Parliamentary Roles in Modern Legislatures by Rozenberg Olivier. Blomgren Magnus

Author:Rozenberg, Olivier.,Blomgren, Magnus.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Case Selection, Data, and Hypotheses

The following analysis focuses on the German case for two reasons. First, in Germany, party organizational careers are of crucial importance for legislative recruitment, thus differences in length and structure could account for differences in partisan role orientations. Second, the country’s mixed electoral system provides the basis for a quasi experiment. It allows varying relevant electoral incentives while holding many other contextual factors constant.

In Germany, in fact, political parties have monopolized legislative recruitment (Borchert and Golsch 1999). Parties need to select candidates for legislative offices either by nominating them for party lists or for nominal votes in one of the 299 single-seat districts. Theoretically, independent individuals are able to bypass parties at the nominal tier by collecting a specific number of signatures and thus by putting themselves on the ballot. But this remains a theoretical option without much practical relevance at the federal level (Best et al. 2001: 69).

Earning a candidacy to the German Bundestag presupposes long and cumbersome careers in party organizational contexts. The literature on this topic unveils crucial patterns and variables in this regard. Political careers usually start with becoming a party member. Different empirical studies find different pieces of evidence regarding the length of party membership prior to the acquisition of a mandate to the German Bundestag. Herzog (1975: 175) in his seminal study on political careers conducted in the mid-1970s found that the average (West) German legislator joined his or her party at the age of 31 (FDP), 30 (CDU) and 26 (SPD) and earned his or her first mandate to the Bundestag on average after 7.1 (CDU/CSU) and 8.9 years (FDP). This is short compared to the findings of Patzelt (1999: 252) reporting for the mid-1990s an average party membership of 18 years prior to earning a legislative mandate at the state or federal level. However, despite these differences in detail, in the German case, party membership is obviously a crucial prerequisite for earning a legislative mandate.

The timespan between joining a party and earning a legislative mandate typically includes two crucial career steps. The first step concerns an upward move within party organizational contexts by acquiring some party office at some moment in time. Patzelt (1999: 252) reports that 90 percent of his respondents held some party office at some party organizational level. The empirical findings of Herzog (1990) and Schüttemeyer and Sturm (2005) support this finding. The second career step concerns earning a mandate at the local or regional level before advancing to higher levels of electoral politics. Borchert and Golsch (1999: 126), for the German case, do not consider this second step a “must” compared to securing some kind of party office. But a successful electoral track record at the local level is nevertheless considered beneficial for further advancement. Herzog (1990: 37) reports that almost 70 percent of all legislators in the Eleventh German Bundestag in fact held a local mandate prior to their election to the Bundestag.

Most party organizational careers take off at the local level. However,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.