Political parties as allies for the forestry sector: A case study from Germany

Abstract

This paper aims at shedding light on partisan differences in forest policy by analysing whether governing parties' policy outputs are strongly orientated towards the demands of the nature conservation or the forestry sector. The data base encompasses four forest-related issues, relevant from 2001 to 2018 in the 16 German Bundesländer, so that more than 50 cabinets were able to be considered for analysis. The application of Qualitative Comparative Analysis allowed testing for several variables that were expected to have an impact on or even dominate partisan effects in certain configurations. The findings show that political parties do matter in forest policy. While the Green Party's policy outputs are clearly orientated towards nature conservation demands, the Christian Democratic Union/ Christian Social Union is a suitable ally for the forestry sector. The Social Democrats are between these two extremes, but closer to nature conservation in highly populated Bundesländer. Factors like forest cover or share of private forests were revealed not to be as important as political parties. We conclude that research in forest policy missed an important political factor of forest policy by neglecting the influence of political parties as a research subject.