Why Parties Take Neutral Positions on Policy Issues: Insights from the German Christian Democratic Union

Abstract

Do political parties position themselves neutrally on policy issues for strategic reasons and, if so, why? We conceptualise neutral position-taking as strategic responses made by parties to reconcile several conflicting political objectives simultaneously and theorise why these actors should take such a position. The empirical focus lies on the Christian Democratic Union’s (CDU) position-taking on the policy topic of agricultural biotechnology at the federal and regional levels (Thuringia) in Germany. The results show that parties take neutral positions and do this for various reasons. The federal CDU took a neutral position in 2017 in order to reconcile its moderate GMO agenda with its objective of forming a coalition with the Greens and to respond to the increasingly diverging policy preferences of its regional branches. The Thuringian CDU took neutral positions from 1999 to 2009 in order to reconcile its pro-GMO agenda with its aspirations for forming coalitions with the SPD and to reduce electoral losses that might result from anti-GMO sentiment. The paper shows that neutral position-taking represents a real phenomenon of partisan activity. Hence, rather than ignoring supposed non-positions, scholars should consider the possibility that these may actually represent neutral stances.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Laurence Crumbie deserves credit for language-editing the manuscript and Laura Zöckler for research assistance.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA AND RESEARCH MATERIALS

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2019.1667978.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ulrich Hartung is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Political Science at Heidelberg University, Germany. His research interests include comparative policy analysis, risk governance, and in particular the regulation of biotechnology in the EU multi-level system [[email protected]].

Notes

1 Non-positioning can also occur when parties make mistakes in their election manifestos. This happens when parties actually have ideal points on certain policy issues and consider position-taking on these topics as being expedient politically but forget to include their corresponding position. This should, however, be less relevant for this study as national and regional parties are highly professionalised organisations, making non-positioning on relevant policy issues due to mistakes rather unlikely. In addition, parties usually use previous versions when drafting election programs, for which reason improper non-positioning seems additionally unlikely.

2 These factors include shifts within electorates (Adams et al. 2004; Adams, Haupt, and Stoll 2009), the influence of leader personalities and intra-party processes (Meyer 2013), party-internal organisation (leadership- or activist-dominated) (Schumacher, de Vries, and Vis 2013), the policy-shifts of rival parties with similar ideological backgrounds (Adams and Somer-Topcu 2009), and the results of previous elections, especially when parties deem them insufficient (Somer-Topcu 2009).

3 Germany’s party spectrum includes the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Alliance 90/The Greens (Greens), which both belong to the centre-left, and the Left Party (Left), which can be located further left. The CDU and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) both belong to the centre-right, which is also the case for the CDU’s regional sister party from Bavaria, the Christian Social Party (CSU), which is also influential in policymaking at the federal level. However, as the CSU usually publishes joint election manifestos with the CDU, it is considered together with the CDU in this study. Usually, the CDU and the CSU are referred to together as the Union. The Alternative for Germany, which ranks further to the right, is not considered as it was founded as recently as 2013 and thus does not fit our longitudinal analysis.

4 In 2010, 87 per cent of Germans rejected GMOs and considered banning them an important measure for protecting the natural environment; in 2015, 45 per cent of Germans believed that GM crops ‘strongly’ damaged the natural environment and biological diversity, and another 31 per cent believed that GM crops were at least ‘somewhat’ damaging; in 2017, 79 per cent agreed to that GMOs should be banned in agriculture (Federal Ministry for the Environment and Federal Agency for Nature Conservation 2010, 2015, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt.