Federalism and the Party System: The Case of West Germany

Abstract

West Germany today is ruled by a constitutional regime in which a strongly led democratic majority party has carried the predominant, indeed, increasingly almost the sole, responsibility of running the national government. Yet the “basic law” of the country embodies a federal system of institutions and checks and balances which were in great measure designed specifically to hamper the exercise of power by just such a politically powerful national government. The inclusion in the Constitution, under German federalist and Allied pressure, of a number of institutional devices, especially that of the “Bundesrat” rather than the “Senate” form of upper House, was rather openly intended to introduce restraints on the power of national party leaderships by allowing the leaders of the Laender governments a direct voice and, on many matters, a potential veto in the formulation of national policies. The creation of a second chamber with members drawn from, and exclusively responsible to, the Land cabinets was pretty clearly an attempt to institutionalize political diversity. It was expected that as the party makeup of the several Laender governments would often differ from the coalition pattern of the Federal government, and that as each Land government would have to cast its indivisible Bundesrat votes with regard both to its regional interests and to its particular party composition, the resultant configuration of power in the upper chamber would differ considerably from that in the Bundestag.