Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands Research Articles

Birleşme Sonrası Almanya’da İdealist Avrupa Yanlılığı ile İç İdeolojik Öncelikler Arasında Alman Sosyal Demokrat Partisi

The main thrust of this article is to examine the evolution of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands – SPD)’s Europhile position since German reunification from a broader ideological perspective. To this end, this study rests on the field research that entails 16 semi-structured interviews with high-profile SPD political elites and archival research on key official party documents. Based on this analysis, the main argument of this study is that the SPD encountered a growing tension between idealistic and domestic views of European integration since 1990. Under the impact of the post-reunification domestic problems and Chancellor Schröder’s assertive European policy line, the German Social Democrats’ ideology-driven doubts about European integration increased at the expense of their idealistic pro-Europeanism. Over time, this tension led to the greater prominence of ideological pragmatism in the SPD’s official European Union (EU) narrative, rendering Europe a politically and ideologically salient issue for the party.

Red Banners, Books, and Beer Mugs: The Mental World of German Social Democrats, 1863–1914

Red Banners, Books, and Beer Mugs: The Mental World of German Social Democrats, 1863–1914

An institutional safety net? How electoral institutions mediate the fortunes of parties under threat

ABSTRACT How do electoral institutions condition the electoral fortunes of parties under threat? In this article, we examine how Germany’s mixed-member proportional (MMP) system has influenced the vote share of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), a party under threat which has consistently lost votes over the past two decades. Using the 2013 and 2017 waves of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), we find that voters are likely to engage in “sincere” vote switching on both the district and party ballots and that they are less likely to engage in “strategic” vote switching when they cast their district votes than when they cast their party votes, which protects SPD district candidates. Moreover, voters who stay with the SPD when casting their district vote are also less likely to switch their party votes, which protects the SPD’s overall vote share. We thus conclude that Germany’s MMP electoral system serves as an institutional safety net for the SPD as a party under threat. Our findings have important implications for understanding the ways in which electoral rules shape voting behavior and how different rules can mediate the decline of parties under threat.

Internationalism, Protectionism, Xenophobia: The Second International's Migration Debate (1889–1914)

AbstractIn 1907, the Second International adopted a resolution on migration that rejected restrictions on the free movement of workers. In this article, we contend that, despite this official stance, the issue of migration was a highly controversial one for the international socialist community. We present a multi-level analysis, in which we detail the migration debate as it took place on the platforms of the Second International (roughly between 1903 and 1907) and the way in which this debate played out domestically for the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands and the Socialist Party of America – two parties that openly rooted for restrictions at the international level. We discern three ideal-typical stances on immigration – internationalism, on the one hand, and protectionist nativism and xenophobic nativism, on the other – and argue that it was the incompatibility of the internationalist and nativist positions that caused internal divisions to arise during the debates. Apart from speaking to the classic historiography on the Second International, which deals with the incompatibility of internationalism and nationalism, this article traces the influence of additional racist and culturalist ideologies on the debate and further historicizes it within the broader context of the modern international migration system that was taking shape at the time.

New Insights into Coalition Negotiations—The Case of German Government Formation

Research on coalition negotiations after general elections in parliamentary systems usually focuses on the parties’ utility maximization as corporate actors. However, the most recent process of government formation after the German general election in 2017 followed a different type of logic and led to an outcome unlike that of other coalition negotiations. Regarding policy seeking, office seeking, and vote seeking, the outcomes of both the exploratory talks between Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU)/Christlich‐Soziale Union (CSU), Freie Demokratische Partei, and the Greens and the negotiations between CDU/CSU and Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands are at least partly irrational from a cost–benefit analysis. This article examines the formation of Germany’s government in 2017–2018 and reveals the paradoxical outcomes of each phase of the negotiations. Empirical data to underpin the argument stem from interviews with negotiators and statements of direct participants in the formation of the coalition. Instead of the parties’ utility maximization, negotiations were largely dominated by intraparty conflicts, in which individual interests and personal trust rather than partisan unitary programs were most relevant to the negotiation process and outcome. Our work answers the question of why the grand coalition was unexpectedly renewed in the end—contrary to what might be predicted based on established theories of coalition building. The observations and conclusions set forth are of general interest not only for future coalition negotiations in Germany but also for other European parliamentary democracies facing increasing party fragmentation. Most importantly, the analysis yields insights into negotiations undertaken in the absence of rationalist behavior.

The Effect of Community Size on Electoral Preferences: Evidence from Post-Wwii Southern Germany

Populous communities often prefer more government involvement than less populous communities, but does community size per se affect citizens' preferences for government? Endogeneity commonly prevents testing for causal effects because (i) people can select into communities while (ii) government structures can affect community size (e.g., by en- or discouraging migration and fertility decisions). This paper studies a plausibly exogenous setting from post-WWII Baden-Wurttemberg (located in Southern Germany), in which the French occupation zone prevented the entry of German expellees after 1945, whereas the U.S. occupied zone did not. Consequently, municipalities on the U.S. side, just across the border from the French zone, experienced large and relatively homogenous population shocks. Studying voting patterns in the 1949 national- and 1952 state-level elections for 828 municipalities, we find more populous municipalities systematically preferred the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), the party advocating for greater government involvement in virtually all areas of policymaking, over the CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union), the major conservative party that emphasized free markets. Our results hold when accounting for a host of potential confounding factors, county-fixed effects, pre-WWII vote shares, employing fractional response models and alternative instrumental variable specifications. Our benchmark estimates imply that a one standard deviation increase in population size (equivalent to ≈4,000 citizens) raised the SPD vote share by more than 11 percentage points.

Emotions, Cognition, and Collective Alignment: A Response to Collins

Emotions, Cognition, and Collective Alignment: A Response to Collins

The German Workers' Sport Movement between Socialism, Workers' Culture, Middle-Class Gymnastics and Sport for All

The 150th birthday of the German Labor Party Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) provides a good opportunity to research and discuss the genesis of the workers' sport movement in Germany. In this article, the German workers' sport history is placed in a broader context of the development of the German club sports system. This system emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century and was strongly influenced by national or nationalistic, as well as socialist ideas and concepts of workers' sport. The chronological context therefore commences long before 1893, when the socialist workers' gymnastics federation (ATB) was formally founded. The history also does not end in 1933, when the socialist organisations were destroyed by the Nazi regime. The concepts, ideas, visions and morality of workers sports are still alive – at least partly – in current sports.

Is it always up to the leadership? European policy-making in the Labour Party, Parti Socialiste (PS) and Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD)

This article analyzes and compares the politics of European policy-making within the British Labour Party, the Parti Socialiste (PS) and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) between 1997 and 2012. We know that party leaders have assumed much autonomy in the making of European policy, but, as with policy-making in any area, their autonomy is constrained and sometimes even questioned by other parts of the party. In order to establish how they are constrained, and what factors increase the level of constraint, this study explores the roles played by four party actors in the making of European policy: conferences, national executive committees, Members of Parliament and Members of the European Parliament. This article, which is based on over 35 interviews with EU experts from the three parties, confirms that European policy was generally made by the party leadership. Other party actors, however, were able to influence the leadership on a small number of occasions. The extent of their influence depended upon the polity, party, policy and politics.

Returns to Capital:

Returns to Capital:

Niemieckie wizje kształtu Unii Europejskiej w okresie rządów Gerharda Schrödera

The unusual activity of the Federal Republic of Germany during all integration processes in Europe was questioned after Gerhard Schröder’s victory in the 1998 election. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD – Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), which for many years had been pushed into opposition, did not have a clear vision of its European policy, which gave rise to concerns from European partners.In addition, the coalition government of the SPD-Union 90/The Greens emphasized German interests in European politics more strongly than Christian Democratic governments.With a persistence that had never been seen before, they demanded that the financial burdens of the Federal Republic of Germany towards the EU budget be reduced and the Common Agricultural Policy be reformed, thereby giving up the „checkbook policy”. One of the focal points became the reform of the European Union’s institutional system and decision-making process. Joschka Fischer’s „From a union of states to a federation” speech, related to the reform of the EU, delivered in May 2000, marked a breakthrough and started an international debate on the political form of the Union.The author of this paper presents German ideas on European integration and visions of the form of the European Union from 1998–2005.

Die Direktwahl als Zäsur grenzüberschreitender Parteienzusammenarbeit? Potenziale und Grenzen transnationaler Programm- und Wahlkampfkooperation am Beispiel von SPD und FDP im Vorfeld der ersten europäischen Direktwahlen 1979

The article deals with the potentials and limits of transnational party cooperation in the context of the first European Elections in 1979. It focuses on two German parties, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) and the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP). It examines the role these parties played in the founding of the transnational party confederations and the creation of their first programs and campaigning elements. Then, it looks at the respective German campaigns, programs and realization. By consulting primary documents of the respective party archives, the author explores the degree to which the German parties participated on the European level, and the degree to which the transnational cooperation reflected upon the German campaign. Despite their strong involvement within the party confederations, the parties’ use of transnational elements in their national campaign is surprisingly low. It is argued that particularly the SPD only resorted to them if it was in line with their nationally focused agenda. The FDP can uphold the claim of a transnational campaign more credibly through the constant reference to their party confederation.

East Germany: The Stasi and De-Stasification

Shortly Mikhail Gorbachev was installed as secretary general of the Soviet Union's Communist Party in the spring of 1985, he began to pursue his liberalization policies of glasnost and perestroika. The impact was felt almost immediately within the ruling Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), the Communist Party of the East German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR). Gorbachev's policies gave new hope for political, economic, and social renewal to those disenchanted with the gerontological Stalinist leadership of Erich Honecker and his sycophants. (1) A new wind was blowing from the East, generated by the great teacher--the Soviet Union. In line with the USSR's change of course, both Moscow's German-language propaganda magazine, Sputnik, and its weekly newspaper, Neue Zeit, reprinted Gorbachev's speeches and editorialized on the necessity for reforms of the socialist system. For East Germany's leaders, however, they became hostile publications and were banned despite protests emanating from Moscow. Nonetheless, they presaged a major change: For the first time since the founding of the DDR in 1949, the restlessness of Party members and much of the citizenry could not be blamed on the capitalist enemy of the proletariat. Until the mid-1980s, opposition to the regime was largely underground, although hundreds of thousands of burghers spent time in penitentiaries for publicly voicing their discontent. The repression began immediately after the end of World War II, carried out by Soviet security services and German Communist Party veterans (both those who had been in exile in the Soviet Union and those that had survived Nazi imprisonment). Thousands of people were arrested and shipped off to the infamous former Nazi concentration camps of Sachsenhansen and Buchenwald. Initially, the inhabitants of East Germany shrugged off the wave of arrests, believing the victims to be only former Nazi officials or war criminals. Then, in spring 1946, the Soviets ordered the fusion of two archenemies, the German Communist Party (the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) and the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD). Outwardly, the creation of the new party, the SED, appeared to proceed smoothly. In reality, however, thousands of rank-and-file socialists opposed to the union were thrown into prisons or concentration camps. They were joined by people who had been denounced for making anticommunist or anti-Soviet remarks, hundreds of them as young as fourteen. (2) On August 16, 1947, the Soviet Military Administration (SMA) ordered the creation of the first postwar German political police. Named Kommissariat 5 (K-5), it was formally attached to the criminal investigation department of the Volkspolizei (the People's Police, or VOPO). In reality, however, it operated independently under Soviet supervision; the subterfuge was necessary because the rules of the Allied Control Commission for Germany forbade the reestablishment of a German political police. Wilhelm Zaisser, a veteran German operative for Soviet military intelligence (GRU) and a former commander of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, was named as its head. Erich Mielke, another long-time Communist agent of the Soviet security services, became Zaisser's deputy. During its early years, the K-5 arrested citizens and turned them over to the Soviet security organs for trial by Soviet military tribunals. In most cases, the proceedings lasted no more than a few minutes, often resulting in sentences of twenty-five years in a Soviet labor camp or a high security penitentiary in East Germany. (3) Less than a year later, Erich Mielke was detailed to create another secret police bearing the innocuous name of Deutsche Wirtschaftskommission, the German Economic Commission. It was charged with guarding confiscated property against misuse and sabotage, as well as with the investigation of economic crimes. …

The paradoxes of success. Dutch social democracy and its historiography

Anniversaries of successful political parties, particularly if the birthdays are 'round' ones like centenaries, tend to call forth a barrage of self-congratulatory literature from political leaders, supplemented by scholarly analyses with varying degrees of sophistication explaining the reasons for the group's success. Remarkably, this scenario has not manifested itself in the case of the recent centennial celebrations of European Social Democracy, including that of the Dutch variant, the 'Partij van de Arbeid' (PvdA). Rather, the political leaders have written pieces full of self-doubt, while historians contributed what were sometimes bitter indictments of present-day European Social Democracy and its leaders 1. This is all the more surprising since, as Sir Ralf Dahrendorf and Klaus von Dohnanyi have recently reminded us, European Social Democracy was an unabashed success story; the Social Democratic parties have dominated much of the political and social agenda in Europe during the twentieth century. The reasons for the unease, as Piet de Rooy has noted, for the PvdA, lies in the ambivalence of the success story. Both the Socialists themselves and the scholarly community see the Social Democratic accomplishments tarnished by a nagging sense that the price for Social Democracy's political success was the loss of Socialism's ideological soul. Paradoxically, this now very pervasive self-doubt is of rather recent origin. Until the last decade or so, most analysts (not to mention Social Democratic political leaders) celebrated the increasing conjunction of the Social Democrats political and social agenda and their electoral success with unabashed enthusiasm. Kurt Klotzbach entitled his history of the 'Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands' (SPD)after 1945 Der Weg zur Staatspartei, and that proud boast would certainly hold even more true for the PvdA. In fact, if there is a Leitmotiv to most of the literature on the ' Sociaal-democratische Arbeiders Partij' (SDAP) and the PvdA, it is a certain historicist tendency to read into the history of Dutch Democratic Socialism a straight-forward evolution toward fullscale acceptance of the pragmatic reformism that was to characterize all of West European Social Democracy after World War II. Indeed, and not without some reason, the Dutch party is usually assigned a pioneering role in this story.

The West German Social Democratic Party and The Politics of Internationalism in Central America

One of the Most Notable Aspects of the Crisis in Central America has been the opportunity it has offered a number of actors, both within and without the region, to become involved in an area long considered a traditional reserve and zone of influence of the United States. Over the last decade, no European Socialist or Social Democratic party has been more important or influential with respect to Central American issues than the West German Social Democratic Party (SPD or Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands). Despite being in the opposition since 1982, the West German Social Democrats have retained their prominence on international issues—particularly on Central American ones—for a number of reasons, such as: (1) having a solid electoral base (37% of the votes in the 1987 Bundestag elections); (2) having leaders who are internationally prominent; (3) having a well-organized foreign policy apparatus at their disposal (the well-financed Friedrich Ebert Stiftung foundation); (4) having connections to a similarly endowed trade union movement, organized around the Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund(DGB); as well as (5) having persisted in their efforts to coordinate joint initiatives with other Socialist and Social Democratic parties, both within the European Economic Community (EEC) and through the Socialist International (SI).

Germany and the Euromissile Debate

In December 1979 the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato) decided to redress the military balance in Europe through a 'two-track' approach involving both the deployment of more modern theatre nuclear forces (tnf) and the pursuit of arms control to reduce the number of such weapons; in this way they hoped to re-establish the credibility of the current system of deterrence. At about the same time the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in an attempt to secure that country militarily and in this way its own 'soft underbelly' against potential trouble in southwest Asia. These two simultaneous, though largely unrelated, events dramatically changed the fabric of EastWest relations from an uneasy detente to a new low-key cold war. At the time, the consequences of these two events were not fully realized in the Federal Republic of Germany. The spd (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), then in power in Bonn, tried to rationalize the events in Afghanistan as an EastSouth rather than an EastWest conflict; above all, it tried to shield EastWest relations in Europe from the apparent deterioration in superpower relations. The two-track nato decision was interpreted as an effort to revitalize the stagnant arms control negotiations in an area crucial to European security (a thrust further emphasized by the new proposals on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions) by coupling it with a delayed deci-

Working‐class movement and working‐class life : Frankfurt am Main during the Weimar Republic∗

In the general election of 1928 the German social democratic party, the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) polled 9 i million votes, 29-8 per cent of the total, while the communist party, the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) polled 3 3 million votes, i o6 per cent of the total. In the same year the SPD claimed goo,ooo members, the KPD 130,000.1 Such figures alone show the strength of the working-class movement in Weimar Germany. In addition to these parties there also existed a range of left-wing sporting and cultural organizations, such as the German workers' singing clubs, the DAS (Deutsche Arbeitersanger-Bund) and the workers' sporting movement, the ATUS (ArbeiterTurnund Sportbund), with in I 928 270,000 and 770,000 members respectively.2 Impressive as they are, such numbers tell us little about the relationship between these organizations and the social class they claimed to represent. The first part of this paper uses Gramsci's concept of 'organic intellectuals' to pose in general terms the ways in which left-wing organizations could be seen as rooted in the working class. From this discussion there follow three stages of empirical analysis, using a case-study of the city of Frankfurt am Main: the social composition of the local leadership of the SPD, USPD and KPD; the relationship between these political organizations and what will be termed the 'working-class movement' as a whole; the ideological influence of this 'working-class movement' on workingclass everyday life.

German Social Democratic Agrarian Policy, 1890–1895 Reconsidered

If in the 1890s any one aspect of economic development under capitalism confounded the prognostications of German Marxists it was the agricultural. The peasants had not obliged the pundits of German Social Democracy by permitting themselves to be ruined and liquidated as a class. The realization, based on a plethora of statistical evidence, that the peasant would be for years to come a hardy perennial disposed many leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) to coquette with reformist approaches to the agrarian problem. This provoked the great debate of 1893–95 in the course of which traditional lines between orthodoxy and reformism became blurred. Some of the party's best men were compromised, and the “whole conception of the movement as that of a class which harbors goals of the broadest revolutionary compass” was put into question. The erosion of principle was such that not only men of the standing of Georg von Vollmar and Bruno Schoenlank in South Germany but also August Bebel, who was the generalissimo of the SPD, Ignaz Auer, and Wolfgang Heine in North Germany were to be labelled by Otto Wels, the later Social Democratic Reichstag leader, shining examples of opportunism. The problem of the small farmer was to be a major factor in the subsequent rise of revisionism, for Eduard Bernstein, that brilliant wandering star in many constellations, was to stress the indispensable auxiliary role of the peasantry in engineering the gradualist transformation of society along Social Democratic lines.

German Socialsim and the Crisis of 1929–33

This study of the economic proposals of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD,Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) and the German Free Trade Unions (ADGB,Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund) during the years 1929–33 is not intended merely to revive a long-forgotten discussion of German economic policy.By exploring the complex interaction during the depression of economic theory, in the form of half-articulated assumptions as well as formal systems, and political ideology and behavior, it attempts to deepen our understanding of the fundamental political conflicts produced by modern economic crises. The Social Democratic Party and the Free Trade Unions had important political roles in the Weimar Republic. Their strong interest after 1929 in reviving the economy and in preventing the rise of a National Socialist regime makes them especially appropriate subjects to explore the relationship between economic theory and politics.

The SPD of East Berlin, 1945-1961

Political parties perform a variety of functions. Typically we think of them in instrumental terms-as coalitions formed to compete for public office, or as means for mobilizing the masses in support of decisions made by the ruling elites. Other parties serve expressive functions. They may be more interested in ideological purity than in gaining political office. Or they may represent the interests of a single group, such as refugees or inhabitants of a particular area, not because they want to move into policy-making positions but rather to ensure that the group's interests are kept before the public. And for individual members, of course, parties serve still other instrumental and expressive functions. The divided city of postwar Berlin witnessed the development of a party with a rather different type of function: that of a symbol with international dimensions in the emerging cold war. In mid-1945, as the dust settled on the ruins of Hitler's Third Reich and the occupying forces began to encourage the development of democratic political organizations, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) emerged as the leading contender for political power in the country's former capital. Before long, however, the struggle for control of Germany among the victors, with their differing conceptions of what the new, democratic Germany should look like, began in earnest. This cold war ultimately focused on the fate of Berlin itself. Before the end of 1948 the Allies, with German assistance, had split the city into two parts-the eight boroughs of East Berlin and the twelve boroughs of West Berlin-that were moving ever further apart in political terms. Throughout these three and a half frantic years the Berlin SPD remained intact, but only in an organizational sense. In fact, machinations carried out by Soviet-sponsored leaders of the Communist Party of