The paradoxical effects of decline

Abstract

This article examines the impact of party system change in Germany on the role, status and power of the two catch-all parties (CDU/CSU and SPD) in the light of the 2009 federal election. It argues that party system change has had a paradoxical impact. On the one hand, the decline in the overall catch-all vote undermines the two parties' integrative function. On the other, the presence of three small parties (FDP, Greens, Left Party) means that, with the possible exception of the Greens, no single small party has the potential to be 'kingmaker' and, because of their relative positions in ideological space, neither can they act in concert to extract concessions from the two catch-all parties. Thus, despite the impressive performance of the FDP in the 2009 federal election and the electoral meltdown suffered by the SPD, in office-seeking terms the catch-all parties are currently less vulnerable to small party threats of defection to alternative coalitions.

Coalition Formation and the German Party System

“…The impact of the constraints imposed by beliefs and norms is most obvious in the pre-election statements, described in the introduction to this article, that German party elites often issue prior to elections ruling out particular coalition arrangements 19 .More subtle and, from the perspective of this article, important are the impact of SOPs as a constraint upon the kind of multi-dimensional calculus discussed earlier. For even if, as already discussed, players were able to make complex multi-dimensional calculations at T1 the process by which one or more parties are able to reach their goal(s) at T3 changes the rules of the game profoundly.…”

“…The resulting 'red-green model' of political co-operation 35 between the SPD and Greens emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s and stressed the selective emphasis of 'new politics' issues (such as environmental protection, group rights, and gender equality) around which the two parties could find common ground whilst initially ignoring many of the high politics issues, such as defence and security, that divided them 36 . However, just as the SPD began successfully to address the challenge of the Greens, the emergence of the PDS in the new German states re-emphasised the left-right dimension whilst also introducing a new territorial cleavage into political contestation 37 that has only recently begun to resolve itself 38 . But these developments were not all bad news for the SPD.…”

“…Over this period, these feedback effects transformed the German party system from the cosy triangular dynamic of the 'Pappi model' 44 , through what was sometimes thought of as a 'two-bloc' system 45 , towards what Niedermayer has described as a 'fluid party system' 46 that more accurately reflects the complex society that Germany has become 47 . As will be discussed below, in such a configuration there was no longer a kingmaker; just two large, albeit diminished, Volksparteien and three smaller parties occupying niche positions within the political space defined by the dominant left-right and secondary libertarian-authoritarian axes 48 . It was under these conditions that the 2009 coalition game was played.…”

The Grand Coalition and the Party System

“…For instance, Riker's 7 prediction that players will try to create coalitions that are only as large as they believe will ensure winning and that repeated plays of the coalition game will produce a 'minimum winning' coalition of 50 per cent plus one vote fails to predict outcomes, particularly in the context of 'strong' party systems such as those found at the national and sub-national levels in Germany. By contrast, von Neumann and Morgenstern's 8 notion of the 'minimal winner' -bigger than the minimum winner but nevertheless the smallest feasible majority given the rules of the game -is better supported empirically 9 .…”

Christian Democracy is Dead; Long Live the Union Parties: Explaining CDU/CSU Dominance within the German Party System

“…One might have assumed that social change associated with the development of the social market economy 1 and consolidation of consumer capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, the rise in living standards and expansion of higher education associated with the emergence of post-materialism 2 and the rise of the 'new middle class' 3 , as well as the eventual accession of the states of the former German Democratic Republic into the Federal Republic in 1990, would have eroded the social base of the CDU/CSU. Similarly, in as far as this process of social transformation was reflected in structural changes in the German party system, we might have expected that although the period of ongoing party system concentration in the two decades after 1949 4 and the long period of system stability associated with the so-called 'Pappi model' 5 from the 1960s until the early 1980s, had buttressed the dominance of the CDU/CSU, the subsequent onset of de-concentration and de-alignment in the 1980s 6 , and finally the establishment of the all-German party system in the 1990s 7 might have had the opposite effect. Yet, despite the fact that Germany is now described as a 'fluid party system' 8 and the CDU/CSU now operates within a very different strategic environment than it did in the past, it remains almost as strategically influential today as it was in the early years of the Federal Republic.…”