Gerhard Loewenberg

The Role of Parliamentary Committees in Coalition Governments Keeping Tabs on Coalition Partners in the German Bundestag

The coexistence of strong parties and strong committees in the U.S. Congress has been interpreted in a principal-agent framework with committees regarded as agents of the congressional parties. In a parliamentary system having coalition governments, the coexistence of strong parties and strong committees has a comparable rationale. With data during a 40-year period, the authors showthat the coalition parties in the German parliament distribute committee chair positions so that coalition parties can monitor each other’s cabinet ministers. Such monitoring is an alternative at the legislative level to intracoalition monitoring through the use of junior ministers at the executive level and is a means of enforcing coalition treaties.

The Effect of Legal Thresholds On the Revival of Former Communist Parties in East-Central Europe

Since 1989 six Central and East European countries have held competitive elections under 17 different electoral systems. After some experimentation, the new electoral systems, adopted on the initiative of noncommunist parties, provided for proportional representation, with legal thresholds designed to protect the new parties from smaller, more recent, and more extreme formations. These legal thresholds favored noncommunist parties initially but subsequently appeared to facilitate a return of postcommunist parties to power. A multivariate model of the effect of electoral system thresholds in 13 elections confirms that they contributed to disproportionality but fails to confirm that they consistently favored either former communist or noncommunist parties. Further analysis reveals that legal thresholds have exaggerated the effect of volatility in the electorates on the representation of parties in parliament, causing systems of proportional representation to behave more like single-member plurality systems.

Agenda-Setting in the German Bundestag: Origins and Consequences of Party Dominance

The procedure for setting the agenda in the German Parliament originated in the middle of the nineteenth century in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies in which an informal committee arranged the agenda by an inter-party consensus. This party-dominated procedure, continued in the Reichstag of the Empire and the Weimar Republic, was institutionalised in the German Bundestag in the second half of the twentieth century. It takes account of the central role of the Fraktionen in the Bundestag and of the specialisation and division of labour that developed within them. The procedure is designed to achieve consensus among all parties and to distribute agenda-setting power between parliament and cabinet. Though remarkably decentralised, it has predictable outcomes that contribute to the impression that the Bundestag is a stage-managed parliament.

The Influence of European Émigré Scholars on Comparative Politics, 1925–1965

Among European émigré intellectuals who came to the United States between 1925 and 1940, a small group of prolific, influential scholars who received appointments at major colleges and universities helped to restore the comparative approach to the study of political systems. That approach had been dominant in the early years of the discipline but had been lost during its Americanization in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The teaching and writing of these scholars contributed to the formulation of theoretical frameworks designed to facilitate cross-national comparison. When the purview of comparative politics expanded in the 1950s and 1960s to include the developing areas, the advantages of multination comparisons became even more evident.

Developing attachments to new political institutions: a multi-level model of attitude formation in post-Communist Europe

In America and Western Europe, legislatures preceded democratization and contributed to the establishment and maintenance of democratic regimes in the late 18th and the 19th centuries. In Central and Eastern Europe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, legislatures and democratic regimes appeared simultaneously. In the first 15 years of post-Communist transitions in 12 countries, attachments to the new regimes have been influenced by their institutional structures, their economic performance, and their records in protecting human freedom, while attachment to the new parliaments have been predominantly influenced by cultural factors related to early life socialization including education, age, gender, social status, and attitudes toward the former communist regime. Attachment to parliament was a product more than a cause of attachment to the new regimes, but the parliamentary system of government created a context that contributed to citizens’ attachment to their new political institutions. In that respect, attitudes toward parliaments in Central and Eastern Europe played a role similar to the role that these attitudes played in an earlier stage of democratization in Europe and North America, the role of attaching citizens to new political institutions.

Paradoxes of Legislatures

Dædalus Summer 2007 Capitalism and democracy have coexisted in so many countries in the last two centuries that they appear to stand in a cause-and-effect relationship. However, it has become ever clearer that capitalism does not inevitably lead to democracy. That they frequently coexist only demonstrates that they are compatible. Yet, despite this compatibility, the leaders of capitalist economies regularly criticize some of the central institutions of democracy, notably democratic legislatures. They are particularly quick to condemn not only the decisions of democratic legislatures, for adopting what they regard as irrational economic policies, but also the way they make decisions. The extremely negative evaluation of Congress in the last few years is typical. It is hardly a new phenomenon, nor is it limited to the United States. Over 170 years ago, the French artist Honoré Daumier caricatured the legislature in the reign of Louis Philippe with a famous lithograph entitled Le ventre législatif en 1834, which cruelly depicts thirty-four members of parliament as obese, corrupt, evil men.1 Legislatures are paradoxical institutions. Although historically they have been indispensable to democracy, their decision-making processes inevitably– indeed necessarily–have antimajoritarian characteristics. Although they are supposed to represent the people, the way they work mysti1⁄2es most people, even members of the economic elite. Because they are meant to represent all the people, legislatures consist of many members, each with an equal mandate to be there. But it de1⁄2es common sense to expect four hundred or more memGerhard Loewenberg

Some Conclusions on the Relationship Between Citizens and Their Representatives in France and Germany

The foregoing comparison of the relationship between citizens and their parliamentary representatives in Germany and France reveals differences due to their different constitutional and electoral systems and differences in their political histories. The comparison is particularly valuable at this moment of public skepticism of representation and populist enthusiasm for direct democracy.

The Extraordinary Collapse and Revival of German Parliaments

The contrast between the extraordinary collapse of the German parliament in the 1920s and 1930s, despite a strong German parliamentary tradition, and the development of the German Bundestag into the strongest parliament in Europe just 20 years later, is in part due to a series of contingent events that were not path-dependent results of German history. The punitive peace treaty imposed on Germany in 1919 and the worldwide depression of the 1920s and 1930s critically weakened the Weimar Republic. The benign military occupation of Western Germany after 1945, seeking to strengthen German democracy as a bulwark against the USSR, decisively contributed to the revival of parliamentary democracy.

Legislatures of Small States: A Comparative Study

This volume provides case studies of small legislatures in 36 states, a neglected area of legislative research. The countries included range in size from the Pacific island of Niue, whose 20-member Legislative Assembly represents a population of just 1311, to Hong Kong, whose 60-member Legislative Council represents over seven million people. The book covers a great variety of assemblies in hugely varying settings. They are situated in 22 small islands or groups of islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific and in five other island states. Of the remainder one is in Asia, two in landlocked territories within the Republic of South Africa, two in Central and South American countries, two in small European states, and two are sub-national legislatures within larger states. They exist in countries some of which are sovereign, some semi-sovereign and two are subnational legislatures within larger states. They represent areas that vary greatly in size. The political influence of the legislatures described ranges from trivial to substantial. Although two introductory chapters make attempts to classify and categorise the material, they make only modest claims for the methodology underlying the case selection or for the prospect of providing a comparative analysis of these institutions. The value of the book is that it describes unfamiliar legislatures that do have in common their relatively small memberships. Most of it is devoted to legislative bodies of fewer than 50 members in states or subnational entities having fewer than one million people. The book brings out interesting relationships between the size of a legislature and the way it works. It shows that very small bodies encourage informality and consensus. When they are set in parliamentary systems, they tend to have a disproportionate number of members who also serve in the executive branch and these therefore dominate their legislative proceedings. And small legislatures cannot sustain extensive committee systems or systems for specialised divisions of labour. The members of many of these bodies are part-time volunteers. In some respects the assemblies the book describes remind us of legislatures in an earlier era. The concluding chapter develops these interesting generalisations. The case studies, written by 15 different authors, are not constrained by a parallel organisational framework. The variety of institutions covered would make that inappropriate. Instead, each chapter offers fascinating descriptions of remarkably different institutions with different histories, set in different political cultures. Some are unicameral, some bicameral; those that were formerly British colonies are in parliamentary systems, others in presidential systems. Description

A Half-Century Perspective on APSA Annual Meetings

Iattended my first American Political Science Association meeting in 1949. It was an exciting experience for me as a first-year graduate student. I already venerated several established scholars in the profession. Herman Finer and Carl Friedrich were the towering figures on my intellectual landscape in comparative politics, my major field. In American politics, in which I was a teaching assistant, Edward S. Corwin and Carl B. Swisher were giants. And here they were, conspicuous in the halls of the hotel, standing for hours, as I recall, each in his own place, talking with groups of awe-struck students. The greats of the profession were suddenly real people rather than simply names on books. The APSA membership included a significant cadre of political leaders, public figures, and well-known journalists. I was astonished to see Senators Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas, Congressman Jacob Javits, Ralph Bunche, who had just served as acting UN Mediator on Palestine, and Max Lerner, a noted editorial writer and political theorist.