Party Servants, Ideologues or Regional Representatives? The German Länder and the Reform of Federalism

Abstract

This article considers recent attempts to reform German federalism, the failed 2004 reform, and the reforms agreed in 2006 and 2009. It compares partisan, ideological and territorial factors which contribute to an understanding of reform, finding that all three have a role in explaining actors’ views of reform proposals. Two other claims are developed: that in some aspects of the reforms, a division between ‘generalist’ and ‘subject specialist’ politicians became apparent; and that a decisive change between 2004 and 2006 was the formation of a grand coalition at a federal level, which paved the way for agreement upon reform proposals.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the participants at a workshop in Edinburgh in December 2010 for their very helpful insight into these issues, and also to the editors of this volume, and to two anonymous reviewers, all of whom provided extremely useful insights. We are also indebted to those people who agreed to be interviewed by us. Finally, we acknowledge generous financial support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and Aston University. Responsibility for errors is our own.

Notes

1 .This method of working towards constitutional change is common in Germany, given the high threshold for reform of the Basic Law. A similarly constructed convention was created in the early 1990s to redraft the Basic Law in the wake of German unification.

2 .This is illustrated by Hesse Minister President Roland Koch’s decision to let the reform collapse, judging that in the long-run the purposes of stronger Länder were better served by sticking to the existing constitutional settlement while pursuing changes through the Federal Constitutional Court (see Süddeutsche Zeitung, 29 September 2005).