The Scope for Policy Change after the 2005 Election: Veto Players and Intra-Party Decision Making

Abstract

This article investigates the potential for decisive policy change after the 2005 German election. Using party manifestos, the analysis concentrates on the size of the winset of the Grand Coalition in legislation with and without mandatory Bundesrat consent. One of its innovative aspects is the systematic distinction between political parties as unitary actors on the one hand and as collective actors (with varying levels of cohesion) on the other. If parties are treated as unitary actors, the conventional view suggests that the Grand Coalition is likely to have only a moderate potential for policy change in both types of legislation. Relaxing the unitary actor-assumption reveals a different strategic situation: the less cohesive the government parties, the larger the potential for policy change. At the same time, however, the self-imposed time-limit of the Grand Coalition promotes defection, because the parties' behaviour is less likely to be disciplined by the existence of a ‘shadow of the future’. Under these conditions, policy change also seems to depend on the distribution of gains between the coalition partners.

Notes

1. P.J. Katzenstein (Policy and Politics in West Germany: The Growth of a Semisovereign State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1987) described post-war Germany well by incremental outcomes of a semi-sovereign state that is tamed by strong Länder, a powerful Bundesverfassungsgericht, bureaucratic independence and limited powers of the chancellor, with societal interests being centrally organised.

2. S.-O. Proksch and J. Slapin, ‘Institutions and Coalition Formation: the German Election of 2005’, West European Politics 29 (2006, forthcoming).

3. T. Bräuninger and T. König, ‘The Checks and Balances of Party Federalism: German Federal Government in a Divided Legislature’, European Journal of Political Research 36/2 (1999), pp.207–34.

4. Proksch and Slapin, ‘Institutions’.

5. T. König, ‘Bicameralism and Party Politics in Germany’, Political Studies 49/3 (2001), pp.411–37.

6. G. Tsebelis, Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work (Princeton, N.J./New York: Russell Sage Foundation/Princeton University Press, 2002).

7. Proksch and Slapin, ‘Institutions’.

8. For a brief description see M.G. Schmidt, Political Institutions in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.83–4.

9. For a quantitative view on German legislation from 1976 to 2002 see T. König and T. Bräuninger, ‘Gesetzgebung im Föderalismus’, Speyerer Forschungsberichte 237 (Speyer: Deutsche Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften, 2005). Their findings reveal that the adoption of legislative proposals is a function of the agenda setting (governmental) actor and the type of policy domain, while neither the veto power of the Bundesrat nor the party configuration matters for legislative success and failure. These results are confirmed by a more qualitative study of Klaus von Beyme, according to which only ten (out of 150) key decisions were not taken or blocked in the period from 1949 to 1994 in German bicameralism. See K. v. Beyme, Beyme, Der Gesetzgeber. Der Bundestag als Entscheidungszentrum (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997).

10. F.W. Scharpf, ‘The Joint Decision Trap: Lessons from German Federalism and European Integration’, Public Administration 66/3 (1988), pp.239–87.

11. G. Lehmbruch, Parteienwettbewerb im Bundesstaat: Regelsysteme und Spannungslagen im politischen System der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000).

12. M.G. Schmidt, ‘Warum Mittelmaß? Deutschlands Bildungsausgaben im internationalen Vergleich’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 43/1 (2002), pp.3–19.

13. Green and Paterson illustrate that this perspective also dominates the German public scene after unification. See S.O. Green and W.E. Paterson, ‘Introduction: Semisovereignty Challenged’, in S.O. Green and W.E. Paterson (eds), Governance in Contemporary Germany: The Semisovereign State Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). In addition to case-evidence of unsuccessful lawmaking and macro-economic indicators revealing a decline since German unification in 1990, they quote impressionistic accounts, such as reports in The Economist, Der Spiegel or Die Zeit.

14. T. Saalfeld, ‘The German Party System – Continuity and Change’, German Politics 11/3 (2002), pp.99–130.

15. Green and Paterson, ‘Introduction’, p.17.

16. Tsebelis, Veto Players, p.19.

17. Note that the size of the winset of the status quo defines the potential for policy change, which does not mean however that political actors make use of this potential or that policy change will necessarily improve the situation. Hence many of the before-mentioned positive, negative or neutral interpretations could be explained by selection bias, i.e. that Peter Katzenstein described Germany's post-war development until the beginning of the 1980s, while others focus on the more recent numbers.

18. Proksch and Slapin (‘Institutions’) use computer-based content analysis developed by M. Laver, K. Benoit and J. Garry, ‘Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data’, American Political Science Review 97/2 (2003), pp.311–31 and a dictionary-based content analysis of the 2002 elections introduced by T. König, T. Blume and B. Luig, ‘Policy Change without Government Change? German Gridlock after 2002 Election’, German Politics 12/2 (2003), pp.86–146.

19. Bräuniger and König, ‘Checks’; T. König and T. Bräuninger, ‘Wie wichtig sind die Länder für die Politik der Bundesregierung bei Einspruchs- und Zustimmungsgesetzen?’ Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen 28/4 (1997), pp.605–28.

20. E.g., König, Blume and Luig, ‘Policy Change’.

21. T. König and V. Troeger, ‘Budgetary Politics and Veto Players’, Swiss Political Science Review 11/4 (2005), pp.47–75.

22. It is assumed that the former governmental parties promote similar policy positions. The reason for this assumption is twofold: (1) the inclusion of the status quo as an additional point of the analysis poses theoretical problems because this point might shift the picture; (2) the SPD and, to a lesser extent, the Greens have explicitly stated their intention to maintain their positions.

23. König and Bräuninger ‘Wie wichtig sind die Länder’; Bräuninger and König, ‘Checks’; König, ‘Bicameralism’. I used the mean solution between the ideal points of the Grand Coalition on the one hand and the coalition of the SPD and Greens on the other to identify the status quo. An alternative possibility would be using the mean of the parties' 2002 ideal points but the transmission of ideal points from other policy spaces is a challenging methodological task, as policy spaces mirror the relative location of all points that can change when adding or subtracting such a point.

24. König and Bräuninger, ‘Wie wichtig sind die Bundesländer’; Bräuninger and König, ‘Checks’.

25. Scharpf, ‘Joint Decision Trap’.

26. Lehmbruch, Parteienwettbewerb.

27. König, ‘Bicameralism’.

28. For example, the Bundesverfassungsgericht rejects, changes and sometimes even sets legislative standards, and oftentimes theses cases are initiated by opposition parties and decided with respect to public awareness and political accountability. See G. Vanberg, The Politics of Constitutional Review in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). In budgetary politics, the finance minister is provided with veto powers over changes made by the political parties of the Bundestag, and the Bundesbank could tie the hands of governmental expenditure for a long time. Another kind of partisan veto player is induced by the electoral system, which makes coalition building necessary – and thus establishes at least two veto players – for government formation.

29. This short-term perspective of both coalition partners usually promotes free-riding and makes cooperation less likely.

30. This usually decreases the probability of cooperation because absolute gains are not sufficient for promoting cooperation.

31. Parteienwettbewerb.

32. Scharpf, ‘Joint Decision Trap’; Schmidt, ‘Warum Mittelmaß?’

33. ‘Institutions’.

34. Green and Paterson, ‘Introduction’, p.17.

35. K. v. Beyme, Parteien im Wandel: von den Volksparteien zu den professionellen Wählerparteien (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000); T. Saalfeld, ‘Deliberate Delegation or Abdication? Government Backbenchers, Ministers and European Union Legislation’, The Journal of Legislative Studies 11/3–4 (2005), pp.343–71.

36. Saalfeld, ‘German Party System’.

37. T. Poguntke, ‘Zur empirischen Evidenz der Kartellparteien-These.’ Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen 33/4 (2002), pp.790–806.

38. U. v. Alemann, Das Parteiensystem der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2000).

39. E. Wiesendahl, ‘Changing Party Organisations in Germany: How to Deal with Uncertainty and Organised Anarchy’, in S. Padgett and T. Saalfeld (eds): Bundestagswahl ‘98: End of an Era? (London: Frank Cass, 2000).

40. T. Saalfeld, ‘Political Parties’, in S.O. Green and W.E. Paterson (eds): Governance in Contemporary Germany: The Semisovereign State Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.68.

41. ‘Institutions’.

42. T. Bräuninger and M. Debus, ‘Intraparty Factions and Coalition Bargaining in Germany’, Paper presented at ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, Granada April 2005, http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/events/jointsessions/paperarchive/granada/ws25/Braeuninger_Debus.pdf.

43. Robert Axelrod used this term to explain cooperation in iterated prisoners' dilemma situations: ‘For future cooperation to be stable, the future must have a sufficiently large shadow. This means that the importance of the next encounter between the same two individuals must be great enough to make defection an unprofitable strategy when the other player is provocable. It requires that the players have a large enough chance of meeting again and that they do not discount the significance of their next meeting too greatly.’ R. Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p.174.