Abstract
The German party system has experienced a process of fragmentation since 1990, which is a consequence of several profound changes: The distance between German citizens and political parties has grown since unification, and the party leaderships in elected office have simultaneously continued to reduce their dependence on their parties’ grassroots. The withdrawal of citizens from parties resembles the experience of other Western democracies: Voter turnout continued to decline after unification at an accelerated rate. Electoral volatility increased. Party identification and formal party membership declined. Engagement with political parties had always been lower in the Eastern parts of post-unification Germany. However, the Western pattern has gradually become more similar to the Eastern one since 1990. Indicators of the party elites’ withdrawal from civil society include the growing reliance of German parties ‘in public office’ on state funding to increase their autonomy from their party organizations outside parliaments and governments. The post-unification party system has also witnessed the gradual digitalization of the public sphere, which has a potential further to strengthen party elites: The establishment of central databases, websites and communication tools are likely to have played their part in the domination of the parties’ grassroots by their ‘party in central office.’ At the same time, however, the digitalization of party politics has expanded opportunities for more membership involvement: Digitalization has allowed parties to explore looser types of less formalized association and more extensive (if looser) membership participation.
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Notes
- 1.
Emphasis in the original.
- 2.
The sum of the changes between the parties between elections (divided by 2) is usually referred to as aggregate volatility and is plotted for Germany in Fig. 3.4. The data were calculated by Emanuele (2015) who decomposes total volatility (TV in the figure) into its major components. Firstly, one part of the aggregate electoral volatility (AltV in Fig. 3.4) is caused by vote switching between existing parties (in the case of the dataset we are including only parties receiving at least 1 percent of the national share in both elections under scrutiny). Second, a further part of the total aggregate volatility is caused by vote switching to, and from, parties that entered or exited the party system (RegV in Fig. 3.4). In Emanuele’s dataset, a party is considered as entering the party system when it received at least 1 percent of the national share in an election at time t + 1, while it had received less than 1 percent in election at time t. Conversely, he considers a party as exiting the part system when it received less than 1 percent in election at time t + 1, while it received at least 1 percent in election at time t. Finally, there is the part of the overall volatility caused by vote switching among parties with a voting strength below 1 percent of the national share in both the elections at time t and t + 1 (OthV).
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Saalfeld, T., Lutsenko, D. (2022). The German Party System Since 1990: From Incorporation to Fragmentation, Polarization and Weaker Ties. In: Oswald, M., Robertson, J. (eds) The Legacy and Impact of German Unification. New Perspectives in German Political Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97154-0_3
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