Michael Koß

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.

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.

Conclusion: left parties in national governments

Given their position as key players in their respective party systems – not to mention their growing importance in the coalition formation process – it is perhaps surprising that political science has only reluctantly given left parties serious scholarly attention or, as Bale and Dunphy (2006) have put it, brought these parties ‘in from the cold’. Doing just this has been the major purpose of this book. As is clear from our case studies, a considerable number of factors come into play in shaping the behaviour of these parties. Institutional factors, for example, have clearly impacted on left parties in Norway, Denmark and Sweden (owing to their traditions of minority government and negative parliamentarism), in Finland (with its special rules concerning the government formateur) and in Spain (with an electoral law that works heavily against minority parties without heavy regional concentrations). Leadership and organisation issues, meanwhile, have also affected left parties’ strategic choices in most of the countries considered here (perhaps most especially in the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Finland), while situational factors (including ‘external shocks’) have forced left parties to reconsider their strategies in several cases (above all in Germany, Italy, Norway and the Netherlands). Finally, party system factors – analysed in considerable detail below – appear to play significant roles in shaping left parties’ behaviour across all our case studies. As a result, many of the left parties considered here find themselves in key bargaining positions, especially in those countries where social democratic parties have fewer coalition options and/or historically better relationships with their cousins on the left. Consequently, as the authors in this volume have made clear, left parties are not substantially different from other parties in terms of the ‘hard choices’ that they are forced to make.

The Origins of Parliamentary Agenda Control: A Comparative Process Tracing Analysis

This paper aims to explain the origins of the rules of parliamentary agenda control, which can be regarded as the single most important institutional determinant of parliamentary power. Based on the premises of distributive bargaining, the paper develops a causal mechanism for the delegation of agenda control to the government majority. Given that only anti-system or anti-establishment parties strictly prefer to participate in plenary proceedings, these ‘anti’-parties potentially obstruct legislation. Such legislative obstruction by ‘anti’-parties causes establishment parties to commit themselves to procedural reform and thus triggers attempts to centralise agenda control. The delegation of parliamentary agenda powers is successful if opposition to procedural reform is confined to anti-system parties. The causal leverage of this mechanism is assessed in a process-tracing of three reform attempts in two most different cases: the initially ineffective, but then successful introduction of a closure procedure in the United Kingdom and the failed attempt to facilitate the closure in Germany.

Durch die Krise zum Erfolg? Die PDS und ihr langer Weg nach Westen

Es ist wahrlich viel geschrieben worden uber die PDS. Die Partei, die anders als der einst mit ihr verwobene Staat — und anders als zu Beginn der 1990er Jahre von der Mehrheit der Zeitgenossen angenommen — nicht verschwand, war fur viele ein Faszinosum und zog entsprechend viel Aufmerksamkeit auf sich. Dem Blickwinkel der Betrachter entsprechend fielen dabei auch die Urteile weit auseinander. Ohne die Debatte uber die PDS im Einzelnen nachzeichnen zu wollen,1 kann man festhalten, dass die Ansichten grundsatzlich zwischen zwei Polen schwankten: Den einen schien die PDS eine extremistische Partei, die die Demokratie des vereinigten Deutschland gefahrdete, andere hingegen betonten die integrative Funktion der PDS im deutschen Parteiensystem, sahen sie gleichsam als Korrektiv gegen die westdeutsche Hegemonie in der Bonner (respektive Berliner) Republik

The Role of Governments in Legislative Agenda Setting

The Role of Governments in Legislative Agenda Setting Edited by Bjorn Erik Rasch and George Tsebelis Routledge, London, 2010, 304 pp., £75.00, ISBN 9780415481014 (hbk) Turning scholarly attention t...

Close to, but Still Out of, Government: The Swedish Vänsterpartiet

Sweden can be seen as a testing ground for a new form of coalition government called ‘contract parliamentarism’. Tim Bale and Torbjorn Bergman (2006a: p. 422) define contract parliamentarism as follows: ‘in contract parliamentarism, what are formally minority governments (formed by either a single party or a coalition of parties) have relationships with their “support” parties that are so institutionalised that they come close to being majority governments.’ Next to the Swedish Greens (Miljopartiet den Grona, MP), the Swedish Left Party (Vansterpartiet, V) was the main support party of Social Democratic governments between 1998 and 2006. As we shall see in the following, the Left Party, after achieving an all-time electoral high of 12 per cent in 1998, suffered badly at the polls during this period and, indeed, afterwards. Even though Bale and Bergman (2006a, b) analysed contract parliamentarism closely, they paid scant attention to the Left Party. This chapter aims to fill this gap and addresses three major questions: first, why did V end up as a support party rather than a coalition partner? Second, which factors caused the collapse of the Left Party’s electoral appeal after 1998? Third, how much did this collapse have to do with V’s role as a support party? In order to answer these questions, this chapter proceeds as follows. After first discussing V’s background as a Communist party, I provide an overview of the (institutional) context of the Swedish party system. Then I trace V’s ideological development before, during and after its experience as a support party. The next section discusses the consequences of V’s support party experience, while the final section provides a brief analysis of the party’s future prospects. As we shall see, a combination of unfavourable institutional factors and unsolved strategic dilemmas weakened V’s bargaining power vis-a-vis its support partner (the Social Democrats). More ominously, on account of the structural changes within the Swedish party system the future prospects of V joining a coalition government are anything but rosy.

Scheitern als Chance. Helmut Kohl und die Bundestagswahl 1976

„Ich will Bundeskanzler werden in dieser ganz konkreten Situation“1, so lautete Helmut Kohls Mantra in der Wahlnacht des 4. Oktober 1976. Als groser Rhetoriker galt Kohl auch in den 1970er-Jahren nicht. Es handelte sich um einen typischen Helmut-Kohl-Satz, ausgesprochen in einer fur Kohl typischen Situation. Helmut Kohl hatte es nicht geschafft. Oder doch? Die Chancen fur die CDU, die Regierung zu bilden, standen schlecht. Zwar wurde Kohl gleich am Tag nach der Wahl bei Bundesprasident Walter Scheel vorstellig, um den Auftrag zur Regierungsbildung einzuholen. Doch Scheel beschied ihm freundlich, dass eine sozialliberale Koalition ungleich bessere Chancen besas, den Kanzler zu stellen. Dennoch: Die Union hatte mit 48,6 Prozent das zweitbeste Ergebnis in ihrer Geschichte erzielt, und das ohne den Kanzlerbonus im Allgemeinen und den Nimbus Adenauers im Besonderen. War Kohl nun Sieger oder Besiegter?