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, the liberal parties emerged as the largest ‘political family’ for the first time since 1883. For the first time since the 1920s, the christian and socialist families no longer held a combined majority in Parliament. The Green family gained ground while the far right family’s standing was eroded overall. New parties demanding a complete overhaul of the political system failed to gain a seat in the federal Parliament
1 Elections, parties and the political system There are many ways of analysing German politics. Recent studies have, for example, focused on policymaking, on institutions (Helms 2000), and on the interface between German politics and the politics of the European Union (Bulmer, Jeffery and Paterson 2000; Sturm and Pehle 2001). All these approaches are valid, but none captures all the intricate interconnections and multiple dimensions of the political process in Germany. The once-popular focus on electoral politics has been neglected of late, yet it can be
Questions and answers: the political system Most readers will be familiar with the political system, though they are not likely to have thought about it analytically, unless they have studied it more systematically at some time. This short chapter aims, at the risk of being too simplistic, to reach out to include those who have never studied the subject and also those who have found it unappealing. The aim is to establish some very basic building blocks of understanding and to stimulate further study. I use a question and answer approach to get inside the
Of course, many factors, both internal to Germany and external (see Chapters 10 , 11 ) have influenced the development of the political system of the Federal Republic. Together with the prior-history and history of the Federal Republic ( Chapter 1 ), and the process of reunification ( Chapter 2 ), the most important have been the Basic Law itself, providing a constitutional basis for the political system, and the Federal Constitutional Court, charged with the task of interpreting that Basic Law. The economy, the division of Germany and the ‘cold war’ and the
lower-levels of government and society. Transitologists seem to expect elite democratisation will 'trickle down' to lower government levels. Thus, one needs only study the top in a transition to know the direction of a political system. In many cases, however, this argument is unfounded. This is particularly the case in federal systems and most especially so in large federal systems such as the Russian Federation. Understanding a system through its parts may be more important to understanding a society's transformative future than the larger whole. The Russian
1 Introduction Opening remarks The involvement of three million ethnic minority 1 people in Britain's political system has been the subject of recurring and extensive debate. Starting from a sluggish base in the 1950s and 1960s, ethnic minority political participation has quickly gained momentum. Early stabs at researching empirically the extent of participation in national and local elections revealed a determination by many minority groups to try to use the potential of democratic politics in order to gain influence and tackle discriminatory barriers in jobs
This book offers an overview of the principal features of the German political system. It emphasises four important characteristics of the system: the way in which twentieth-century history shaped the post-Second World War political system; the stability and adaptability of that system; the unusual importance within the political system of legal rules; and the significance of Germany's association with European integration. The book surveys the Basic Law, designed in 1948-1949 as a direct response to the failure of Germany's first experiment with democracy: the regime of the Weimar Republic. The book describes the events of the fateful years 1989 and 1990, which led to reunification, in three phases: the downfall of the old regime in the German Democratic Republic; the period of adjustment and transition to a democratic regime in Germany; and the process and consequences of reunification itself. The book also examines the principal influences which have shaped the present-day political system, the electoral system and electoral behaviour of the Federal Republic, and the features of the 'party state'. It reviews the structure, operation and political effects of Germany's particular version of federalism and analyses the core institutions of government. The structure and powers of the legislative chambers, the legislative process, and the role of the elected representative are also discussed. Finally, the book charts the path taken by West Germany to develop links to 'Europe', and explores the ways in which membership of what has become the European Union impinges upon the domestic politics of the Federal Republic.
systems are monetised and coercive, often overtly violent. They also cross national boundaries. Political systems that exhibit this logic can be called political marketplaces and can be described using the PM framework (PMF) ( Spatz et al. , 2021 ; de Waal et al. , 2021 : 1; de Waal, 2015 ). Nearly all ongoing instances of famine and mass starvation are enmeshed in the dynamics of local, national and transnational PMs. This paper examines the connections between the PMF
order goes much deeper than this core liberal principle about the equal worth of all human lives. Liberal space is constitutive of the international political system as a whole. Consider the second Red Cross principle, ‘neutrality’: ‘In order to continue to enjoy the confidence of all, the Movement may not take sides in hostilities or engage at any time in controversies of a political, racial, religious or ideological nature’ ( ICRC, 2016 ). This liberal space exists above and beyond political space, a space where, regardless of one
need of an urgent operation. Another problem was that the region’s medical authorities had diverted some of the drugs brought by MSF to the military hospital. This was causing stock-outs and obliging patients to buy drugs from private pharmacies that they should have been receiving free-of-charge from MSF at the hospital. The Political System in North-East Syria It took an in-depth investigation (different visits