A legacy reassessed: Helmut Kohl and the German party finance affair

Revelations about former chancellor Helmut Kohl's party finance practices spawned the biggest scandal in post‐war German political history. Though some details of this affair's scope remained unclear or in dispute, the author argues that large, unreported private contributions served Kohl's strategy for managing his Christian Democratic Union: such resources helped fund the modern party organisation that he had built and sustained his own quasi‐feudal network of personal relationships at all levels. His intense partisanship made it easier for him to justify circumventing party finance laws. Yet evidence for the contention that Kohl took such funds in exchange for granting policy favours remains more ambiguous.     

The PDS in the new German party system

The success of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) cannot be explained solely with a rising tide of GDR nostalgia and/or with the efficiency of PDS members as service providers and advocates at the grass‐roots level. We stress the importance of the PDS as the main political representative of a specific socio‐economic and cultural milie in the former GDR. Furthermore, the article traces the evolution of the PDS from a populist voice of protest of the losers of unification to the beginnings of a new political party. As such it defines its identity more as a radical left‐wing party with strong social libertarian characteristics than a traditional socialist party. The party programme and the electorate of the PDS display remarkable similarities to the fundamentalist wing of the West German Greens in the 1980s, although differences as to the origins of the left‐libertarian ideas remain important. While the PDS seems to have strengthened the significance of the new politics agenda in post‐unification Germany, it is still too early to conclude whether this agenda is firmly rooted in the party or whether it is simply a vehicle to electoral success.     

Between haiderisation and modernisation: The German free democrats since party unification

This article examines the development of the German Free Democrats (FDP) since party unification in 1990. Two‐fifths of the FDP's membership now come from the new Lander which adds considerably to the party's internal volatility while it is faced with a dual policy and functional crisis. The current internal debate indicates the extent of the resulting disorientation and illustrates the post‐unification search for a new identity. There now appear to be three principal options for the FDP's future development: firstly, the ‘West German option’, that is the retention of the internal status quo ante; secondly, a radical Haider‐style transformation or the ‘Austrian option'; and thirdly, the ‘modernisation option’, which sees party unification as an opportunity for positive change which could make the Liberals the first truly all‐German party.     

Misleading the German public: The new bundestag law on parliamentarians

This article outlines the history of several attempts to increase salaries and pensions of members of the German Bundestag in the early 1990s. It shows the unethical tactics used by parliamentarians and the way in which public information was in part consciously designed to mislead. It is argued that Bundestag members tend to form a political cartel when decisions concerning their salaries and pensions are made. Similiar tendencies can be observed in all parliamentary decisions involving party finance, providing support for Katz and Mair's thesis that ‘catch‐all’ parties are generally being replaced by ‘cartel parties’. Having analysed the issues involved, the article calls for greater accountability and responsibility on the part of German politicians when their own personal advantage is at issue.     

The German Parliament

ABSTRACT

In the words of Louis Marie de La Haye Cormenin (1788-1864), the French lawyer, politician and pamphleteer, in the Livre des orateurs (1843), ‘Four people know the secret of the weakness of the parliamentary orator: his doctor, his confessor, his lover and his stenographer’. Stenographers worked for the first time in 1840 in the Upper House of the Hungarian Parliament. The Bureau of Stenographers as a permanent office was established in 1868. For the Upper House and the House of Representatives, a joint Bureau of Stenographers was organized with two superiors, four auditors, twelve ordinary stenographers and two rotation guides. The stenographers worked at five-minute intervals with no backlog of work. The stenographic report of each session was published half an hour later after the last word had been spoken in the session room. The parliamentary stenographer was required to have a university degree and to take a shorthand exam. Journalists, lawyers, professors and also engineers were employed as stenographers. Reproductive intelligence, quick comprehension, responsiveness, and craftsmanship were some of the qualities that were required to be a qualified parliamentary stenographer.     

The evolution of party images and party system in Taiwan, 1992–2004

This article examines the evolution of party images in Taiwan between 1992 and 2004. It shows that party images are not immutable, as while the DPP gained more positive images, the other parties gained more negative images during the research period. The results show that the Taiwanese parties have quite distinct party images. Taiwanese voters often tend to use ethnic background and the cross-Strait relations to define the parties. Party images also play a significant role in Taiwanese voting behaviour, even when other variables are controlled. Voters tend to vote for the parties that they have favourable impressions of. The results also have implications for how political parties package themselves to attract more votes and on the development of the party system in Taiwan.     

The regulation of party switching in Africa

The article presents a complete overview of existing regulations of party switching in Africa since the reintroduction of multiparty politics in the early 1990s. While most established democracies do not see any reason for sanctioning with legal restrictions the decision of members of parliament to change their party affiliation, in Africa many countries take a critical stance towards party switching. Frequent party switching is considered to weaken political parties, to hinder the institutionalisation of party systems, and to endanger the stability of government and the legitimacy of democracy. The article distinguishes legal regulations of party switching conceptually by what is prohibited and its enforcement. A preliminary analysis shows that anti-defection laws indeed matter for party system institutionalisation in Africa's emerging democracies.     

The diplomacy of German unification

Heinrich Bortfeldt, Washington ‐ Bonn ‐ Berlin (Bonn: Bouvier, 1993)

Elizabeth Pond, Beyond the Wall (Washington: Brookings, 1993)

Stephen Szabo, The Diplomacy of German Unification (New York: St Martin's, 1993).     

The idiosyncratic dynamics of party system nationalization in Russia

This article uses data from the 1993–2011 national legislative elections in Russia in order to systematically measure and explain the dynamics of party system nationalization. The analysis registers a salient discrepancy between the extremely low levels of territorial homogeneity of the vote in the single-member plurality section of Russia's electoral system (1993–2003), on the one hand, and very high levels of party nationalization in party-list contests, on the other. This discrepancy, facilitated by such factors as the legacies of regime transition, federalism, and presidentialism, was reinforced by the integration of gubernatorial political machines into the nationwide political order, which ultimately resulted in unprecedentedly high levels of party nationalization in the 2007–2011 elections. The findings challenge a conventional theory that equates the formation of national electorates to the progressive process of party system consolidation, suggesting that under certain conditions, related but not reducible to the authoritarian perversion of the structure of electoral incentives, there is no such linear relationship.     

Auditing party democracy: the case of Canadian party constituency associations

Political parties are often assessed on the basis of participatory democratic theory, which emphasises the importance of openness, inclusiveness, and responsiveness as the markers by which we can measure their democratic quality. This approach can be contrasted with competitive democratic theory that emphasises the centrality of fairness, transparency, and accountability to the democratic assessment of parties and other democratic actors. We apply these contrasting frameworks to a democratic audit of one set of party institutions and actors: the grassroots constituency associations maintained by Canadian parties. We illustrate how the outcomes of such assessments are deeply informed by the frameworks employed.     

Indonesian local party politics

Since the fall of Soeharto in 1998, economic reforms have been linked to internationally supported programs to introduce market-facilitating “good governance” practices, which include the promotion of democratic elections and administrative and fiscal decentralization. International development organizations have thus put forward decentralization as necessary, essentially, to save Indonesia from becoming an irredeemably “failed state” — an issue that has now grown in importance because of the current nature of Western security concerns in Southeast Asia. But this article suggests that the way decentralization has actually taken place can only be understood in relation to the entrenchment of a democratic political regime run by the logic of money politics and violence, and primarily dominated by reconstituted old New Order elites. Taking local party politics in North Sumatra and East Java as case studies, the article shows that local constellations of power, with an interest in the perpetuation of predatory politics, still offer significant sites of resistance to the global neoliberal economic and political agenda.     

The rise and fall of Germany's party of democratic socialism

This article offers a short diachronic analysis of the development and success of Germany's Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), followed by an examination of the explanations cited by academics, political commentators and the party itself for its poor performance in the 2002 general election. A distinction is drawn between factors that are short-term in nature and those that are more fundamental to the party's current predicament, with the analytical emphasis being placed firmly on internal variables – that is, on the party's own capacity (or lack thereof) to act. The conclusion is reached that sympathisers and supporters of the PDS currently have very little reason to be optimistic about the party's future prospects.