Unsecular Politics in a Secular Environment: The Case of Germany's Christian Democratic Union Family Policy

Secularisation theory carried two implicit implications for Christian Democratic parties: either they become secular or they cease to exist. Both implications were wrong. Christian Democracy has neither vanished from the political landscape nor has it become fully secular. To secure its survival Christian Democracy has embarked on a delicate balancing act between the modern and the secular. Following up empirically on the thesis of Christian Democratic politics as being modern unsecular, the paper explores how much of the Christian element is still needed to explain Christian Democratic ideology and policy in the twenty-first century. By scrutinising the struggle surrounding Christian Democratic family policy in Germany, the paper finds that the conflict on the repositioning of Christian Democracy in a new cultural environment not only unfolds between secular modernisers and religious traditionalists. It has also led to the re-eruption of the interdenominational cleavage between Protestants and Catholics within the party.     

The Chilean presidential elections of 1999–2000 and democratic consolidation

This article examines the campaign and the outcome of the presidential elections held in 1999–2000 in Chile. It argues that the election marks a crucial phase in the consolidation of democracy in Chile. It can be seen as the first “normal” election since the return to democracy in 1990. It was unusually competitive and the result was in doubt until the second round vote. The election was notable for its emphasis on the future. Issues of the past were largely ignored ‐ as was the position of General Pinochet in London. The campaign of the Right was based upon an above‐party appeal while that of the ruling coalition relied on the traditional weight of parties in Chile. The result can be seen as an endorsement of the policies of the Concertacion government, but it also represented a resurgence of the Right. The victorious candidate, Ricardo Lagos, has stressed his commitment to social justice and to equity ‐ but he faces the problem of a governing coalition with internal differences still to be resolved, and a Right better placed to be a formidable opposition.     

Populism on Difficult Terrain: The Right- and Left-Wing Challenger Parties in the Federal Republic of Germany

Right-wing populist parties in Germany were unable to benefit from the success of their counterparts in neighbouring Western European states from the mid-1980s. Despite this failure, there were several attempts to establish such a party in Germany. Even the ‘centre’ of the political spectrum attempted to approach populist structures and content, and this was especially true of the FDP during the 2002 parliamentary election campaign. After a discussion of the term ‘populism’, we analyse the different parties' opportunities, political proposals and the reasons why they ultimately failed. We then examine the recently founded party ‘The Left’ as a case of left-wing populism, a rarely discussed topic, and we pay particular attention to the development of the leftist alliance between PDS and WASG. Finally, we discuss whether a leftist populist grouping could, perhaps, have better prospects for success in the German party system than a right-wing populist party.     

‘Responsibility for Europe’: the EU policy of the German Social Democrats since unification

The following article analyses the European Union (EU) policy of the German Social Democrats (SPD) since German unity. Starting from the cross-party European consensus in the early 1990s SPD policy has altered significantly in response to major changes in the ‘policy context’ such as the party's rise from opposition to government, German unification and increasing European integration. Policy change in the SPD has been defined by two dynamics: greater ‘pragmatism’ among a new generation of party leaders that has allowed a ‘freer’ interpretation of German interests; and a gradual prioritisation of EU policy in the party elite that has seen it integrated into a multi-level programme for political governance. The article examines how these changes manifested themselves in SPD policy, focusing on European Economic and Monetary Union and the debate on ‘the future of Europe’.     

The 2009 Elections in Schleswig-Holstein: Polarised Electoral Campaign,Exceptional Election Results,and an Unspectacular Process of Government Formation

The elections for the Schleswig-Holstein Landtag were held on 27 September 2009. After conflicts between the governing parties the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), Prime Minister Carstensen had ended the ‘grand coalition’ and called for early elections, one year earlier than scheduled. The electoral campaign centred on the divide between the Christian Democrats who favoured a coalition with the Liberals, and the Social Democrats who competed for a majority together with the Greens. The elections resulted in large shifts in party strength. Christian and Social Democrats together lost about 22 percentage points of votes, while most of the smaller parliamentary parties attained their best election results in Schleswig-Holstein state elections ever. CDU and FDP gained a majority of seats and formed a coalition that re-elected Carstensen into office on 27 October. Using concepts from coalition theory, our analysis shows that a Christian–Liberal coalition was indeed the most likely outcome of the government formation process.     

Yet Another Case of Electoral and Government Epidemic? The Turkish Cypriot Legislative Election of January 2018

Following Bosco and Verney’s analyses of ‘electoral’ and ‘government epidemics’, the 2018 Turkish Cypriot legislative election is examined in the context of the impact of the economic crisis on elections and government formation in southern Europe. Despite its obvious idiosyncrasies as a self-declared state with 335,000 inhabitants, in the last decade of economic crisis and austerity policies, the Turkish Cypriot case has followed a largely similar pattern to other southern European countries: declining turnout; emergence of start-up parties; three consecutive early elections; a more fragmented parliament; sidelining of the biggest party in government formation; the first ever grand coalition; and, finally, an unprecedented four-party coalition bringing together parties from left, right, and centre.     

Trade Unions and Political Parties in Italy (1946–2014): Ideological Positions and Critical Junctures

The paper investigates party-union relationships in Italy (1946–2014) by hand-coding parties’ parliamentary speeches and trade unions’ congress motions. In line with the cartel party thesis, a time series analysis shows that the ideological closeness between the left-wing Italian General Confederation of Labour and left-wing parties deteriorated when the Italian Socialist Party (1980) and the heirs of the Italian Communist Party (1998) converged toward the centre of the ideological spectrum. Conversely, the closeness between the Catholic-inspired Italian Confederation of Workers’ Unions and the heirs of Christian Democracy increased after 1994, when the former party’s leftist factions became the major part of the Italian Popular Party.     

Party Competition and Government Formation in Germany: Business as Usual or New Patterns?

The process of coalition formation following the 2017 Bundestag election was the most difficult in German post-war history. For the first time, Germany saw negotiations fail, a minority government being discussed as a real possibility, and the federal president involved as formateur in coalition politics. The aim of this contribution is to explain why government formation was so intricate after the 2017 election. To this end, we trace patterns of party politics and the development of the German party system since 2013. We then study general patterns of government formation at the regional and national levels since the 1990s and evaluate whether these have changed with the advent of the right-wing populist party, Alternative for Germany. Our analysis of the 2017–2018 government formation is based on a novel expert survey of the policy profiles of German parties on various issue dimensions, conducted in 2017. The results show that the continuation of the incumbent coalition government of Christian and Social Democrats was the most likely outcome, and that the Social Democrats were indeed able to enforce a surpassing share of their policy positions in the final negotiation rounds.     

An introduction to the articles on Indonesia

Abstract

In May 1987, general elections will be held in Indonesia. These will be the fifth such elections since the country's independence in 1945, and the contesting parties will be the government electoral organization, GOLKAR, which convincingly won the last elections, the largely Muslim PPP (Unity Development party), and the small Christian and nationalist PDI (Indonesian Democratic party). After the previous elections in 1982, the Indonesian government made the claim that the proceedings had been “direct, general, free and secret,” and indeed it was difficult to find more than incidental evidence of fraud or manipulation in the conduct of the poll itself. However, this attempt by “Pancasila Democracy” to claim kinship with the Western democratic tradition studiously ignored the context of political restriction which has operated in Indonesia for the last three decades. Since such claims are likely to be revised after the coming elections to suggest that the power of the New Order government of President Suharto rests on the active consent of the people, the editors of the Bulletin have thought it appropriate to devote this issue to a closer examination of the recent political history of Indonesia.     

Populist Communication and Publicity: An Empirical Study of Contextual Differences in Switzerland

Abstract: This study analyzes the context‐dependency of populist communication and asks whether there are variations in populist communication for representatives of different kinds of parties. In contrast to previous research on European populism, which mostly considers only the right‐wing, this study includes the entire scope of political parties; thus allowing for the possibility of the diffusion of populism in contemporary politics. The empirical contribution is a multilevel analysis of speeches in non‐public and public forums (closed parliamentary committees, open parliamentary floors, and the talk show ‘Arena’) on immigration and asylum amendments in Switzerland. A so‐called populist party, the Swiss People’s Party, played a significant role in drafting the legislation. Analysis reveals that a) different public settings influence populist communication differently; b) a non‐populist party, the Christian‐democrats, employs more populist communication on average than any other party and its populism is employed more consistently across contexts than that of the Swiss People’s Party; c) but when speaking in media forms, the Swiss People’s Party employs substantially more populist communication than any other party. Thus, the type of public forum does not uniformly contribute to higher levels of populist communication, but rather the effect of forum type varies substantially by party.     

The Myanmar Elections 2015: Why the National League for Democracy Won a Landslide Victory

On November 8 the vast majority of Myanmar's citizens participated in what official observers – international and domestic – widely hailed as the most genuinely competitive, free, fair, and orderly parliamentary elections in the nation since 1990. Yet the poll, which resulted in a resounding victory for the National League for Democracy (NLD), surprised many observers, who expected that members of the ruling party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), would have done better through widely anticipated vote-rigging and manipulation of the results. Right up to a few days before the vote, observers were concerned about the possibility of a cancellation of the election as a result of politically motivated violence or, in the event they went ahead, administrative chaos resulting from errors in voters’ registration information and large-scale vote-rigging and manipulation by the ruling party. These fears were well-founded given that only 3 weeks prior to the elections, the government's Union Election Commission (UEC) proposed delaying the polls, citing recent floods that had devastated 12 out of Myanmar's 14 states and regions, killing 103 people and displacing 1 million others. This proposal predictably met strong resistance from the NLD and other opposition parties, which expected a strong public support for them in the poll.     

The Neglected Nation: The CSU and the Territorial Cleavage in Bavarian Party Politics

This article examines the continuing salience of the territorial cleavage in Bavarian party politics. It does so through an exploration of the Christian Social Union's (CSU) mobilisation of Bavarian identity as part of its political project, which has forced other parties in Bavaria to strengthen their territorial goals and identities. Parties have articulated different constructions of ‘Bavaria’ to rival the CSU's dominant nation-building project. However, they have been unable to portray themselves as ‘standing up for Bavarian interests’ due to the constraints of the state-wide parties to which they belong. As an exclusively Bavarian party, the CSU has no such constraints. Indeed, the CSU's core aim of strengthening Bavaria's position vis-à-vis the German federation may be viewed as akin to that of the Convergència i Unió in Catalonia, Spirit in Flanders or Plaid Cymru in Wales. Like these parties, the case of the CSU in Bavaria demonstrates that sub-state territorial mobilisation has as much to do with negotiating autonomy within the state as seceding from it. To that end, the CSU provides a valuable case of how a regionalist party operating within a multi-level political system has sought to influence the regional, state and European levels to obtain a comparative territorial advantage.     

The Baden-Württemberg State Election of 2011: A Political Landslide

After 58 years in the position of dominant political party, the Christian Democrats suffered from an electoral defeat in the Baden-Württemberg state election of 27 March 2011 and, as a result of the election, the first Green prime minister was elected and headed a state government formed by the Green and the Social Democrat parties. The main reasons for this political landslide were the unique constellation of political issues and the voters' attitudes towards the candidates for the office of prime minister. Instead of economic issues traditionally ‘owned’ by the Christian Democrats, the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima and the bitter conflict over the reconstruction of the Stuttgart railway station brought ‘new politics’ issues to the top of the agenda. Moreover, never before in the history of German state elections was a prime minister running for re-election as unpopular as the leading candidate of Christian Democrats. Finally, many voters were convinced that it was just time for a change.     

The Fiji Election of 2014: Rights,Representation and Legitimacy in Fiji Politics

Abstract

Fiji’s 2014 election was its first in eight years, first under the 2013 constitution, and first using a common roll of electors with proportional representation. In the new parliament of 50 seats, the coup leader of 2006, Frank Bainimarama, emerged triumphant. His FijiFirst Party won 32 seats, with the Social Democratic Liberal Party, a successor party to earlier indigenous Fijian parties, winning 15 and the National Federation Party three. The election of the new parliament marked the end of Fiji’s longest period under a military government since independence. How should the significance of these elections be judged in the context of Fiji’s history? Do they represent the breakthrough to democratic stability that so many Fiji citizens have wanted for so long? Or are they just another phase of Fiji’s turbulent politics, a democratic pause before another lurch into authoritarian government?     

Kirchheimer Revisited: Party Polarisation,Party Convergence,or Party Decline in the German Party System

The 2005 German parliamentary elections produced two parties claiming victory, the inability to form a government, and Germany's second post-war grand coalition government. This article explores the peculiarities in the contemporary dynamic of the German party system. It considers the strategy and motivation of parties and the effect of party competition. A key focus is to revisit and evaluate the predictive power of Otto Kirchheimer's ‘end of ideology’ proposition in the German case. On the one hand, mainstream parties seem to be converging at the ideological centre across Western Europe. At the same time, some party polarisation within the party system is evident as more marginal parties such as those of the far left and far right have gained votes at the expense of the mainstream parties in recent elections. A third possibility is that both of these circumstances have produced a political void with voters becoming increasingly apathetic and non-ideological. This paper argues that in the aggregate, trends do not reflect the predictions of Kirchheimer.     

The Kingmaker is Dead,Long Live the Kingmaker: Examining the Degree of Influence of Small Parties in the Coalition-formation Process in Germany

This article examines the role of small parties in the German party system. It thus attempts to make a contribution to a largely under-researched topic in the existing literature. The goal is to determine the influence and ultimately the pivotal role of small parties over time both federally and in each Land (1949–2010). For that purpose we develop a five-point ‘opportunity structure’ scale. During the heyday of West Germany's two-and-a-half-party system (from the early 1960s to the early 1980s) the FDP was not just the main small party but the pivotal kingmaker at least federally, deciding which of the major parties (CDU/CSU or SPD) would be in government. Since then the Greens and later the PDS/die Linke have also become durable small parties and play an important role in the government formation process. The analysis shows that based on our measure the Greens have at least equalled if not surpassed the FDP as the country's most influential small party since they emerged on the political scene in the early 1980s.     

Winning Against the Trend: Labour’s Victory in the 2017 Maltese Parliamentary Election

The re-election of the Labour Party with an increased majority in the 2017 Maltese national election bucks the trends of incumbent punishment experienced in most South European countries during the ‘Great Recession’ and of the decline of social democratic parties in Europe in the past 50 years. This Maltese ‘exceptionalism’ is explained by the Labour Party’s centrist shift, the country’s pure two-party system, and the economic prosperity which encouraged voters to opt for continuity. These factors allowed the governing party to win, despite corruption allegations deriving from the Panama Papers. Although a third party entered parliament for the first time since 1966, the fundamentals of the party and electoral systems have not changed and this development may not be long-lived.     

Germans and ‘others’: Racism,xenophobia, or ‘legitimate conservatism'?

Drawing on data from various sources, the article assesses the extent of xenophobia and the potential support base for right‐wing extremism in the united Germany. The data shows that West Germany displayed a considerable level of xenophobia before unification, and that at present, Germans in east and west display strikingly similar patterns of hostility towards foreigners. In comparison to their European neighbours, however, the Germans are not markedly different. In addition to levels of education, and placement on a Left‐Right scale, the driving force behind xenophobic attitudes ‐ both in Germany and in other European Community states ‐ are economic and social fears and a perception of relative deprivation.     

Is the left alright? The SPD and the renewal of European social democracy

The late 1990s appeared to herald a new dawn for European social democracy. Social democratic governments were elected to office in Germany, the UK and France (and participated in governments in 12 of the 15 EU states). For the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the British Labour Party, this took place after long periods in opposition. For the French Socialist Party (PS), its victory in legislative elections signalled a remarkable comeback after a shattering defeat in 1993. Their rise to power was accompanied by programmatic renewal, symbolised by the ‘Neue Mitte’, the ‘Third Way’, and ‘réalisme de gauche’, and marked by convergence within the context of European integration. Yet this electoral success concealed a number of weaknesses which began to emerge at the start of the 2000s. Hierarchical leaderships, bound by the realities of government, failed to deliver (and/or communicate) distinctive social democratic agendas, undermining linkages to core supporters. This narrative is particularly relevant for recent developments in the SPD, which – after the departure of Gerhard Schröder – faces a period of strategic and programmatic uncertainty.     

Manifestos and elections in Ghana's Fourth Republic

Debate continues over the factors that influence electoral outcomes or voter behaviour and alignment in elections all over the world. Several factors have been noted, including the manifestos of political parties. In spite of the potential influence of the party manifesto, several comparative and empirical studies on elections in Ghana have paid little or no attention to manifestos in determining the electoral outcomes of political parties in the Fourth Republic.This paper makes a contribution to the debate by examining how manifestos have influenced the electoral chances of the two main political parties which have been in and out of government in Ghana since the inception of the Fourth Republic, namely, the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party. Analysis covers the five elections held in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008. Specifically, it discusses not only the ability of the manifestos to shape policy debate but also to some extent, influence electoral outcomes. The paper concludes with some lessons learned.