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The terms 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' have lost their shock value in today's public discourse and seem to have become part of our normal political vocabulary. Fake news, mis- and disinformation are not a problem of a particular country but are found in politics around the world. In this paper, I look at how disinformation appears as a problem for democracy. Empirically, this paper explores dominant patterns of argumentation with a focus on the US, Germany and Czechia. I discuss the themes of media literacy, hybrid warfare and the emergence of fringe media. This paper argues that more attention needs to be paid to the affectual dimension of why people share fake news. Even though there is no easy solution for dealing with fake news, a first step is to stop denouncing people for believing in fake news and putting all our hope in media literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the socio-demographic attributes and political attitudes of protesters in Germany. In doing so, the paper studies participation at demonstrations, one of the key forms of non-electoral political participation in Germany and a central political arena in which to negotiate political and cultural conflicts. Methodologically, we draw on original data from nine protest surveys collected between 2003 and 2020. The demonstrations under scrutiny address a wide variety of issues such as peace, climate change, global justice, immigration, international trade and social policy. Analysing protesters' profiles, we focus on differences both within and across demonstrations. We show that demonstrators' socio-demographic and attitudinal characteristics diverge considerably across the surveyed demonstrations. In particular, we identify two clusters of demonstrations, differing most prominently regarding participants' political trust, satisfaction with democracy, and perceptions of self-efficacy – the 'disenchanted critics' and the 'confident critics'. Based on a regression analysis across all nine demonstrations, we further show that the distinction of these two demonstration clusters is not the result of the presence or absence of certain groups of demonstrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two crucial questions related to coalition politics and representative democracies. How do parties' ideological positions translate into cabinet policy positions? And how does the relative impact of parties vary over the legislative term. Using an original dataset of 74 social and budgetary laws from nine German coalition governments, the paper shows that, on average, government parties influence cabinet policy position according to their relative strength. However, the relative impact of coalition parties varies significantly during the term. At the beginning of the term in office, the policy positions of the cabinet are representative of the overall cabinet ideology, but the policy positions strongly move towards the position of the party representing the median when the next election approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the early Frankfurt School through to the work of Manuel Castells, there has been a rich body of work on the cleavage between technological and social developments of the twentieth century in respect of the consequences for the constitution of subjectivity. However, little attention is paid to the role of children during their childhoods in attempts to bridge this gap beyond discussions about the democratic actors children will become when they are adults. This paper argues that only the full integration of children, during their childhoods, into democratic development of societies will prevent the deepening of the rift between technological and social progress. The paper traces the correspondence between the new childhood studies and those concepts of politics and politicisation which can support social progress towards an emancipatory social perspective undergirded by particular and democratisation of all areas of everyday life. Drawing on Bourdieu and ideas of participation as action, the paper critically examines the various mechanisms by which children are conventionally excluded from democratic participation and then explores how a deeper consideration of agency in childhood and social actorship opens up alternative mechanisms of inclusion and the concomitant expansion of the concept of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The East German past has been the focus of much debate and scholarly work in Germany since unification in 1990. The government-sponsored discourse on this past, Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, the ‘re-working of the past’, presents the GDR as the ‘SED-dictatorship’. In constructing the East German past as part of Germany’s dictatorial past the discourse of Aufarbeitung legitimises German unification and the transition to democracy. This paper explores how local governmental institutions attempt to realise the national and authoritative discourse of Aufarbeitung. Drawing on ethnographic research it will discuss two projects realised by the ‘Working Group Aufarbeitung’ on the topic of everyday life in socialism which provides both a challenge – to the categorical certainties of the discourse’s narratives – and an opportunity – to attract a wider audience – for this political field of memory-work. The paper will highlight how in this sphere memory-work has become tied to the governmental aim of the further development of democracy that however ties past, present and future together in uncomfortable binary relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the content of so-called 'fake news' differ across Western democracies? While previous research on online disinformation has focused on the individual level, the current study aims to shed light on cross-national differences. It compares online disinformation re-published by fact checkers from four Western democracies (the US, the UK, Germany, and Austria). The findings reveal significant differences between English-speaking and German-speaking countries. In the US and the UK, the largest shares of partisan disinformation are found, while in Germany and Austria sensationalist stories prevail. Moreover, in English-speaking countries, disinformation frequently attacks political actors, whereas in German-speaking countries, immigrants are most frequently targeted. Across all of the countries, topics of false stories strongly mirror national news agendas. Based on these results, the paper argues that online disinformation is not only a technology-driven phenomenon but also shaped by national information environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While political parties in Germany have been steadily losing members for more than two decades, there has been no sign of a breakdown in their day-to-day grass-roots activities. Despite many prophecies of doom, the 'party on the ground' does not seem to be dead yet. There is some evidence that the declining number of party members is compensated for by an increasing share of party activists. The question is how the erosion of the political parties' member-ship base affects their levels and types of activity. This paper aims to describe and explain these two dimensions of activity in German political parties, using data from German party membership studies from 1998 and 2009. The analyses show that parties are partly able to compensate for membership losses via an increased activity of the remaining members, but at the same time, it is possible that changes in the social profile and motivations of the most active group of members may lead to future difficulties in coping with party work and canvassing new members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern representative democracies political parties are the main institutions responsible for providing linkage between citizens and the state. One way to do this is through organizational linkage mechanisms, especially the representation of a party's voters through the party membership. This paper tries to describe the attitudinal representativeness of German party memberships in terms of left-right positions using data from two party membership studies from 1998 and 2009. In a second step, the determinants of divergent attitudes of party members from the position of the parties' voters are analyzed on an individual level, testing four possible explanations for this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilises survey data from the 1999 European Value Study to conduct a quasi-experimental analysis of the relationship between the left-right self-identification and policy preferences of Germany's electorate. Given the German division until 1990 it is plausible that citizens from East and West Germany had different ideological socialisation experiences swayed by the political discourse of their times. This paper models the influence of this diverse experience on ideological thinking, and examines the effects on the understanding of political issues. The findings suggest that differences do exist in the ideological consistency and attitude structuring of respondents. Compared to respondents in the West, East Germans are more likely to understand the term 'left' in socio-economic terms. On the other hand, they seem to connect the term 'right' rather to xenophobic issues. These results have crucial implications for political communication in representative democracies, as they question the one-level dimensionality of the left-right concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A consensus has emerged that gender-friendly policies can promote higher fertility in rich democracies (Esping-Andersen 1999). This paper supplies a political explanation for why these fertility-enabling policies diverge across countries. Using Sweden and Germany as our primary case studies, we argue that the strength of the left party's hold on government, rather than economic or social factors. underpins the expansion of the public sector that draws women into the labor force and allows them to balance family and career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Disaster education’ is a fledgling area of study in lifelong education. Many countries educate their populations for disasters, to mitigate potential damage and loss of life, as well as contribute to national security. In this paper, which draws on interview data from the German Federal Office for Civil Defence and Disaster Assistance and the Federal Agency for Technical Relief, archival research, analysis of websites and promotional materials as well as relevant academic literature, I examine disaster education and preparedness for national emergencies in Germany. I argue that it is not generally extended to the general public, rather confined to trained experts, decentralised, localised and exclusive. Theorising disaster education as a ‘civil defence pedagogy’, a type of public pedagogy, which contributes to shaping narratives of national identity, I argue that it is unlikely that Germany will develop a more inclusive, universal, formalised nor high-profile campaign in disaster education in the foreseeable future. This, I suggest, is due to narratives of the German democratic nation as secure, federal, peaceful and unified, which originated at the founding of West Germany in 1949, and continue to shape contemporary political narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the assertion that preferences for a comprehensive welfare state hamper and delay the emergence of a liberal-democratic culture in East Germany. Two questions are explored: first, has the impact of welfare-state values on support of the German democratic regime declined in East Germany since re-unification and adapted to the lower levels observed in West Germany? Second, are attitudes towards different welfare-state programmes equally important for citizens’ approval of the German democratic regime? Empirical analyses on the basis of representative public opinion surveys conducted between 1991 and 2012 confirm that the effect of welfare-state values in East Germany has converged to the smaller effect size observed in West Germany. Furthermore, attitudes to welfare-state programmes aimed at reducing income inequalities turn out to be a significant determinant of regime support in both parts of Germany. It is the higher demand for inequality-reducing governmental activities which still restrains the approval of the liberal-democratic regime among citizens in East Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After two decades of widespread privatization, German municipalities have started to re-purchase privatized companies. At the same time, social movements are campaigning for remunicipalization, promoting it as a means of achieving greater urban democracy, though these objectives are often divergent from those of municipalities concerned with reasserting local state autonomy. With reference to Berlin, the paper discusses how remunicipalization campaigns might contribute to post-neo-liberal urban governance. It presents a preliminary frame for developing progressive remunicipalization movements centred on three elements of contestation: rejection of neo-liberalism; connection to other and broader struggles; and commoning as an alternative form of urban governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper seeks to describe whether reflections about the legitimacy metropolitan governance arrangements found consideration in metropolitan reforms in five German metropolitan regions. Metropolitan regions are an increasingly relevant scale for political decision-making but mechanism for legitimacy and accountability did not keep pace. Given the fact that in most metropolitan institutions only indirect mechanisms of legitimacy such as regional assemblies with representatives from municipal councils or public–private governing boards are at work, one may expect that output legitimacy or legitimacy by performance is the dominant source for legitimacy in metropolitan governance. In fact, citizens care much about the quality and the prize of services such as waste management or public transport but less about the transparency of decision-making procedures behind these services – at least on the scale of the region. The results show a mixed picture. In two out of five regions, directly elected regional assembly have been established and now constitute genuine tiers of metropolitan politics where input and output legitimacy are combined. In other regions, the turn to flexible forms of governance opened up decision-making arenas for societal actors, but it seems that this opening of the policy process is very selective and comes at the expense of citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Germany is generally considered one of the most important democracy promoters, there is still limited work on the German approach to promoting democracy. There is a general understanding that Germany – as a civilian power – should be guided by democratic values in its external affairs, but it is neither theoretically nor empirically very clear what this means for the actual practice of democracy promotion. The present paper contributes to filling this gap by (1) locating democracy promotion as a foreign policy aim and instrument in the role conception of civilian power, (2) summarising the fragmented state of the art on German democracy promotion, (3) presenting results of a qualitative content analysis in order to reconstruct the main features of the official outline of German democracy promotion, and (4) confronting these programmatic findings with a brief comparative view on the practice of German democracy promotion towards Bolivia, Turkey and Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines aspects of education for democracy in occupied Germany, 1945–1949, with a focus on efforts made in the British Zone of Occupation to encourage active participation in democratic processes in schools and universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oral questions are usually seen as a procedure designed for political conflict. Yet question time may serve other purposes depending on the institutional setting, the political context and the policy field. By comparing the use of oral questions on the defence issue in the national parliaments of four Western democracies, the paper identifies a specific characteristic of questioning in each lower house: political conflict in Germany, internal dissent in the United Kingdom, reward of policy expertise in Spain and local issues in France. Such diverse uses of questioning procedures impact differently on the quality of the accountability process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does a movement for the creation of institutions for the care of small children aged between two and six years constitute a political movement? This movement was closely connected to the democratic movement of the 1848–49 revolution in the German States. It was also, as the author will argue, a movement that was an essential part of the emerging women's movement that constituted itself as part of the democratic movement of those years. These relationships may seem incomprehensible at first sight. Indeed, German research and teaching into the origins of public pre-school education, the history of female professionalization and the Revolution of 1848–49 have hardly noticed this correlation. And yet, as will be demonstrated here, it existed. A contemporary source that reflects this correlation is the Frauen-Zeitung (‘Women's Newspaper’) founded and edited by Louise Otto (1819–1895). 1 This paper was published from 21 April 1849, until the middle of 1853. It was an important forum for the early German women's movement. In the context of a research project on the correlation between the movement for democracy, the early women's movement and the kindergarten movement at the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg all surviving issues of the Frauen-Zeitung were analysed for the frequency and context of articles on public pre-school education and especially Froebelian kindergartens. The following article summarizes the results of this analysis and illustrates contemporary patterns of thought and discussions by taking a closer look at one article in Die Frauen-Zeitung. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the parliamentary elections in Germany in September 2017, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union (CSU), The Greens (Bündnis90/Die Grünen) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) started to negotiate about forming a coalition government. But, surprising to many, the FDP decided to let these coalition talks collapse, and many commentators in Germany found it highly problematic for a political party to refuse to take responsibility in government. Interestingly, the question whether (or: when) democratic parties may legitimately refuse to govern has so far been neglected in political theory and political philosophy. The article develops a general answer by discussing several possible reasons for thinking that it is sometimes wrong to refuse to govern and thereby engages both democratic theory and the recent literature on compromise. The resulting view is that parties have an 'integrity prerogative' that allows them to refuse to govern, except when there is no reasonable and stable alternative government coalition available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analysis of an increasingly political nature of the rationales behind the memberships of the UK and Germany in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). This analysis is guided by rational-choice neo-institutionalism and is based on expert interviews with key stakeholders in both countries as well as their relevant official communications. This article serves as an important stepping-stone to the investigation of the link between EHEA memberships and its signatories' external politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do lasting differences in the political cultures of social subgroups call into question the legitimacy of democracy? This danger has been discussed for three decades now, always in the run up to German Unity Day, which marks the reunification of Germany in 1990. Is there still a 'wall in people's minds', as postulated in the late 1990s? This article examines the question comparatively and over time: Do political cultures and their main political attitudes still differ between Western and Eastern Germany 30 years after reunification? And, if so, to what extent? Using an extended concept of political support, we analyse East–West differences by drawing on different data material from representative surveys. What we show that there is no deficit of legitimacy in Eastern Germany in terms of democracy. Nevertheless, there are consistent East–West differences in terms of people's satisfaction with democracy as it is currently practised. These differences can be explained neither by existing socio-economic and socio-structural inequalities between Eastern and Western Germany, and nor by feelings of nostalgia for socialism. Rather, they are due to a combination of feelings of disadvantage, of a lack of recognition, and corresponding narratives that can draw on objective manifestations of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is uncontested that political trust is highly relevant in democratic political systems. Although scholars have begun to study to a larger extent political trust in new democracies, this latter interest has faded away in recent times. To reinvigorate awareness of this area, thirty years after German reunification, we take stock of political trust in East and West Germany. Drawing on ESS data from 2002 to 2018 (ESS 1–9), we study empirically the convergence hypothesis in view of both the levels of political trust and the particular quality of citizens' trust in its democratic institutions. Our findings show that we can still not speak of a convergence of the mere levels of trust in East and West Germany: East Germans do still display lower levels of trust in both representative and regulatory institutions. Regarding the quality of political trust, however, the gap between East and West is less pronounced. These findings are highly relevant for both research on the social and psychological underpinnings of trust and the assessment of the consequences of the undemocratic heritage for the German political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the state of German journalism a hundred years ago, when American journalism was becoming the role model for journalists all over the Western world. It deals with the questions (1) whether German journalists at that time were aware of modern aspects of text formats and writing styles and (2) if the inverted pyramid model of news writing—as a component of objectivity—was well established in German newspapers in 1914. The findings deconstruct the myth of old-fashioned partisan German journalism and underline the universality of American standards such as the ideal of the objectivity norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses memoirs, newspapers, and archival documents to analyse how four German women journalists became entangled in ideological conflict between Nazism, communism, and liberal democracy from the 1930s to the 1950s. Using the concept of a 'long' Cold War, it demonstrates how from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic of West Germany, the experiences and autobiographical writing of German women journalists who had been arrested and imprisoned by the Soviets contributed to Germany's national identity as both a victim and a bulwark of (potential) Soviet aggression. Publishing their experiences provided these female journalists with a unique and historically specific political agency: their words echoed contemporary discourses about the supposed communist threat and how women and ideas about women were inherent in such rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ervedosa's article demonstrates from a cultural perspective that the categories 'Südländer' (Southerner) and 'südländisches Aussehen' (Southern looks) in German police reports are discriminatory since they challenge the central principles of the German constitution. They infringe the fundamental right in Article 3.3, that is, the right not to be racially discriminated against, the fundamental rights of human dignity (Article 1.1) and human equality (Article 3.1), as well as the constitutional right to be a German citizen regardless of one's skin colour (Article 116). It argues that the terms are a form of skin-colour racism in that the police carry out their work—investigations, searches, inquiries and so on—on the basis of the perpetrator's racialized phenotype. The categories basically stand for 'Mediterranean looks'—even referred to in the past as the 'Mediterranean race'—and phenotype: dark hair, dark eyes and so-called 'skin type IV', that is, 'olive or brown skin'. They are the product of a tradition of racialized, exclusionary thinking that collides with the humanistic and democratic values of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the tensions Peter Mair identified between responsible and responsive government in relation to the constraints and opportunities of an internationally integrated and instituted economy. Drawing on the example of the short period of democratic stability and its subsequent breakdown in the Weimar Republic, the article argues that in Weimar Germany’s ‘golden twenties’, governments could bridge the gap between responsibility – defined as a commitment to deep international integration – and responsiveness to its citizens mainly through the availability of cheap credits. With the onset of the Great Depression, responsible government became tantamount to increasingly drastic austerity policies. These policies were not only an economic failure, they also made the gap between responsible and responsive government unbridgeable. The article also shows how a similar cycle of good and bad times, with similar consequences with regard to the tensions between responsible and responsive government seem to have occurred in the crisis that has been affecting the Eurozone since 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Search engines are important political news sources and should thus provide users with diverse political information – an important precondition of a well-informed citizenry. The search engines' algorithmic content selection strongly influences the diversity of the content received by the users – particularly since most users highly trust search engines and often click on only the first result. A widespread concern is that users are not informed diversely by search engines, but how far this concern applies has hardly been investigated. Our study is the first to investigate content diversity provided by five search engines on ten current political issues in Germany. The findings show that sometimes even the first result is highly diverse, but in most cases, more results must be considered to be informed diversely. This unreliability presents a serious challenge when using search engines as political news sources. Our findings call for media policy measures, for example in terms of algorithmic transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dissatisfaction with democracy is among the central determinants of voting for a populist radical right party, such as the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). At the same time, elections have been shown to increase political satisfaction, especially when voters see themselves as winners of the election. In this article, we ask, first, whether voters of the AfD have partly been reconciled with democracy during the 2017 federal election in Germany in which the party entered the Bundestag for the first time since its foundation. Second, we investigate which individual level factors conditioned the change in democratic satisfaction among AfD voters. Our empirical analysis, which is based on panel survey data from the 2017 Germany Longitudinal Election Studies (GLES), shows that AfD voters experienced a stronger increase in support for the political regime than any other voter group. Moreover, policy congruence with the AfD on socioeconomic issues as well as identifying with a party other than the AfD enhanced this boost in satisfaction with democracy. Our findings point to the importance of political representation and opportunities for protest-based voting behaviour regarding public support and the legitimacy of democratic political systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research has documented political inequality along class lines at different stages of the representation process. This article contributes to our understanding of unequal responsiveness and its causes with an in-depth study of Germany that investigates the link between preferences and policymakers' decisions. Using an original dataset covering 746 survey questions on specific reform proposals from 1980 to 2013, we provide the first study of a European democracy that investigates whether responsiveness patterns vary between economic and cultural policies or different governing coalitions. We show that decisions are skewed towards upper occupational and educational groups, irrespective of policy type or government composition. These results advance the discussion of potential mechanisms for unequal responsiveness. As privileged groups are overrepresented in parliament, our findings support the argument that the social bias in the make-up of parliaments matters for substantive representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key element in determining the prospects for success in transforming totalitarian political systems into democratic political systems is the extent to which the armed forces can be included in the democratisation process and brought under constitutional, civilian and political control. In the aftermath of the 1998 financial crisis in Moscow and the probable retreat of democracy in Russia, this utterly critical question assumes even more importance. This article is concerned with the problem of devising a new system of civil–military relations for a democratising post-Soviet Russian state, particularly the relevance of the German citizen in uniform model to the armed forces of the Russian Federation. After a brief history of the German system of civil–military relations, the author proceeds to analyse the German model in detail. The paper then assesses the current context of the Russian state, society and armed forces before evaluating the prospects for the successful application of the German system of civil–military relations to Russia. The author concludes that the German system is inapplicable because Russia does not presently possess the socio-political structures and norms to sustain such a system of civil–military relations. However, the article proposes an immediately viable third strategy for democratising Russian civil–military relations which does not rely either on the inappropriate German model or on meekly managing the intolerable status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exclusionary nationalist movements' rise in recent years challenges liberal democracy's trust in political institutions' ability to neutralize and incorporate extremism. The crisis of liberal democracy likewise questions liberal civil society's emphasis on associational membership's intrinsic democratic side-effects. The study proposes a partisanship spectrum integrating attitudes to conflict into civil society theory, suggesting the centrality of cross-partisanship in mediating modern society's unavoidable conflicts, a question central to civil society theory and modern democracies. Germany's first school of public affairs serves as a historical case study to better understand how cross-partisanship addressed the extreme political polarization, radicalization of public discourse, and violence challenging interwar Germany's transition to democracy. While honouring political factionalism, cross-partisanship (Überparteilichkeit) countered extremism through a correct understanding of political facts and a common commitment to republican institutions. Relying on archival sources, I show that when cross-partisanship was equated to nonpartisanship, it favoured the penetration of extremism by emphasizing compromise and equal representation of all political parties, including the Nazi Party. The question of how to build a civil society is as crucial today as it was in interwar Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Germany, there is no exhaustive institutionalised process of scrutiny for parliament to ensure the quality of laws. Neither the members of parliament nor the parliamentary administration are tasked with this quality review. In fact, the German legislative procedure draws on a pluralistic concept of quality review: all organs and persons involved in legislation are called upon in order to ensure good legislative quality. This concept stresses the political reality of the principle of democracy, rather than the legal rationality resulting from the rule of law, and therefore accepts inferior laws based on democratic legitimacy rather than good laws that in turn do not rely upon the expertise of democratically non-legitimated committees. An equilibrium between these poles can only be found in time: after all, laws are amendable, thus adaptive and improvable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of how the history of political violence targeting individuals on the basis of their race, religion, or ethnicity is memorialized in democracies. To what extent do states' memorialization practices reflect their democratic values and institutions? The study addresses these questions by bridging the theoretical literatures of memory studies and political regimes. It compares two cases that differ in the circumstances under which they transitioned to democracy, but that have in common the history of political violence of exclusion. The first case includes the Holocaust memorials and monuments in Germany following the reunification, and the second case, the memorialization of the inter-ethnic violence in the 1990s in Bosnia and Herzegovina. By focusing on the memorials, rather than on the characteristics of a political regime, the article argues that memorials that are inclusive of different perspectives and experiences and those that encourage critical reflection and community involvement are more aligned with democratic values. The congruence between the characteristics of the political regime and those of the memorial should not be assumed even in the cases of consolidated democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the holocaust remembrance and antisemitism in Germany since 1945. Topics include Germany is the only country that has seen a rise in antisemitism since the turn of the twenty-first century; Germany's approach has led to a number of problems, including new forms of antisemitism; and Germany's relation to the Jews would be the ‘real touchstone' of the new German democracy.

In this article, we look at the fissures in United Europe from both sides of the region where a post-Cold War 'Middle/Central Europe' should have been forged. How do leading German and Polish newspapers treat the categories of 'Central' or 'Middle' Europe relative to the concept of the Eastern–Western European divide and what are the discourses associated with these perspectives? At the time of a looming redefinition of the entire European project, what can media reports from Germany and Poland tell us about its future? We conclude that the media narratives in these two countries portend further tensions for European unity, since the new divisions now overlap the old ones. Our findings have implications for the future of democracy in the newly democratic countries of Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The end of the social democratic century has marked the beginning of a new era of political and economic imbalance in Europe. These dynamics are visible even in Germany, despite its reputation for stability. This article proposes reorienting the paradigm for research on Germany's political economy from stability to imbalance in order to help illuminate central causal processes within the country and across the rich democracies. As our review of prominent approaches to the German Model reveals, recent developments have unseated the mechanisms that once balanced competing social forces. Putting contemporary tensions centre stage, we outline three vantage points from which to study political and economic imbalance: the systemic properties of capitalism, multivalent policy feedback, and the organisational foundations of creative adjustment. This conceptual reorientation should equip scholars to use Germany not merely for theorising the roots of stability in the past, but also to employ it as a powerful prism to explain the dynamics of imbalance in the current era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A widespread view in political science is that minority cabinets govern more flexibly and inclusively, more in line with a median-oriented and 'consensual' vision of democracy. Yet there is only little empirical evidence for it. We study legislative coalition-building in the German state of North-Rhine-Westphalia, which was ruled by a minority government between 2010 and 2012. We compare the inclusiveness of legislative coalitions under minority and majority cabinets, based on 1028 laws passed in the 1985–2017 period, and analyze in detail the flexibility of legislative coalition formation under the minority government. Both quantitative analyses are complemented with brief case studies of specific legislation. We find, first, that the minority cabinet did not rule more inclusively. Second, the minority cabinet's legislative flexibility was fairly limited; to the extent that it existed, it follows a pattern that cannot be explained on the basis of the standard spatial model with policy-seeking parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do citizens join German parties? Do specific attributes and abilities play a determinant role in participation in political parties? The German Party Membership Study of 2009 enables us to answer these questions. On the basis of the telephone survey, we will address these issues by way of a systematic comparison of current party members with fellow citizens who never joined a party. For the purpose of analysing the individual-level determinants of joining a party, we use fundamental explanatory approaches to political participation: The socioeconomic standard model, the social-psychological approach, and the general incentives model. The results of our analyses clearly show that social-psychological attributes best explain the decision to join a party. Nevertheless, the findings for the determinants in both the socioeconomic standard model and the general incentives model complete the picture of citizens who are party members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With respect to explaining declining party membership, the question who leaves political parties and why has so far been neglected. This article aims to fill this gap by applying Hirschman's theory of "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" to both current and former party members, and at combining it with the resource model of political participation. We find that neither individual resources nor reasons for discontent are sufficient to explain the different reactions to discontent, but that the exit-voice-loyalty model has a certain explanatory power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The party membership decline experienced in Germany in the last decades raises a number of theoretical, empirical, and normative questions, a selection of which is addressed in this special issue of German Politics. In this introduction, we summarise some of the central arguments and findings presented. Although the individual articles take various perspectives and present specific insights, as a whole they allow for drawing some consequences: Firstly, party membership decline seems to be irreversible, secondly, it does neither imply an inadequate organisational linkage between society and state institutions nor, thirdly, a threat to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article empirically examines the social composition of German political party membership. In the first stage of the analysis, party members are compared with the total population and with voters. This makes it possible to identify potential deficiencies in the political representation of certain social groups. In the second stage, party membership is regressed on individual characteristics. This makes it possible to study cleavage structures. Since the empirical analysis includes data from the 2009 German Party Membership Study as well as from the 1998 Potsdam Party Membership Study, we are able to investigate changes over a period of eleven years. In light of the empirical findings, we then consider whether German parties are socially representative of the German population and their respective voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will first introduce a model that explains the development of aggregate party membership on the basis of individuals' decisions. Important factors explaining the decision to join a party will be analysed in turn. These are incentives and restraints to join the party as well as possible alternatives of action. The second part of the article will illustrate how the membership of relevant German parties developed between 1945 and 2016, whereas the third part will analyse various explanations for this development according to the presented model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades party membership numbers have declined in many parliamentary democracies, including in Germany. This article investigates how German parties have reacted to their losses, considering both the domestic and wider implications of their evolving responses. Their approaches include introducing multi-speed affiliation options, and providing new opportunities for members to affect party decisions. These changes are not unique to Germany, but they may have special meaning here, because the Federal Republic's constitutional tradition treats membership-based political parties as key engines of representative democracy. The German parties' experiences illustrate how membership losses can spur organisational experimentation, including in ways that have the potential to boost partisan political participation both within and around the parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Backes's article discusses the judgement of the Second Senate of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) of 17 January 2017—not to ban the right-wing extremist party Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD)—in light of recent lively international debates on the protection of democracy. It considers the logic of an examination of proportionality as established by German constitutional law, considering aspects of the legitimacy, suitability, necessity and appropriateness of the party ban. The article shows that the newly introduced criterion of 'potentiality' requires an examination of proportionality even if the court itself denies this. Thus the threshold for intervention has been raised, moderately, since a concrete or even immediate threat as defined in police law is not required. The Court links the definition of a free democratic basic order more closely to the established minimum definitions of comparative research and provides clarification that further refutes the (exaggerated) accusation of 'vagueness'. In doing so it has sharpened the contours of the concept of militant democracy that is widely regarded in international comparative studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few decades, independent local lists in German municipalities have become serious competitors to political parties. However, despite their wide-spread presence and success, party researchers have largely ignored this phenomenon. Empirical evidence concerning the attitudes of their members towards political parties is rare. Thus far, it remains unclear whether their self-described image as non-parties or anti-parties is restricted to the sphere of local politics or accompanies a general rejection of parties in federal politics. First, the article conceptualises anti-partyism and proposes an analytical distinction between their intensity and related political level. It then analyses the consequences of different patterns of local politics and group characteristics as well as individual determinants to explain the degree of anti-party sentiment. This study improves our understanding of independents and whether they promote party democracy or are a product of political dissatisfaction. Based on a cross- sectional postal survey, multi-level regression models are used to test the hypoth- eses. The results show that anti-partyism is particularly strong towards party politics at the local level, whereas the general legitimacy of party democracy is not questioned in federal politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the author's perspective on the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in Prussia, Germany. He points that GDR is the last Stalinist in East Europe and its existence depends upon the Soviet divisions stationed within its boarders. He adds that the stressing of things in the East represents a deliberate attempt to identify their own state with the real German past. He also mentions that the East German government has strong historical antecedents from the time of Otto von Bismarck has consistently voted communist.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the special issue on topics including German intellectuals' reactions to the migrant crisis, European intellectuals and democracy, and the future of the public in public education.

In mixed-member electoral systems, voters usually have two votes: a nominal and a list vote. According to some studies, voters are increasingly using them to cast a split-ticket vote. However, very little is known about whether the type of mixed-member system, and in particular whether the allocation of seats across tiers is linked or not, creates different sets of incentives for this behaviour. This article provides new insights into the topic by analysing survey data from seven countries and 18 elections since 1990. It is found that the proportion of split-ticket votes is greater in mixed-member proportional than in mixed-member majoritarian systems. The results suggest that voters understand the operation of the electoral system and its consequences for the distribution of seats among parties, and adapt their behaviour accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why do political parties prioritise some policy issues over others? While the issue ownership theory suggests that parties emphasise policy issues on which they have an advantage in order to increase the salience of these issues among voters, the riding the wave theory argues instead that parties respond to voters by highlighting policy issues that are salient in the minds of citizens. This study sheds new light on the selective issue emphasis of political parties by analysing issue attention throughout the entire electoral cycle. On the basis of a quantitative text analysis of more than 40,000 press releases published by German parties from 2000 until 2010, this article provides empirical support for the riding the wave theory. It shows that political parties take their cues from voters by responding to the issue priorities of their electorate. The results have important implications for political representation and the role that parties play in democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]