Change of position within the German government as an arena of rivalling public interest groups—The case of the German buyer's premium as regulatory instrument for the purchase of electric cars in Germany

Abstract

The present article deals with the role of the German federal government on promoting the increased production of electric cars in Germany. It shows the changing positions of different stakeholders in the Berlin arena, their interests, positions, and alliances. It examines the question of why and how the stakeholders, especially within the government, change their positions in the arena of electromobility. The paper refers to the principal‐agent theory associated with the empirical field of arena analysis. The empirical basis of this study comprises five high‐level expert interviews with key‐decision players in the electromobility arena: two former federal state secretaries of the Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI), Mr. Bomba, and the Ministry of Economy and Energie (BMWi), Mr. Machnig; the acting state secretary in the Ministry of Finance (BMF), Mr. Gatzer, and, in addition, the head of the Berlin representative office of a major German automobile manufacturer and the chairman of the National Platform on Electric Mobility. In addition to these interviews, a lot of participating observation was done between 2012 and 2013, as a major German automobile manufacturer provided insights into the group's representation in Berlin, the decision‐making process between the corporate headquarters and the public affairs managers in Berlin and Brussels, and the cooperation with the ministries in Berlin. The paper tries to fill a research gap: Scholarly research on the impact of the German federal government as an arena of rivalling public interest groups is scarce in Germany. The leading view takes the federal government as a monolith, which view is more based on “how it should act” as on empirical evidence (“how it acts”). Inductive evidence shows that the government does not exist, as it is a subarena of itself. The consequences of this observation for the theorization of the role of the government in the larger society, as being only one out of many players, are discussed in the text.