Abstract
The dispersion of power in the Federal Republic creates a need for its integration and aggregation if there is to be any coherence in the policy process. The key agencies performing these functions of integration and aggregation in the postwar period are the political parties. One of the most striking changes in postwar Germany has been the emergence of a system of political parties that has effectively organized and controlled the political process. Traditionally, parties were marginal factors in German political life. Their home was the legislature, but the executive and the bureaucracy dominated politics; the parties had little influence in these institutions. This pattern was also dominant during most of the Weimar Republic when the party system was fragmented and stable parliamentary majorities became impossible to form. By the late 1920s, effective political power, in spite of the democratic structure of the state, had passed once again into the hands of the executive and the state bureaucracy.
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Notes
For a discussion of this point, see Gordon Smith, Democracy in Western Germany (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 96 ff.
Gerhard Lehmbruch, “Liberal Corporatism and Party Government,” in Trends toward Corporatist Intermediation, ed. Philippe Schmitter and Gerhard Lehmbruch (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979), 147–88.
There is a union for white-collar employees (Angestellten) with about a half million members that is not affiliated with the DGB. This is the only non-DGB union of any significant size in the private sector.
Andrei S. Markovits and Christopher S. Allen, “Power and Dissent: Trade Unions in the Federal Republic of Germany Re-Examined,” Council of European Studies, Washington, D.C., March 1979. See also Andrei S. Markovits, The Politics of the West German Trade Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Michael Fichter, “From Transmission Belt to Social Partnership? The Case of Organized Labor in Eastern Germany,” German Politics and Society 23 (Summer 1991): 10.
Michael Jungblut, “Die heimlichen Reichen,” Die Zeit 46 (10 November 1978): 25.
Kurt Sontheimer, “Die Bundesrepublik und ihre Bürger,” in Nach dreißig Jahren, ed. Walter Scheel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), 175–86.
Referendums are constitutionally possible in most states, and a little-known provision of the Basic Law allows local communities to be governed by citizen assemblies. Thus far, no locality has employed this form of governance.
Two additional changes in the law were in effect for only the 1990 election, the first free all-German vote since 1932. First, largely as a concession to the East German parties, a party in 1990 was required to secure the 5 percent minimum in either the former West or East Germany. Hence the PDS, the former Communist Party and the East German Greens, now allied with the East German citizen democracy movement, Bündnis 90, were in the parliament even though they only received 2.4 percent and 1.2 percent respectively of the national vote. In the former GDR they met the 5 percent minimum. Second, parties were allowed to combine their electoral lists, that is, form alliances in the various states. This was also designed to help the new East German parties. Ironically, had the West German Greens formed such an alliance with their East German counterparts, they would have returned to parliament with about twenty-six seats.
David P. Conradt and Russell J. Dalton, “The West German Electorate and the Party System: Continuity and Change in the 1980s,” Review of Politics, January 1988, 3–29. For the 1990 election, see Rainer-Olaf Schultze, “Bekannte Konturen im Westen—Ungewisse Zukunft in Osten,” in Wahlverhalten, ed. Hans-Georg Wehling (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1991), 78; for 1994 church attendance among Catholics, see ALLBUS (General Social Survey), 1994.
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© 1998 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Hancock, M.D., Conradt, D.P., Peters, B.G., Safran, W., Zariski, R. (1998). Who Has the Power and How Did They Get It?. In: Politics in Western Europe. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14555-3_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14555-3_13
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