The Programmatic Development of CDU and CSU since Reunification: Incentives and Constraints for Changing Policy Positions in the German Multi-Level System

Abstract

Like all political parties in modern democracies, the major German parties face challenges caused by changes both in the social structure of the electorate and in value orientations. Generally speaking, parties have to adopt policy positions that take into account changes in the preferences and structure of the electorate in order to maximise their share of votes. This article focuses on the programmatic development of the German Christian Democrats since reunification and discusses the incentives and constraints faced by the CDU and CSU to change their policy positions over time. By discussing patterns of social change, voting behaviour and (intra-)party competition in the German multi-level system, we derive several hypotheses about the programmatic development of the CDU and CSU since 1990. We evaluate these expectations on the basis of a dataset that covers information on the policy positions of all the major German parties – the CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP, the Greens and the PDS/‘Linke’ – on the federal and state level in the time period from 1990 to 2011. The results show that there is no distinct trend in the programmatic development of the Christian Democrats. However, we do find evidence to suggest that the German Christian Democrats take the ‘setting’ of an election into account; that is, they adopt policy positions according to the social structural profile of the electorate when the CDU or the CSU compete for votes in elections for the Länder parliaments.

Notes

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See the contributions by Wiliarty, Clemens and Green in this collection.

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Bräuninger and Debus, ‘Der Einfluss von Koalitionsaussagen’; Däubler and Debus, ‘Government Formation and Policy Formulation’.

Müller, ‘The Impact of the Socio-Economic Context’.

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Schmid, Die CDU, p. 120; see also F. Bösch, ‘Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU) ’, in F. Decker and V. Neu (eds), Handbuch der deutschen Parteien (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007), pp. 201–19.

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Clemens, ‘Modernisation or Disorientation?’

Bräuninger and Debus, ‘Der Einfluss von Koalitionsaussagen’; Bräuninger and Debus, Parteienwettbewerb in den deutschen BundesLändern.

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; W. Lowe, ‘Understanding Wordscores’, Political Analysis 16/4 (2008), pp. 356–71; for a more detailed description of the data see Bräuninger and Debus, Parteienwettbewerb in den deutschen BundesLändern.

Laver et al., ‘Extracting Policy Positions’, p. 313.

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Using these surveys, we created a dataset that covers information on the characteristics of voters. Building this dataset was mainly possible because of the work carried out by a research group that combined all state-level election surveys and exit polls conducted in the period between 1962 and 2004. These data were made available to us by GESIS. We updated this dataset by including survey data on nineteen elections held after 2004, which were also made available by GESIS. Since the question on religion was not part of the first surveys conducted in the new states, we replaced these missing values by values provided by the churches

The variable is coded ‘1’ for the Berlin CDU given the spatial distribution of its voters and members. See I. Reichart-Dreyer, ‘Das Parteiensystem Berlins’, in M. Haas, U. Jun and O. Niedermayer (eds), Parteien und Parteiensysteme in den deutschen Ländern (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft, 2008), pp. 147–66.

Although the CSU is an independent party, we include the CSU state election manifestos into the following analysis.

Given the high unemployment rate in Saxony-Anhalt and the moderate economic policy stances of the Prime Minister of Saxony-Anhalt from 2002 until 2011, Wolfgang Böhmer, the finding for the CDU in this state is somewhat surprising.

See Schmid, Die CDU.

Since the observations for particular state parties are not independent from one another, we employ robust standard errors that are clustered by state party.

See, for example, W. Müller, ‘Political Parties in Parliamentary Democracies: Making Delegation and Accountability Work’, European Journal of Political Research 37/3 (2000), pp. 309–33.

See R. Andeweg, ‘Ministers as Double Agents? The Delegation Process between Cabinet and Ministers’, European Journal of Political Research 37/3 (2000), pp. 377–95.

See, for instance, G. Marks, L. Hooghe and A. Schakel, ‘Regional Authority in 42 Democracies, 1950–2006: A Measure and Five Hypotheses’, Regional & Federal Studies 18/2–3 (2008), pp. 111–302.