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Abstract
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.
ORCID
Thomas Bräuninger http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2767-717X
Marc Debus http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7151-7942
Jochen Müller http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4021-7442
Christian Stecker http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9577-7151
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Thomas Bräuninger is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Mannheim. His area of research is comparative politics and formal theory with a focus on the effect of political institutions on policy outcomes. He has worked on voting behaviour, party politics, electoral systems, legislative politics, and interest group politics.
Marc Debus is Professor of Comparative Government at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim. His research interests include political institutions and their effects on the political process, party competition and coalition politics, and political decision-making in multi-level systems.
Jochen Müller is an assistant professor in political sociology at the University of Greifswald. His research interests include legislative behaviour, government formation and party competition in multi-level systems. His work has been published in journals including Electoral Studies, European Union Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Analysis and Regional Studies.
Christian Stecker is a post-doctoral researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research. His research focuses on party competition and legislative politics. His work has been published in journals including the European Journal of Political Research, Political Analysis, West European Politics and Party Politics.
Notes
1 The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) are two distinct parties. However, they do not compete with each other in elections and form a joint parliamentary party in the Bundestag. We thus regard them as a single actor in the context of government formation – despite their ideological differences that also emerged from a recent expert survey (see below).
2 A more detailed summary of the expert survey (sample, items, etc.) can be found in Bräuninger et al. (Citationforthcoming).
3 This transformation was already visible during the 2013 election campaign. While ‘immigration-sceptical attitudes were entirely irrelevant’ for the AfD's early supporters, respective positions were important to those who decided close to election day to vote for the party (Schmitt-Beck Citation2017, 138).
4 In the states of Hamburg and Bremen, only 5.5 per cent and 6.1 per cent of the electorate voted for the then still predominantly Eurosceptic party, and polls reported continuously decreasing support until summer 2015. For a compilation of monthly and weekly polling results for the period between 2013 and 2017, see for instance http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/politbarometer.htm (accessed on 23 May 2018).
5 The Left led a coalition with the SPD and Greens as junior partners in Thuringia after the 2014 state election, and the SPD headed the same constellation in the state of Berlin in the autumn of 2016.
6 Note that for each formation process, there are 2n –1 possible coalitions or observations.
7 While other methods for text scaling are available, we prefer Wordscore as its estimates, at least in the German case, highly correlate with other estimates, such as those provided by the Comparative Manifesto Project (see, e.g., Bräuninger, Debus, and Müller Citation2013; Hjorth et al. Citation2015).
8 As the variables pre-electoral alliances and rejected coalitions are arguably endogenous (they reflect anticipated likely outcomes to some degree), we use a two-stage residual inclusion model: we first regress both variables on all other covariates and then use their residual predictions in the main model.
9 The ideological heterogeneity of a potential coalition is measured on the basis of the parties’ positions on economic and social policy and the parties’ relative saliency of these two dimensions. Replacing the social policy dimension with the immigration policy dimension does not change the results in substantive terms.
10 One could argue that the more fragmented party system of the recent past makes less likely any irreconcilable differences between government and opposition camps in the second chamber, as state parties more often form uncommon coalitions that are ‘cross-cutting’ when majority coalitions that mirror the government–opposition divide in the Bundestag are missing. Future research could test this expectation on the basis of a longer time series than the one which we use here.
11 See https://www.morgenpost.de/politik/article212618009/Minderheitsregierung-Was-spricht-dafuer-und-was-dagegen.html (accessed on 11 October 2018).
12 Olaf Scholz acted as SPD party leader until a special party convention elected Andrea Nahles as the new and first-ever female leader in April 2018.
13 A qualitative analysis of party programmes by Jakobs and Jun (Citation2018, 278–279) locates the AfD more to the centre of the economic left-right dimension. Taking into account that the position of Chancellor Merkel and her core supporters in the CDU is more favourable towards permissive immigration policies compared to other parts of the party, the interpretation of , in which we consider parties as unitary actors, is likely to underestimate the programmatic diversity between CDU/CSU, FDP and AfD.
14 See https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article181088706/Streit-ueber-CDU-Linke-Koalition-Die-unmoegliche-Koalition.html (accessed 11 October 2018).