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Chapter Ten
Politics in Germany
Comparative Politics Today, 9/e
Almond, Powell, Dalton & Strøm
Pearson Education, Inc. publishing as Longman © 2008
Country Bio: Germany
 Population:
 Language:
 Territory:
 Religion:
 82.5 million
 137,803 sq. miles
 Year of Independence:
 1871
 German
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Protestant 34%
Roman Catholic 34%
Muslim 4%
Unaffiliated or other 28%
 Year of Current
Constitution:
 Scheduled Castes
 Head of State:
 Scheduled Tribes
 1949
 President Horst Kohler
 Head of Government:
 Chancellor Angela Merkel
 16.2% of population
 8.2% of population
Background: Germany
 Merkel’s election in 2005
 Testimony to change in Germany
 Communism distant past
 Two halves of the nation acting as one
 Major achievement of contemporary German
politics
 Creation of a unified, free, and democratic nation
in a short period of time
 Unification occurred in 1990
 Contributed to a stable Europe
Current Policy Challenges
 Unification related issues
 Eastern Germany: struggled to compete in the globalized
economic system
 EU has invested more than 1,000 billion Euros in the East
since unification
 Taxes increased for all Germans in the process
 General socioeconomic course of the nation
 What direction for economic reform?
 German labor costs and benefits high by international
standards without comparable productivity
 Social welfare costs spiraled upward
Current Policy Challenges
 Multicultural nation
 New source of political tension
 Foreign policy challenges
 Role in the EU
 Role in the post-Cold War world
The Historical Legacy
 The Second German Empire
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Bismarck, 1871
Authoritarian state
Power flowed from the Kaiser
Suppression of opposition
World War I
 Devastated the nation
 3 million German soldiers and civilians lost their lives
 Economy strained to the breaking point
 Government collapsed
The Historical Legacy
 The Weimar Republic
 1919 – popularly elected constitutional
assembly established the new democratic
system of the Weimer Republic
 Constitution granted all citizens the right to
vote and guaranteed basic human rights
 Directly elected parliament and president
 Hopeful beginning – disastrous end
The Historical Legacy
 Severe problems
 Versailles Peace Treaty: lost all overseas colonies
and large amount of European territory
 Burdened with moral guilt and reparations:
economic problems
 Great Depression of 1929
 Hurt Germany harder than it hurt other countries
including the U.S.
 One third of the labor force became unemployed
 Parliamentary democracy began to fail
 Emergence of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist
German Workers’ Party (the Nazis)
The Historical Legacy
 Failure due to a mix of
factors
 Lack of support from
political elites and the public
 They seemed to long for
the old authoritarian
system
 Many Germans were not
committed to democratic
principles
 Economic and political crises
 Eroded public support and
opened the door to Hitler
 Most Germans drastically
underestimated Hitler’s
ambitions, intentions, and
political abilities.
The Historical Legacy
 The Third Reich
 Hitler: election 1933
 Used domination of the parliament to enact legislation granting
Hitler dictatorial powers
 New authoritarian “leader state”
 Hitler pursued extremist policies
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Destroyed opposition
Attacked Jews and other minorities
Massive public works projects lessened unemployment
Expansion of the army
Expansionist foreign policy led to WWII
 Initial victories, but followed by a series of military defeats beginning in
1942
 60 million lives lost worldwide in the war, including 6 million European
Jews who were murdered via systematic genocide
 At the end of the war, Germany in ruins
The Historical Legacy
 The Occupation Period
 At the end of the war, the
Western Allies (U.S., Britain,
and France) controlled
Germany’s Western zone
and the Soviet Union
occupied the Eastern zone.
 West
 Denazification
 New political parties and
democratic political
institutions
 Basic Law (Grundgesetz)
 East
 Socialist Unity Party
 Draft constitution for the
German Democratic
Republic-East Germany
Following Two Paths
 Faced similar challenges
 West Germany
 Economic challenge
 Free enterprise system
 Christian Democratic Union
 Economic Miracle
 East Germany
 Economic miracle almost as impressive
 Collectivized agriculture, nationalized industry, and centralized
planning
 Process of reconciliation
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Helmut Kohl
Gorbachev
Opening of the Berlin Wall
Western Germany dominated the process and the outcome
Social Forces
 Economics
 Largest state in the EU
 Merger of two different economies
 Religion
 Unification has unsettled the delicate
religious balance
Social Forces
 Gender
 Basic Law guarantees the equality of the sexes, but the
specific legislation to support this guarantee often lacking
 Merkel’s selection as Chancellor may have an impact
 Minorities
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Guest workers
Isolated from mainstream society
Lower end of economic ladder
Some opposition to further immigration
 Regionalism
 Potential source of social and political division
The Institutions and Structure of
Government
 Basic law – specific goals:
 To develop a stable and democratic political
system
 To maintain some historical continuity in political
institutions (parliamentary system)
 To recreate a federal structure of government
 To avoid the institutional weakness that
contributed to the collapse of Weimar democracy
 To establish institutional limits on extremist and
anti-system forces
The Institutions and Structure of
Government

A federal system (Bund)
 State governments have a unicameral legislature, normally called a Landtag,
which is directly elected by popular vote.
 Sixteen states (Lander)
 Political power divided between federal and state governments.

Parliamentary government
 The Bundestag (Federal Diet)- 598 deputies; elections every four years
 Enact legislation
 Forum for public debate
 Oversight- “question hour”
 The Bundestrat (Federal Council)- 69 members
 Role is to represent state interests

The Federal Chancellor and Cabinet
 Strengthened formal powers (Basic Law)
 Elected by the Bundestag
 Control over the Cabinet
The Institutions and Structure of
Government
 Federal government functions based on
three principles based on Basic Law
 Chancellor principle
 Ministerial autonomy
 Cabinet principle
 The Federal President
 Basic Law transformed this office into a
mostly ceremonial one
The Institutions and Structure of
Government
 The Judicial System
 Ordinary courts
 Administrative courts
 Constitutional Court
 The Separation of Powers
 Basic Law – avoiding
concentration of power
 Constructive no-confidence
vote
 Role of Constitutional Court as
a check
Remaking Political Cultures
 Orientations
 Toward the system and nation
 Toward the democratic process
 Social values and the new politics
 Two peoples in one nation?
Political Learning and Political
Communication
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Family influences
Education
Social stratification
Mass media
Citizen Participation
 1950s almost two-thirds of the West German
public never discussed politics
 Today about three-quarters claim they talk
about politics regularly.
 Rising participation levels
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Growth of citizen action groups
Voting levels highest of any European democracy
Sign petitions, boycott
Both sides of the country actively involved
Politics at the Elite Level
 Few thousand political elite manage the
actual workings of the political system
 Party elites
 Leaders of interest groups and political
associations
 Recruitment
 Long apprenticeship period
 Varied political preferences among elites
Interest Groups
 Interest groups are connected to the government
more closely in Germany than in the U.S.
 Formally involved in the policy process
 Neocorporatism
 Social interests are organized into virtually compulsory
organizations.
 A single association represents each social sector.
 These associations are hierarchically structured.
 Associations may participate directly in the policy process.
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Business
Labor
Religious interests
New politics movement
The Party System
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Christian Democrats
Free Democratic Party
The Greens
The Party of Democratic Socialism
The Role of Elections
 Goals of Basic Laws for the electoral system:
 Create a proportional representation system (PR)
 Also, use single-member system to avoid fragmentation of the
Weimar party system and ensure some accountability between
electoral district and its representative
 Mixed electoral system
 Ballot: vote for a candidate to represent district; second part of the
ballot they select a party
 Half of Bundestag members are elected a district representatives and
half as party representatives.
 5 percent clause
 Party leaders have influence on who will be elected due to their ability
to place candidates on the list
 PR system also ensures fair representation for minor parties
 Affects campaign strategies
 The electoral connection
Party Government
 Parties are important political actors in German politics.
 Basic Law
 Specifically refers to political parties
 Guarantees their legitimacy and their right to exist- if they accept
the principles of democratic government
 Primary institutions of representative democracy
 Educational function of parties
 No direct primaries
 Candidates are merely “representatives” of the party
 Parties form government and are central actors within the
Bundestag
 Structured around parties
 Cohesion high
The Policy Process
 Policy initiation
 Most issues reach the policy agenda
through the executive branch.
 Legislating policy
 State and federal governments share
legislative power.
The Policy Process
 Policy administration
 Basic law assigned the administrative
responsibility for most domestic policies to the
state governments
 States employ more civil servants than the federal
and local governments combined.
 Judicial review
 Constitutional Court can evaluate the
constitutionality of legislation and void laws that
violate the provisions of the Basic Law.
Policy Performance
 The Federal Republic’s policy record
 Increases in total public spending and new policy responsibilities
 Difficult to describe the activities in terms of revenue and budgets
– complex system
 Extensive network of social services
 Social security programs are the largest part of public expenditures
 Policy responsibility is divided among three levels of government
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Education
Defense and foreign policy
Economic policy
NATO
 Public expenditures show the policy efforts of the government,
but the actual results of this spending are more difficult to
assess.
Policy Performance
 Overall, many areas have seen improvement
in both sections of the country: housing,
living standards, work, income, social
security, environmental security, and public
security.
 Paying the Costs
 Three different types of revenue provide the bulk
of resources for public policy programs:
 Contributions to the social security system (self-financed
by employer and employee contributions)
 Direct taxes
 Indirect taxes
Addressing the Policy Challenges
 The problems of unification
 Reforming the welfare state
 A new world role
After the Revolution
 Unification
 Presented new social, political, and
economic challenges for the nation.
 Mergers bring problems.
 Strains magnified by elites
 Need for consensus both socially and politically
 Resolution of questions regarding national
identity