The Long Way towards Polarized Pluralism

The German party system has changed since the 1980s. The relatively stable ‘two-and-a-half party’ system of the 1960s and 1970s has become a fluid five-party system. This development can generally be attributed to changes on the demand and supply sides of party competition and to the changing institutional framework. The European integration process is part of this institutional framework and this chapter deals with the question of whether it has influenced the development of the party system at the national level. To systematically analyse the possible impact, eight party-system properties are distinguished: format, fragmentation, asymmetry, volatility, polarization, legitimacy, segmentation, and coalition stability. The analysis shows that one cannot speak of a Europeanization of the German party system in the sense of a considerable impact of the European integration process on its development. Up to now, the inclusion of Germany in the systemic context of the EU has not led to noticeable changes of party-system properties. On the demand side of party competition, this is due to the fact that the EU issue does not influence the citizens' electoral decisions. On the supply side, the lack of Europeanization can be explained mainly by the traditional, interest-based pro-European élite consensus, the low potential for political mobilization around European integration, and the marginal role of ethnocentrist–authoritarian parties.

In this research note, candidate survey data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) is used to analyse positional shifts of German Bundestag parties between 2013 and 2017. Two developments make Germany a particularly interesting case: (1) the liberal but also controversial policies of the Merkel cabinet during the European refugee crisis and (2) the change of leadership within the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Applying scaling techniques to locate candidates of both elections in the same two-dimensional policy space, the analysis demonstrates that in 2017 the AfD took a distinct radical right position in the party system of Germany. Moreover, the study finds that almost all parties moved to the right on the cultural left–right dimension in 2017, whereas for the economic left–right dimension this has not been the case. Contrary to the mantra of an ideological delineation against right-wing populism, there has been a robust socio-political conservative shift in the German party system.

The article draws upon the formal coalition literature to demonstrate that party system change over the last thirty years means that the Volksparteien enjoy more coalition options and greater ideological leverage within coalitions that form than was the case in the past. The Free Democrats have lost their kingmaker status and the distribution of party weights over recent elections allows no other small party to act in this manner. By contrast, the numerical and ideological resources possessed by the two Volksparteien means that they remain the only parties within the German party system that can act as formateur in the coalition game and are less vulnerable to threats of a decisive defection by small parties to alternative coalitions than they were in the past.

This chapter aims at presenting the characteristics of cabinets in Germany, in particular for the cabinets formed since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The chapter covers two decades of coalition dynamics and an era that has led to significant changes in German politics in general and the German party system in particular. The electoral support for the two catch-all parties – Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD) decreased in that time period, while the increased number of parliamentary parties and the increasing vote share for the smaller parties resulted in a more complex bargaining environment. We also discuss changes in the policy profiles of the parliamentary parties and how potential coalitions are discussed during election campaigns. The chapter provides first a brief overview on the institutional setting in which parties in Germany act and which influences the government-formation process, as well as the daily business of coalition governance. In a second step, we outline recent dynamics in the structure of the German party system. The final section summarizes the findings, considers if an overall trend in terms of changes in coalition governance exists in Germany, and discusses the impact of the parliamentary presence of a left- and a right-wing ‘pariah’ party—The Left and the Alternative for Germany—for coalition politics in Germany in the future.

The success of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) cannot be explained solely with a rising tide of GDR nostalgia and/or with the efficiency of PDS members as service providers and advocates at the grass‐roots level. We stress the importance of the PDS as the main political representative of a specific socio‐economic and cultural milie in the former GDR. Furthermore, the article traces the evolution of the PDS from a populist voice of protest of the losers of unification to the beginnings of a new political party. As such it defines its identity more as a radical left‐wing party with strong social libertarian characteristics than a traditional socialist party. The party programme and the electorate of the PDS display remarkable similarities to the fundamentalist wing of the West German Greens in the 1980s, although differences as to the origins of the left‐libertarian ideas remain important. While the PDS seems to have strengthened the significance of the new politics agenda in post‐unification German...

The Bundestag election of 1994 took place in an unusual context: that of ‘Superwahljahr’ and was the most exciting in terms of uncertainty that there had been for at least 25 years. The causes of the lack of electoral uncertainty in the history of the Federal Republic are analysed. The reasons for this uncertainty: historical, institutional and party‐political, are explored in this article.

The 2013 federal election led to a considerable change in the German party system. Yet Chancellor Merkel secured a third term, once again, as chancellor of a grand coalition. This analysis shows that Angela Merkel was much more popular than her SPD challenger, Peer Steinbrück. Moreover, she was perceived as somewhat more representative of the values and policies of the party she stood for than her competitor. What is more, the candidates' perceived representativeness conditioned the impact of candidate preferences on vote choice in complex ways. As a result, support for Angela Merkel was likely to translate into votes for the CDU/CSU, whereas support for Peer Steinbrück did not easily earn SPD votes. The article thus concludes that, in contrast to her challenger, Angela Merkel was an electoral asset for her party. The CDU/CSU's impressive result in the 2013 federal outcome can thus be interpreted, to some extent, as reflecting its leader's popularity.

In the 2021 German federal election, Alliance 90/The Greens received its best result so far. The outcome was based in part on a popular party leadership, government participation in different coalition formats on the state level, and an increasing salience of environmental and climate policies with which the party is strongly associated. After the election, the Greens became part of a novel three-party coalition with Social Democrats and Liberals where the party finds itself in a more influential role than in its first federal coalition with the spd. The opinion polls placing Alliance 90/The Greens above 20 percent before the election and its continuously growing membership base indicate a new centrality of the party in the German party system, as well as the potential to further increase its vote share.

The German Party System Since 1990: From Incorporation to Fragmentation, Polarization and Weaker Ties

Politics after Hitler: The Western Allies and the German Party System.

This article explains variation in levels of party system institutionalization in Asia by testing available data against several major hypotheses in the literature. The authors make three contributions to the literature on party system institutionalization. First, this study finds that historical legacies are a crucial variable affecting current levels of party system institutionalization. In particular, the immediate postwar period was the crucible from which institutionalized party systems in Asia developed. Second, the authors claim that for a significant number of institutionalized party systems, historical legacies are rooted in some element of authoritarianism, either as former authoritarian parties or as semidemocratic regimes. Third, precisely because authoritarianism has played an important role in the origins of institutionalized party systems, the authors argue that the concept of institutionalization needs to be strictly separated from the concept of democracy.

In this paper, I first provide an idealized functional account of political parties and party systems. I argue that parties are difficult to regulate constitutionally because of their Janus-faced public-private character. The key function they perform, when functioning as they ought to function, is to facilitate a mutually responsive relationship between public policy and popular opinion by acting as an intermediary between a state and its people. They perform this intermediary function in a unique manner, because of their bi-directionality and their plenary character. When they perform this function effectively, political parties significantly reduce four key information and transaction costs which would otherwise make democratic governance impossible: political participation costs, voters’ information costs, policy packaging costs, and ally prediction costs. This idealised account helps us identify pathological parties and party-systems and ground four principles that constitutions should seek to optimise in relation to political parties. The second part of this paper outlines and defends these four principles. Here I argue that state constitutions: i. should guarantee maximum autonomy for the formation, organisation, and operation of political parties, moderated by the restrictions necessitated by their purpose of winning (a share in) state power (for fixed terms) in competitive elections by acting as intermediaries between the state and its people (the ‘purposive autonomy principle’); ii. should try to optimise the party system such that the total number of serious political parties is large enough to broadly represent every major ‘voter type’, but not so large that the information costs on judicious voters are too high (the ‘party system optimality principle’); iii. should ensure a separation of parties and the state (the ‘party-state separation principle’); and iv. should discourage the factionalization of political parties (the ‘anti-faction principle’). These political principles are drawn from the value of democracy itself. They are likely to bring real world political parties and party systems closer to their idealised form, thereby improving and deepening democratic governance. As such, they should—alongside other relevant political and constitutional norms—inform fundamental constitutional design choices.

Political parties are political societies that have a steady and stable organizational structure that seeks to seize control of the state mechanism with public support. Party systems refers to the arrangement within which political parties operate. Predominant party system is a condition where the opposition parties challenge the strongest party in competitive elections but fail to remove the incumbent from power. The most popular definition and classification for the concept of predominant party system remains Sartori’s conceptualization. According to Sartori, the predominance is established when a party wins three consecutive elections while keeping the majority of the seats in the parliament. How do predominant party systems emerge? This article explains the impact of the failure of multiparty systems in fostering predominant party systems in democratizing countries.

Political Parties in Constitutional Theory

Contents: Evert van der Zweerde: Mix the Balance! Democracy as a Paradoxical Process - Paul Lucardie: From Crisis to Democracy? An Exercise in Political Imagination - Marco Verschoor: The Problem of the of the People. The Rawlsian Strategy of Avoidance - Daniel Hausknost: The Epistemic Legitimacy of Liberal Democracy as a Structural Constraint for Radical Politics - Wim de Jong: Political Education and the Recurring Crisis of Democracy in the Netherlands (1945-2010) - Tim Houwen: Populism as a Recurrent Phenomenon of Representative Democracy - Machiel Karskens: Crisis of Democracy as a Repudiation of Politics - Carla Hoetink/Karin van Leeuwen: Dilemmas of Democracy: Early Postwar Debates on European Integration in the Netherlands - Anna Friberg: Towards Total Democracy? The Concept of Democracy within the Swedish Social Democratic Party, 1921-1939 - Joris Gijsenbergh: Crisis of Democracy or Creative Reform? Dutch Debates on the Repression of Parliamentary Representatives and Political Parties, 1933-1940 - Stefan Couperus: Fixing Democracy? Political Representation and the Crisis of Democracy in Interwar Europe and the Netherlands - Martin Conway: The Making of Democratic Stability. The Case of Belgium after 1944 - Jacco Pekelder: From Militancy to Democracy? The Radical Left in West Germany in the 1970s - Wim van Meurs: Political Marches as Markers of Democratic Crisis - Peter Bal: Public Spheres in a Globalizing World. How the Global and the Political Shape and Reshape Public Opinions - Stijn van Kessel: Two of a Kind or Kind of Incompatible? Populist Parties in the Dutch and Polish Party Systems - Saskia Hollander/Monique Leyenaar: Towards a Direct Democratic Era? Assessing the Usage of Direct Democratic Institutions in Europe - David Hugh-Jones: Why Elected Politicians Implement Direct Democracy.