Dan Hough

Left Parties in National Governments

Left Parties in National Governments analyzes why Left Parties enter national government, what they do when they get there and what effect this has on both their programmatic positions and their electoral prospects. The book looks at how we should expect parties to the left of the main social democratic actor – what we term here as Left Parties – to behave when government participation becomes a possibility. It includes nine detailed case studies, encompassing every Left Party in Europe that has either been part of a national coalition or taken on support party status. The contributors also look at parties – in Germany and the Netherlands – that have thus far been interested observers without actually taking the plunge. This book is a systematic insight into the complex relationship Left parties have with governing at the national level.

Politicising Migration: Opportunity or Liability for the Centre Right in Germany?

Centre-right parties have by and large been keen to mobilize support by adopting relatively restrictive approaches on immigration and multiculturalism. However, such mobilizing strategies carry a number of costs: centre-right parties risk losing support from more moderate supporters, and they may lose legitimacy by pursuing policies that conflict with more liberal approaches, or which prove difficult to deliver. This contribution develops a typology of these risks and applies it to analyse the behaviour of the CDU in Germany. While many features of the CDU are well suited to more restrictionist immigration policies, such approaches have at times conflicted with the more Christian and communitarian ethos on which the party was originally founded. Moreover, when in government the CDU has found it difficult to deliver on more restrictive pledges, and is likely to find it increasingly difficult to reconcile restrictiveness with a business-friendly approach.

‘Made in Eastern Germany’: The PDS and the articulation of Eastern German interests

The electoral success of the post‐communist PDS has surprised politicians and academics alike. The PDS has been able to find a niche for itself within the German polity by articulating territorially salient political difference. The PDS has expanded its voter base beyond merely the politically disaffected and the former ‘Dienstklasse’ of the GDR, as it has developed into an effective articulator of eastern German interests. Western German parties have been unable to incorporate differences in eastern German attitudes and perceptions into their political platforms — leaving space for a regionally concentrated political party (the PDS) to establish itself.

Between a rock and many Hard Places: The PDS and government participation in the eastern German Länder1

It is now widely recognised that unification has led to an increased regionalisation of party politics in the Federal Republic. On the one hand a significant number of decision-making competencies within parties remain decentralised. On the other, regional party systems have become ever more differentiated both from each other and from that which exists at the national level. This article assesses to what extent there is any empirical evidence supporting such ideas by comparing four PDS Landesverbände. The article illustrates that ideological differences, personality clashes and different strategic agendas ensure that each the of the four Landesverbände has a different profile and can behave in strikingly different ways – highlighting that parties have much more room to manoeuvre at the Land level than is traditionally believed.

Towards an Analytical Framework for Party Mergers: Operationalising the Cases of the German Left Party and the Dutch Green Left

The theoretical literature on party mergers is thin. This article draws upon organisational behaviour research to create an analytical framework that is suitable for explaining the processes inherent in party mergers. The authors operationalise this framework by examining two cases of party merger: in Germany, between the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the Electoral Alternative for Labour and Social Justice (WASG) in 2006/07, and in the Netherlands, between four small parties to form Groenlinks (Green Left) in 1989–91. They conclude that the two cases demonstrate definable steps and processes that are inherent to mergers, and they welcome further applications of this framework in other settings.

From Pariahs to Players? Left Parties in National Governments

Over the last two decades western European party politics has undergone a number of far-reaching changes. One of these changes has been the rise in the number of new parties and also an increase in the political relevance of longer-lived, but hitherto largely marginalised, older ones. Broadly speaking, these parties fall into one of three distinct camps – Green parties, parties of the far right, and parties of the far left. One of the most interesting common features of these three types of party is their initial – and in some cases, still existing – disdainful attitude to striking bargains and entering government alongside other actors. The first of these three party types, Green parties, were initially considered non-coalitionable by their opponents, and for many years they themselves also deliberately rejected participating in national governments, making a virtue out of the necessity of their ‘anti-partyness’ (Frankland and Schoonmaker, 1992; Poguntke, 1993; Tiefenbach, 1998; Shull, 1999; Burchell, 2002). This changed slowly at first, but by the late 1990s most green parties had become ‘coalitionable’, even if many have not yet actually been part of a national government (Lees, 2000; Poguntke, 2002; Hough, Kos and Olsen, 2007: chapter 4).

Territory and Electoral Politics in Germany

Modern party political competition, as this volume illustrates, occurs in ever more complex settings. Long gone are the days (if, indeed, they ever existed at all) when parties could craft one political package that was suitable for more or less all electoral contests. Parties now have to mould, shape and articulate their demands in a multitude of ways to make them relevant to different sets of voters possessing differentiated sets of interests for elections to different sets of institutions. At the vertical level, federal institutional arrangements have traditionally been used to permit voters to voice their territorially specific interests in substate elections. Long-established federal states (such as the US, Australia, Canada, Germany and Switzerland) have recently been joined by states such as Belgium, the UK, Spain and Italy — to name but four — in creating, or rejuvenating, genuinely significant multilayered institutional frameworks. Increasing divergences in wealth, interests and even identity awareness within nation-states have also prompted parties to mould their political profiles and messages in more subtle and focused ways in order to appeal to electors who rely less and less frequently on the pillars of class and partisan alignments in shaping their votes.

A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing or a Gift from Heaven? Left–Left Coalitions in Comparative Perspective

Communist, post-Communist and radical socialist political parties have recently been brought into the coalition equation in a number of democratic states. This article seeks to develop and apply an analytical framework suitable for understanding under what conditions this occurs. It concentrates primarily on coalition formation at the sub-state level between social democratic parties and competitors to their ideological left. The framework is applied in the German and Spanish cases. The article concludes that there do indeed appear to be optimal sets of conditions facilitating the creation of left–left coalitions.

Introduction: Multi-Level Electoral Competition: Elections and Parties in Decentralized States

The study of parties and elections has traditionally focused on the national, or statewide, arena.1 The reasons for this are obvious enough. As Reif and Schmitt (1980: 8) put it, there is in most cases simply more at stake in statewide elections. National parliaments and government are (still) the most important decision-making fora. So we want to know how they are formed. And that means looking at the factors that shape statewide election outcomes, and the ways political parties negotiate the statewide electoral arena. But there is also a disguised normative element at play here. Processes of nation building in Western Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries typically understood regional identities as conservative anachronisms set to disappear as the modern national state established common standards of public services and an overarching, statewide process of opinion formation. In these circumstances political parties emerged or adapted to articulate social interests generated around standard, statewide cleavages: class, religion and so on (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). Parties became ‘nationalized’ (Hopkin, this issue), focused on statewide controversies, and focused on winning the big prize of national-level government.

Small but Perfectly Formed? The Rise and Rise of Germany's Smaller Parties

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.