils and social insurance institutions have become blurred. Since the 1990s social politicians have become more focused on political careers in the party and in parliament than on social policy. The new social politicians are party politicians who have distanced themselves from the interest groups. The qualitative change in parliamentary personnel is explained by changes in electoral politics, parties and interest groups. The author argues that the weakening linkages confirm contemporary research results on change in German neo-corporatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A primary challenge facing both immigrants and German society more generally is immigrants' integration into the wider social, economic and political community, including the development of their political attitudes and behaviour in the host country. This paper examines how one aspect of the immigrant experience - individuals' educational experiences - has influenced the development of immigrants' political attitudes and behaviour. Twenty-five in-depth interviews conducted in 2002 with second-generation Turks and Yugoslavs living in Berlin illuminate how individuals' educational experiences in German schools influence the development of their political attitudes and behaviour. Survey data from the German Socio-economic Panel (GSOEP) are then used to test specific hypotheses concerning the relationship between education and various political attitudes and behaviour. Results suggest that, while interviewees reported numerous negative experiences in German schools and often used these experiences to form unfavourable opinions about government policies, quantitative analyses reveal that German education has generally benefited the political engagement of immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic discussions have increasingly attested to the fact that state governments in the German Bundesrat represent partisan interests more than state-specific interests. This view seems to be confirmed by recent developments in which opposition parties exploit the Bundesrat to block the projects of the federal government. This contrasts with the behaviour of state governments in the earlier years of the Federal Republic, which were characterised to a greater extent by more heterogeneous interests. Using roll-call vote data in the Bundesrat, this article investigates to what extent preferences of the state governments are heterogeneous. More concretely, item response models are utilised to examine the dimensionality of the policy preference constellation. The results show that, besides the partisan left-right dimension, there was another dimension at work in the 1950s. The analysis of the roll-call data after German reunification shows, by contrast, the strong growth of relevance of the first partisan dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constituency campaigns are multidimensional and complex: parties and candidates are deeply entangled, and, at least in mixed-member electoral systems, local constituency campaigns are embedded within national party campaigns. Recent discussions have focused on aspects of campaign change in European democracies, especially disentanglement in terms of individualisation, personalisation, and/or localisation. This study contributes to the discussion both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, three dimensions ('faces') of constituency campaigns are differentiated: organisational partyness, vertical integration, and communicative personalisation. This threefold differentiation allows for a more precise analysis of campaign patterns by differentiating party-candidate (organisation, communication) and intra-party (vertical integration) aspects. Constituency campaigns in the 2005, 2009, and 2013 German federal elections are empirically examined. The analysis explains why candidates decide for one or another campaign pattern. These three faces are empirically distinct as well. Furthermore, we argue that parties remain vital for the organisation of campaigns despite a decline in centralisation. Addressing the communicative face, the analysis shows that candidate-related issues are important, but a mix of party- and candidate-related communication gains importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few decades, independent local lists in German municipalities have become serious competitors to political parties. However, despite their wide-spread presence and success, party researchers have largely ignored this phenomenon. Empirical evidence concerning the attitudes of their members towards political parties is rare. Thus far, it remains unclear whether their self-described image as non-parties or anti-parties is restricted to the sphere of local politics or accompanies a general rejection of parties in federal politics. First, the article conceptualises anti-partyism and proposes an analytical distinction between their intensity and related political level. It then analyses the consequences of different patterns of local politics and group characteristics as well as individual determinants to explain the degree of anti-party sentiment. This study improves our understanding of independents and whether they promote party democracy or are a product of political dissatisfaction. Based on a cross- sectional postal survey, multi-level regression models are used to test the hypoth- eses. The results show that anti-partyism is particularly strong towards party politics at the local level, whereas the general legitimacy of party democracy is not questioned in federal politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the transition from the political sphere to highly paid and attractive private and public sector positions a common phenomenon for legislators? If so, which variables determine these career moves? To answer these questions, the following variables are utilised: (1) the expertise gathered in certain committees, (2) strong professional networks resulting from a high position in party and legislature, (3) a business-friendly ideology, (4) the deteriorating party support and networking base indicated by a failed re-nomination, and lastly (5) the political success in winning elections. To comprehensively assess these factors, this study makes use of a new dataset that comprises information on the political positions as well as the professional status of 646 former German MPs who left the Bundestag between 1998 and 2009. Using probit regression analyses, it is shown that a higher hierarchical position in parliament and party and acquired expertise influence the probability of subsequently holding a more attractive private or public sector position. Moreover, the way in which legislators leave parliament -- be it due to failed nomination, a scandal or failed re-election --serves as a reliable predictor for the status of subsequent employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using new data for the 1977–2012 period, this article shows that dealignment has halted during the last decade amongst older and better educated West German voters, and that party identification is now more widespread than it was in the 1990s in the east. For voters who identified with one of the relevant parties at the time of the 2013 election, their vote choice was more or less a foregone conclusion, as candidates and issues played only a minor role for this group. A detailed analysis of leftist voters shows that supporters of the Greens, the Left, and the SPD have broadly similar preferences but diverging partisan identities. Even amongst western voters of the Left, most respondents claim to be identifiers. This suggests that the fragmentation of the left is entrenched, and that ‘agenda’ policies have triggered a realignment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most accounts of coalition voting are based on instrumental reasoning. However, coalition voting might also be the result of expressive motivations. Using the case of the FDP, this article studies the impact of a varying degree of coalition voting in the German federal elections of 2009 and 2013. According to theories of instrumental coalition voting, there should have been more ‘threshold insurance voting’ at the 2013 election, as the FDP was actually in danger of not crossing the threshold. Yet it is found that there was considerably less coalition voting in 2013 than in the 2009 election. The analysis suggests that a more comprehensive account of coalition voting is needed that considers not only instrumental reasoning but also expressive coalition voting. Taking into account expressive motivations for coalition voting helps to explain the tremendous decline of the FDP vote share in the 2013 German federal election. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Given the rise of EU-scepticism in Germany and elsewhere, spatial models suggest that the SPD and the CDU/CSU have incentives to move towards a more critical position about integration. However, mainstream parties have developed a pro-integration reputation over several decades so it is difficult for them to adopt a stance reflecting outright opposition to Europe's integration. A comparison of party positions in 2008 and 2013 shows that the SPD hardly changed its policy stances on EU issues, whereas the CDU/CSU moved noticeably to a more EU-critical stance. However, situating German parties within the West European universe of party families shows that both remain quite positive about integration. The upshot of this is to illustrate the ‘blind corner’ of party representation on integration issues in the German party system which created electoral opportunities for the Euro-sceptic AfD. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the formation of the German AfD in spring 2013, political scientists have discussed whether the AfD can be classified as a populist party. Despite the split of the party in summer 2015 leading to this characterisation becoming uncontested, the question remains whether the AfD was populist from its inception. This article demonstrates that distinguishing between the tactical and strategic agendas of the party solves this conundrum. While the AfD seldom applied populist discourse in its official manifestos, its tactical agenda was undoubtedly framed by populism. Ironically, it has been the ideologically moderate economist wing that has applied populist discourse in combination with its critique of the euro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the e-campaigning activities of political actors in Germany, the Wahl-O-Mat has emerged as a popular ‘non-party’ online tool which has been used by millions of voters before elections in Germany. An analysis of the users can provide information about the characteristics of people resorting to this and other types of online pre-election tools. Based on an application-specific approach, hypotheses about the users are developed in light of the uses and gratification theory, taking into consideration normative expectations associated with the rise of the Internet. Whether the Wahl-O-Mat helps fulfilling these expectations is analysed by drawing (1) on data generated by an online exit survey of the Wahl-O-Mat users and (2) on datasets of the German Longitudinal Election Study 2009. The findings show that users of the Wahl-O-Mat largely belong to a group of young and politically interested voters who resort primarily to the Internet to collect political information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we attempt to examine what has happened to the Civic Culture paradigm in the past 50 years with particular focus on Germany. We first discuss the impact of the research and its core findings for the Federal Republic. Second, we focus on the issue of ‘inner unity’. Third, we present data on the development of unified Germany's political culture since the 1990 unification. We examine the influence over time of the major explanatory variables that have been central to post-unification culture research: socialisation or the effect of the socialist past, the contrasting economic experiences of both regions during the early decades of their democratic existence and the role of identity politics in shaping each region's view of each other. Finally, this article contends that in spite of the cultural differences there is a consensus on the institutions, processes and values of political democracy in the unified Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contrary to most other OECD countries, the German labour market remained almost unaffected by the consequences of the global financial crisis and experienced a strong and steady recovery. Thus, after their victory in the elections of 2009, the economic conditions for the bourgeois parties to shape labour market policy according to their preferences were rather favourable. After exploring the causes of the German ‘employment miracle’, this article summarises the relevant labour market policies introduced by the black–yellow coalition. We argue that, apart from some important exceptions, the second Merkel government did not pursue a decidedly market–liberal policy agenda. Instead, primarily due to the low problem load, the government mainly readjusted some of the existing policy instruments. Therefore, German labour market policy between 2009 and 2013 can rather be described as an administration of the inherited ‘employment miracle’ than an active pursuit of a discrete policy agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Unlike national elections, subnational levels of politics have rarely been the subject of research. The small number of investigations stem from the field of psephology. While these have supported the assumption that the national level exerts a time-dependent impact on regional voting behaviour, election campaigning's time-dependency has yet to be investigated. Against this backdrop, this article offers a unique longitudinal and quantitative investigation of election campaigns in Germany's federal states. Using campaign managers' perceptions as a basis, it discusses time-relevant effects on electoral campaigning with regard to the degree of regionalisation, emotionalisation, and personalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses how German citizens' national identities are linked to their belief systems regarding foreign and security policy. Previous research has pointed out that citizens' belief systems are not unconstrained, but organised hierarchically. Especially domain-specific predispositions have been shown to structure policy attitudes. Against the backdrop of the prominence national history is granted in public discourse, the article argues that in Germany national identities influence both predispositions and attitudes concerning foreign and security policy. Using data from a representative telephone survey of German adults, a structural equation model is used to test this hypothesis. The results show that different types of national identities have distinct effects on domain-specific predispositions and attitudes towards the German participation in the ISAF mission in Afghanistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German Federal Network Agency (FNA) was established in 2005 as multi-utilities regulator thereby creating Germany's first energy regulator. It maintains a quite exceptional position in the landscape of German agencies because of its far-reaching independence from political influence. This independence represents an empirical puzzle, because in Germany no comprehensive agencification of the federal administration can be observed and independent agencies are rather an exception than a rule. This article explores whether this puzzle can be plausibly solved by the approach of institutional isomorphism. It argues that the German government faced informal pressure from the European Commission and its endeavour to build a network of European energy regulators at the European level. Furthermore, independent regulatory agencies increasingly became a kind of guiding model in the utilities sector. Therefore, mechanisms of coercive and mimetic isomorphism can be seen as plausible explanations of the agency's independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A range of empirical studies has shown that candidates' physical attractiveness can substantially influence the outcome of political elections. This applies to different countries, different electoral systems, and different levels of political systems, and equally affects simple direct or list candidates and front-runners. However, no previous investigation using actual election results has been made into whether candidates' attractiveness also has an effect under the conditions of a presidential electoral system. Theoretical reasons can be formulated that suggest attractiveness is ineffective under these circumstances. In order to clarify this point empirically, we analysed the 2009 North Rhine-Westphalia mayoral elections. Yet the results of the analyses clearly show that candidates' attractiveness has a substantial influence. Taking into account earlier findings, the influence of physical attractiveness in political elections appears to be resistant, to a large degree, to varying constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German grand coalition's track record with regard to managing the financial crisis is mixed. The government has spent enormous amounts of money to prevent a breakdown of the banking system and to cushion the effects of the recession. It was at least partially successful as these programmes indeed prevented collapses of banks as well as bank runs, kept unemployment relatively low and somewhat mitigated the recession. Nonetheless, at least some of the crisis policies lacked coherence, particularly with regard to the bank rescue packages. The reason is that even in the face of a systemic banking crisis and a GDP decline of 5 per cent, programmatic differences between the coalition partners have not disappeared and became manifest in government policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the role of small parties in the German party system. It thus attempts to make a contribution to a largely under-researched topic in the existing literature. The goal is to determine the influence and ultimately the pivotal role of small parties over time both federally and in each Land (1949–2010). For that purpose we develop a five-point ‘opportunity structure’ scale. During the heyday of West Germany's two-and-a-half-party system (from the early 1960s to the early 1980s) the FDP was not just the main small party but the pivotal kingmaker at least federally, deciding which of the major parties (CDU/CSU or SPD) would be in government. Since then the Greens and later the PDS/die Linke have also become durable small parties and play an important role in the government formation process. The analysis shows that based on our measure the Greens have at least equalled if not surpassed the FDP as the country's most influential small party since they emerged on the political scene in the early 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses some of the most important aspects covered in the articles published within the issue about German politics and looks at their implications for the future of German party democracy. It considers the rising levels of volatility, the shifting role of the mass media in campaigns and the transformation of the German party system(s) as the most important aspects. According to the author, the media performance of the major candidates became a major factor of the campaigns. The lack of a clear mandate of incoming governments is also noted.

The economic crisis hit Germany hard before the 2009 Bundestag election. Against this background the extent of economic voting in this particular election is analysed. As economic perceptions are often believed to be important determinants of voting behaviour the following questions are addressed in this article. Are perceptions of the voters' personal and the general economic situation influenced by the economic crisis and thus worse than in previous election years? How do these perceptions impact on the decision to vote in 2009? What effect do attributions of the government's responsibility for the economic situation have on economic voting models and how do they interact with other predictors? Finally, did economic evaluations affect the decision to vote in favour of the parties of the old government (CDU/CSU and SPD) or the new government (CDU/CSU and FDP), respectively? Answers to these questions are provided by an analysis of the data of the 2009 German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the reasons for the rise and stabilisation of the Free Democrats, the Greens and the Left Party as long-term actors in the German party system. It explains why they have become more electorally relevant in recent years and also analyses what effect this is having on the dynamics of everyday political life in Germany. It analyses the bases of their support as well as their future prospects, before concluding with a discussion of their impact on the German party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the 2009 German federal election campaign with specific emphasis on the three categories of actors that play key roles in contemporary election campaigns - parties and their candidates, the mass media, and the voters. Mainly aiming at a theoretically informed comprehensive description, the article addresses some key themes of the recent literature on electioneering. The Bundestag election on 27 September 2009 was preceded by a campaign that lacked drama. There were several reasons for the absence of a more polarised campaign, not least the fact that CDU/CSU and SPD had been tied together in a Grand Coalition and had to deal with massive political challenges. Against the background of an unclear picture painted by the media, the feasibility and likelihood of various types of government coalitions were dominant topics of the campaign. The CDU/CSU in many respects had an edge over the SPD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article uses a thick synthetic analytical framework, derived from the established coalition literature to examine the process of coalition formation in the context of the German party system at the time of the 2009 federal election. It argues that increasing party system fragmentation and fluidity are long-term effects of the critical changes that took place between 1983 and the mid-1990s. These changes have shifted coalition power away from the smaller parties, and in particular the FDP, and towards the two Volksparteien. In terms of the coalition game, the article argues that outcomes cannot be explained by pure office-seeking but that these motives do become important once the desire to avoid unnecessary co-ordination costs, achieve ideological adjacency and reduce ideological range to a minimum has been satisfied. The article concludes by asserting that, rather than being a re-constitution of the default coalition model in Germany, the logic of the 2009 Black-Yellow coalition is consistent with more recent coalition games and therefore is a reflection of change rather than continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the election of seventeenth Bundestag in Germany on September 27, 2009. He relates the effect of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 on Germany, like most other developed countries. He says that despite the crisis, the campaign in the run-up to the election was almost characterized as being uneventful and lacking in controversial issue. He notes that the 2009 campaign was unusual as the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats had been in a coalition with each other. Some historic results of the election are discussed.

As a contribution to the 'de-parliamentarisation' debate, this article discusses the Europeanisation of the Bundestag by focusing on parliamentary party groups and their policy experts. In the German 'working parliament', these units are focal points for coordinating policymaking. By adding the explanatory power of 'belief systems' and, more generally, of 'heuristics' to theories of new institutionalism, this explanatory study reveals that although new institutionalism frameworks have served as rather good guidelines for explaining why German MPs have backed off scrutinising the government and co-governing in EU policymaking, they can be further improved by explicitly integrating elements of cognitive theory. The study empirically draws on elite interviews with MPs and their staff. These interviews offer insights into heuristics which serve to diminish information overload and which help MPs to cope with trade-offs and conflicts between EU issues and programmatic positions that point back to national party affiliations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past 20 years, Germany has witnessed a remarkable expansion in renewable energy production due to the introduction and further development of a feed-in-tariff model (FITM). This comprehensive and rapid policy change is surprising given the many veto points in Germany's political system and the fact that a powerful alliance objected to an expansion of renewable energy (RE). To explain this puzzle, this study relies on insights from historical institutionalism and policy analysis. I argue that historical contingency and critical juncture opened a window of opportunity for the pro-RE alliance in the late 1980s. Policy entrepreneurs subsequently used the opportunity to advance the FITM. Once introduced, this institution developed a self-reinforcing economic dynamic. Policy entrepreneurs in the parliament and the Ministry for the Environment translated economic gains into political leverage, which was crucial to defend the FITM from counterattacks in the following years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the relationship between the activities of think tanks and the development of the party-programmatic discourse of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). It addresses the years between 1994 and 2005 during which the SPD underwent a programmatic revision resulting in the adaptation of 'Third Way' Social Democracy. Description and analysis of the interaction of the various policy field stakeholders establish what it is that a number of specific think tanks did and whether what they did was policy-relevant. The study, based on interviews with relevant stakeholders and document analysis, comes to the conclusion that a number of think tanks contributed to the process of bringing about significant change in policy objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, collective memories of the Nazi period and the Holocaust have influenced greatly the Federal Republic of Germany. Despite fears that such progressive memories would decline after unification, the last twenty years have witnessed the institutionalisation of this memory regime. More generally, coming to terms with this past has been a constant political and cultural dynamic since 1945, even if the intensity of this process increased after the big debates of the 1980s. The last decade, however, has witnessed the development of a more pluralistic memory regime in the Berlin Republic, with collective memories of the East German dictatorship and, more importantly, the long-dormant memory of German suffering competing with memory of the Holocaust for visibility and influence. This article concludes with some speculation about the future of collective memories in Germany in light of evidence that the phase of intensive memory work may be coming to an end. The long-unmasterable past may be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of path dependence identifies sources of institutional stability and change. It emphasises the importance of early, contingent events and increasing returns over time to explain patterns of institutional persistence. Used to describe the evolution of the procedural practices of the German Bundestag, this theory points to the long-term importance of the consensus that developed early in the 1950s among the floor leaders of three dominant parties, which is in stark contrast to the absence of such inter-party consensus in the early years of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. Path dependence identifies factors endogenous to the institution to explain how the institution responds to external shocks, such as the entry of new parties. When the Greens and the PDS entered the Bundestag, the established parties responded by accepting their vigorous exercise of minority rights and they accepted the established practice of managing these rights by inter-party consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To social constructivists, West German Ostpolitik, as implemented under the social-liberal government of Chancellor Willy Brandt in the early 1970s, is an excellent example of norms and identities influencing foreign policy. According to constructivists, Ostpolitik involves a continuous social process in which decision-makers are increasingly guided by norms such as 'peace', 'reconciliation' and 'Europeanness'. However, constructivist analyses of Ostpolitik remain too abstract to answer the question why West German reunification policy was first put on an international sidetrack, before it subsequently took the initiative in international detente and caused national and international political commotion. Only when the constructivist emphasis on the influence of norms is linked to more traditional decision-making models of bureaucratic and government politics, and their focus on political interests, does it become clear that the answer lies in the dynamics of the continuous political struggle between Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a new approach for estimating the policy positions of political actors in the German multi-party policy space. The approach consists of two steps, 'smart tagging' in the data generation process and Bayesian factor analysis in the estimation process. 'Smart tagging' relates the statements of political parties and governments to the keywords of German federal legislation, which we use to estimate the policy positions in portfolio-specific n-dimensional policy spaces. Our G-LIS approach (German 'LexIconSpace') provides several advantages for scholars evaluating policy-seeking theories, in particular by providing context-related variation of policy positions across portfolios and over time. Our findings for the portfolio of 'labour and social policy' reveal a two-factor solution which unfolds a latent 'resource' and 'value' dimension in Germany during the period from 1961 to 2009. We find changes in the policy positions of German political parties and governments, which existing approaches can hardly identify in n-dimensional spaces under the specification of the error term for each dimension and actor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The statistical analysis of political texts has received a prominent place in the study of party politics, coalition formation and legislative decision making in Germany. Yet we still lack a thorough understanding of the conditions under which such analysis produces valid estimates of policy positions. This article examines the properties of the word scaling method 'Wordfish' and uses the technique to estimate party positions in Germany. Through Monte Carlo simulations, we investigate the effects of the choice of texts on party position estimates, including the number of documents included in the analysis and their length. Moreover, we present guidelines on how to process linguistic information for political scientists interested in using the technique, focusing specifically on German texts. Finally, we present an analysis of the German party system from 1969-2005 using the Wordfish algorithm. We demonstrate the robustness of the algorithm to extract left-right positions for various subsets of words, but show that agenda effects dominate when estimating a long-time series if the entire manifesto corpus is analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a broad range of research in comparative politics, political parties are conceptualised as unitary actors with consistent preferences. We depart from this sometimes accurate, at other times overly strong assumption by studying patterns of intra-party heterogeneity of preferences within parliamentary parties in the German Bundestag from 2002-05. For this purpose, we use the Wordscores method, a form of computational text analysis, to estimate policy positions of 453 individual legislators based on plenary speeches. We then study the link between intra-party faction membership and expressed policy positions. We find that there is a limited, but consistent effect of intra-party factionalism in the German Bundestag. According to random effects ANOVA, faction membership determines about 3 per cent of the variance of positions on economic policy in the present study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like father, unlike sons: German parties at the state level (Lander parties) not only differ with regard to their roots, their membership structure and their electoral successes, they also exhibit remarkably varied policy preferences. Although several case studies of parties and party systems in the Lander offer important insights, we still lack systematic knowledge about the causes of this variation in policy. This article seeks to fill that void by examining the ways in which socio-economic variables influence a party's policy positions. Based on a comprehensive dataset representing the policy positions of 77 parties over several electoral terms, I test hypotheses related to the cleavage theory and to the concept of the politicised social structure. The policy positions are estimated using the wordscore method. The results show that the proportion of Catholics, rurality and economic situation affect the parties' policy positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue on the federal reform in Germany, including one by Katrin Auel, another by Wade Jacoby and one by Charlie Jeffery.

The debate on how to revise Germany's federal structure has relied on oft-cited ideas that largely lack an empirical basis. The current discourse is marked by an additional shortcoming: individuals' preferences about how to structure the country's federal system have been more or less unexamined. This contradicts the fundamental principles derived from the economic theory of federalism, which stresses that those principles should serve as a basis for all such reform considerations. Our key findings show that public attitudes towards German federalism are very ambivalent. For this, a fundamental re-examination of the conventional arguments that moves away from a notion of 'competitive federalism' towards an optimisation and increased democratic acceptance of more collaborative forms of coordination between the different federal levels seems to be necessary. Following this, Germany seems to be prepared for global challenges like demographic change and climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article sheds light on an unintended effect of recent constitutional reform in Germany: the extension of detailed regulations in the constitution. This outcome is explained by the structure of the reform process which caused party political and intergovernmental bargaining as usual. Moreover, the interplay between constitutional policy-making and decisions of the Constitutional Court contribute to the described trend of over-regulation of the constitution. The second reform, currently under way, is likely to continue this trend. As a consequence, the federal system is in danger of losing necessary flexibility, while governance will become neither more effective nor more democratic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One often finds assumptions in political science literature based on a phenomenon referred to as Dauerwahlkampf (permanent campaigning) which postulate an influence of state elections on the federal government's legislation in Germany. However, specific effects have not been observed, nor are there any systematic studies of the presumed relationship. Therefore, this article discusses the assumptions and empirically examines their validity. The results of the quantitative analysis not only confirm a significant influence of state elections on the German federal government's bill initiation and passing rates, but also indicate a surprising effect of state elections on the degree of conflict in the voting behaviour of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]