Marc Debus

Parteienwettbewerb in den deutschen Bundesländern

Unterscheidet sich die nordrhein-westfalische CDU eines Jurgen Ruttgers programmatisch von der hessischen Union unter Fuhrung von Roland Koch? Steht die SPD im Saarland weiter links von der Mitte als die Sozialdemokraten im benachbarten Rheinland-Pfalz? Wenn ja, warum ist das der Fall? Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die bundeslandsspezifischen Eigenheiten des Parteienwettbewerbs anhand einer Analyse aller zwischen 1990 und 2010 verfassten Landtagswahlprogramme. Dies geschieht vor dem Hintergrund der historischen Entwicklung der Parteiensysteme in den Landern einerseits und auf Grundlage theoretischer Modelle andererseits. Die Ergebnisse zeichnen ein differenziertes Bild des Parteienwettbewerbs im deutschen Mehrebenensystem. Sie zeigen die Unterschiede in den programmatischen Positionen der Parteien in den verschiedenen Politikfeldern auf, die ihre Ursachen in der Sozialstruktur der jeweiligen Wahlerschaft, aber auch in taktischen Bestrebungen der Parteien bei Landtagswahlen haben. Die Eigenstandigkeit des regionalen Parteienwettbewerbs im Vergleich zum bundespolitischen zeigt sich schlieslich in der Bedeutung der inhaltlichen Ausrichtungen der Landesparteien fur die Regierungsbildung in den Bundeslandern.

Government Formation and Policy Formulation in the German States

This article theorizes and analyzes two aspects of government building in the German states while paying special attention to interrelations between the federal and state level. First, we examine which factors influence the choice of the partisan composition of the next government. Secondly, we ask for the determinants of the policy positions of the newly formed coalition governments. Original empirical results show that both government formation and policy formulation in the German Länder are clearly affected by federal politics. State-level coalitions cross-cutting the federal government–opposition divide are avoided, and the strength of this effect depends on institutional context and the federal election cycle. The policy position of state-level governments is affected by the position of the respective federal government. On the economic policy dimension, all state-level governments move towards the federal government. On the social policy dimension, those state governments whose partisan composition is congruent with the federal government seem to move away from the latter.

Office and Policy Payoffs in Coalition Governments

According to theories on coalition formation, parties with a key position in the coalition game receive higher office and policy payoffs than their coalition partners. In this article, I use two models of government-formation — the portfolio allocation model and the political heart model — to identify key players in the coalition game. Both models are modified to incorporate institutional and political constraints on coalition-formation, and the predictions of key parties from the four models are compared with the governments that actually formed in five European countries: Austria (1983—2002), Belgium (1985—2003), Germany (1980— 2005), Ireland (1982—2002) and The Netherlands (1977—2003). I argue that the modified models are preferred to the original ones on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Using the key parties identified by the modified models, I find that if a coalition member is a key party, then it is able to assert its policy views more effectively than its coalition partners can, but, contrary to expectations in the literature, that it is unable to capture a surpassing share of cabinet offices.

Who Takes the Parliamentary Floor? The Role of Gender in Speech-making in the Swedish Riksdag:

Legislative speeches are an important instrument for parties and members of parliament (MPs) to signal their positions and priorities. This raises the question of who speaks when. We evaluate whether a MP’s presence on the floor depends on his or her gender. We hypothesize that female MPs give in general less speeches in parliament and that this pattern results from debates dealing with “harder” policy issues. Our expectations are supported when analyzing a new data set containing information on the number and content of speeches given in the Swedish Riksdag between 2002 and 2010.

Challenges for Estimating Policy Preferences: Announcing an Open Access Archive of Political Documents

We provide a comparative perspective on the contributions of the special issue with regard to their applied methods and findings. In addition, we discuss problems that arise when using ‘wrong’ or at least ‘incorrect’ versions of election manifestos by presenting replications of estimated policy positions of German parties. We show that the latter can result in biased estimates that may affect the outcome of theoretical models. On the basis of those findings, we present the idea of the open access archive polidoc.net to build up a common database for political texts.

Analysing Party Politics in Germany with New Approaches for Estimating Policy Preferences of Political Actors

This contribution introduces the development of German party competition and coalition politics in recent decades on the one hand and the latest techniques for estimating the preferences of political actors on the other. It argues that, for reasons of social change, the preferences of the electorate were reshaped and political actors therefore had to adopt programmatic changes. In addition, the establishment of a new socialist party in the eastern German states, and since 2005 also in the western part of Germany, resulted in new coalition strategies for the ‘traditional’ political parties, which are discussed between and within the parties. Researchers can apply various methods to test what programmatic position political actors adopted and whether they changed their programmatic orientation over time. The paper discusses the advantages and drawbacks of the major strategies in estimating preferences of political actors and provides an overview of the contributions to this issue of German Politics.

Coalition formation at the local level: Institutional constraints, party policy conflict, and office-seeking political parties

This article examines the determinants of coalition formation on the local level. In addition to standard office- and policy-seeking variables, we incorporate the local institutional setting and the constraints on local coalition politics emerging from patterns of party competition at the superior level of the political system. We test our expectations on the basis of a dataset providing information on the characteristics of potential and formed coalitions in 29 German cities. The results show that – even on the local level, which is often described as less politicised – not only office-seeking variables but also the ideological positioning of parties are good predictors for local coalition formation in German cities. Additionally, our findings suggest that local political actors take the party affiliation of the directly elected mayor into account when forming coalitions in local councils. The findings imply that political actors on all levels of political systems try to maximise their payoffs and form coalitions accordingly.

Under Which Conditions Do Parties Attract Voters’ Reactions to Issues? Party-Varying Issue Voting in German Elections 1987–2009

Are voters’ choices influenced by parties’ position-taking and communication efforts on issues during a campaign? And if so, do voters’ reactions to issues differ across parties? This article outlines a research design for the statistical identification of party-varying issue reactions within the established paradigm of the Spatial Theory of Voting. Using a special feature of conditional logit and probit models – i.e. the estimation of alternative-specific coefficients instead of fixed ‘generic’ issue distance effects – it is possible to detect asymmetrically attached issue saliencies at the level of the voters, and hence at the demand-side of politics. This strategy opens a new way to systematically combine insights obtained by saliency approaches with the Spatial Theory of Voting. An application to the German parliamentary elections from 1987 to 2009 demonstrates that it is predominantly parties taking polar positions – and, more specifically, niche parties taking polar positions – that induce such asymmetric issue voting.

Do Voters’ Coalition Preferences Affect Government Formation?

Studies on coalition formation assume that political parties have two major goals: they aim to maximise office and policy payoffs. This paper shows that decision-making in the government formation game is also determined by the voters’ coalition preferences. Since the coalition formation process is not a one-shot game, parties have to take the coalition preferences of the electorate into account when they evaluate the utility of potential coalitions. If parties fail to comply with the coalition preferences of voters, they are likely to be penalised in future elections. The argument is tested by an analysis of government formation in the 16 German states between 1990 and 2009. The results support the argument: the formation of coalitions – at least in the German states – is not only determined by office- and policy-seeking behaviour of political parties, but also by the preferences of voters regarding their preferred outcome of the coalition game.

Parteienwettbewerb und Koalitionsbildung in den deutschen Bundesländern

Folgt man einer zusammenfassenden Betrachtung von (1993: 16f.); (vgl. Schneider 2001: 385), so ist dem Parteienwettbewerb auf Ebene der Bundeslander in vergleichender wie in empirisch-analytischer Perspektive bislang wenig Beachtung geschenkt worden. Zwar existieren eine Reihe von Studien, die Muster des Parteienwettbewerbs wie der Regierungsbildung in einem oder mehreren Bundeslandern analysieren (vgl. z.B. Berg-Schlosser u.a. 1994; Jun 1994; Galonska 1999; Kropp 1999, 2001; Heinrich 2002), jedoch sind diese eher qualitativ ausgerichtet oder lassen aufgrund der Berucksichtigung von nur wenigen Bundeslandern keine Generalisierung zu. Andere, starker quantitativ ausgerichtete Arbeiten weisen zur Analyse der Koalitionsbildung in den Bundeslandern (Pappi u.a. 2005) oder des legislativen Prozesses (Brauninger/Konig 1999) den Landesparteien die programmatischen Positionen der Parteien auf Bundesebene zu. Dabei wird vernachlassigt, dass das Bestehen regionaler politischer Kulturen oder unterschiedlicher Konkurrenzsituationen durchaus zu Verschiebungen in den Mustern des Parteienwettbewerbs in den Bundeslandern fuhren kann (vgl. etwa Wehling 1985, 2004; Best 1991; Rohe 1991, 1992).