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Abstract
Germany’s federalism imposes significant constraints on sub-national parties. They cannot enact their ambitious policy agenda as most legislative powers are concentrated at the federal level. This article demonstrates how sub-national parties use position-taking strategies to escape these constraints. By position-taking, parties try to induce regional voters and interest groups to judge them for what they stand for instead of blaming them for the policies they cannot deliver. This argument is illustrated empirically by analysing all 1,715 announcements of legislative initiatives in the Bundesrat in 562 electoral manifestos and coalition agreements that were published during all 92 regional elections since 1990 and all 1,619 Land bills from the period between 1972 and 2013. It is shown that regional parties and governments that are in opposition at the federal level announce and submit significantly more legislative initiatives that aim at changing federal policies.
Acknowledgements
I thank Sandra Gadinger, Vinzent Leitgeb, Sebastian Riedl and Ellen Schmidt for their most valuable research assistance. Helpful comments by Sebastian Eppner, Johannes Freudenreich, Klaus H. Goetz, Isabella Harle, Jochen Müller, David Willumsen and two anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Supplemental Data
The underlying research materials for this article can be accessed at www.chrstecker.com.
Notes
1. For the sake of clarity I use the terms regional/Land versus federal to discern between levels of government in Germany and avoid the term ‘state’, which may refer to both levels.
2. Party abbreviations used throughout the text: Christian Democratic Union (CDU); Christian Social Union (CSU); Social Democrats (SPD); Left Party/Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS); Liberals (FDP).
3. With regard to social policy, the states have limited discretion for their own legislation, such as providing additional social benefits (Schmid and Blancke Citation2006: 296).
4. The exact share of these so-called consent bills has varied over time. The recent reform of federalism aimed specifically at reducing the share of consent bills (Turner and Rowe Citation2013).
5. In European federal countries, only Austrian states enjoy even less legislative power (Thorlakson Citation2003: 8–9).
6. This also implies that regional party leaders’ progressive ambitions with regard to their federal party call for strategies focusing on the federal level. Only with ‘federal weight’ (bundespolitisches Gewicht) may a regional party leader aspire to become an influential federal party figure.
7. Another indicator for the strong influence of regional party branches is the portfolio allocation in federal cabinets. Some ministerial posts are reserved for influential regional party branches.
8. With few exceptions, each of the five main parties – CDU, SPD, Greens, FDP and Left Party – are internally structured in federal and Land-level organisations (which are further divided into district and local parts).
9. Recent reforms also provided for more policy discretion at the regional level (Behnke et al. Citation2011; Benz Citation2007).
10. Socio-economic peculiarities may directly translate into different policy preferences but may also be projected onto a constitutional dimension. Richer Länder, for example, often have a clear preference for more regional autonomy than poorer Länder (Detterbeck and Jeffery Citation2009: 66; Hepburn and Hough Citation2012: 79; Ziblatt Citation2002).
11. While a mutually exclusive partisan categorisation of initiatives offer a straightforward measurement of party-political misfits, territorial misfits are inherently more difficult to operationalise. One reason is the considerable overlap of horizontal conflicts between the Länder. All eastern Länder, for example share various interests with different western Länder: they are secular, they receive money from the federal financial equalisation fund and they prefer – due to their higher unemployment rates and structural disadvantages – certain instruments of economic policy.
12. More generally speaking, regional party branches’ assertiveness against their federal party becomes particularly obvious when stakes are high, such as when fiscal interests are at play (Houten Citation2009), during government formation on the regional level (Kropp Citation2001; Ştefuriuc Citation2009a) or when the unpopularity of the federal party threatens electoral prospects at the regional level (Hough and Koß Citation2009: 57).
13. I conducted three semi-structured interviews with public officials from Bavaria, Lower-Saxony and Hesse. All three interviewees are or were employed in the section of the state prime minister’s office (Staatskanzlei/Staatsministerium) that deals with the drafting and coordination of the Bundesrat initiatives of their states. All interviewees asked for and were guaranteed anonymity.
14. A simple search for articles referring to BR bills in a few newspapers in Germany corroborates this point: in the nationwide newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1,099 articles refer to BR bills (1990–2014); in the nationwide newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, 849 articles (1990–2014), in the Stuttgarter Zeitung, an important newspaper in Baden-Württemberg, 77 articles (since 2010); in the Berliner Zeitung, more than 200 articles (since 2010); in the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, the largest newspaper in North Rhine‐Westphalia, 212 articles (since 2007); in the Ostseezeitung, a prominent newspaper in north-east Germany, 46 articles (during the last year). A more systematic newspaper analysis is beyond the scope of this paper.
15. More specifically, there is no instance where the most right-wing SPD party branch is situated to the right of the most leftist CDU party branch.
16. Here I restrict the analysis to the five main parties of the German party system: CDU (CSU in Bavaria), SPD, FDP, Greens and Left Party.
17. Outliers of the two upper boxes are all party manifestos of the Greens. The Greens are most active in announcing legislative initiatives in their party manifesto (see online appendix).
18. Note that single-party majority governments at regional level do not enter the analysis as they – less surprisingly – do not publish coalition agreements.
19. Example: If Bavaria spent 24 months as an O Land in the Bundesrat and submitted 20 initiatives in this period it enters the dataset with 2 Landyears and 10 bills per year.
20. See supplemental material for descriptive statistics of dependent and independent variables and regression tables. Figure visualises the results of Model II in Table A5 of the supplemental material.
21. To account for the panel structure of the data, I estimated pooled negative binomial regressions with cluster-robust standard errors for each individual Land government constellation.