Ludger Helms

Parliamentary party groups and their parties: A comparative assessment

This article presents a comparative study of the interrelationship between parliamentary party groups and their extra‐parliamentary party organisations in liberal democracies. Starting with a historical overview of the most important party changes that have taken place since the 1960s, a typology of parliamentary party/party organisation relations is suggested. The following variables are identified as being of particular importance in shaping the structure of power in political parties: position of parliament in the political system; (non‐)existence of the incompatibility rule; effects of the electoral system; competition structure and degree of polarisation of the party system; political culture; conditions under which parties emerged; (non‐)existence of public funding for parties; degree of professionalisation of the political elite.

Parliamentary Opposition and its Alternatives in a Transnational Regime: The European Union in Perspective

The contention that there is no such thing as parliamentary opposition at the European level belongs to the more established hypotheses concerning European governance, which have rarely and only more recently been challenged. This paper tries to demonstrate that it is possible to discern manifestations of parliamentary opposition, both at the national and the European level. That said, the overall status of parliamentary opposition within the European Union has remained rather modest. While there is a host of checks and balances and potential veto players, these institutions and actors represent ‘alternatives’ with different functional profiles rather than genuine ‘functional equivalents’ to parliamentary opposition. Institutional engineering continues to be the most promising road towards strengthening parliamentary opposition within the European multi-level system, though institutions alone will not be able to overcome the specific limits of representative democracy in the European Union.

Germany: chancellors and the bundestag

Historically, executive–legislative relations used to mark one of the least understood and most problematic areas of democratic politics in Germany. However, as in many other fields, the post-war period has seen the transformation of Germanys rather unimpressive historical legacy in the field of executive leadership and legislative politics into a respected model of democratic parliamentary government. Whereas the existing institutional parameters in place generally foster a cooperative style of legislative decision-making, the experience of the seven post-war chancellorships from Adenauer to Schröder to be covered in this article suggest that there remains considerable room for different styles of executive leadership in the parliamentary arena.

Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership, New York 1960

„Presidential Power“ (1960) ist die erste grose Studie und das Hauptwerk des amerikanischen Politikwissenschaftlers Richard E. Neustadt (1919–2003). Er wurde an den Universitaten in Berkeley und Harvard ausgebildet. Nach kurzeren Zwischenstationen lehrte er von 1964 als Professor of Government bis zu seinem Tod in Harvard. In die Studie „Presidential Power“ flossen Erfahrungen ein, die der Autor ab Mitte der 1940er Jahre als Mitarbeiter des Washingtoner Bureau of the Budget und zwischen 1950 und 1953 im White House Office Prasident Harry Trumans gesammelt hatte. Unterschiedliche Verlage legten die Untersuchung 1976, 1980 und 1990 in jeweils um einige Kapitel erweiterten Fassungen neu auf. Im Unterschied zu der ublichen Praxis, den Text bei einer Neuauflage vollstandig zu aktualisieren, belies Neustadt die bereits veroffentlichten Kapitel in ihrer Originalfassung und setzte sich in hinzugefugten Kapiteln mit eigenen fruheren Bewertungen auseinander. Dies verstarkte den „weichen“ Charakter der Arbeit, der schon das Ursprungswerk gekennzeichnet hatte.