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Linkages between Parliamentary and Ministerial Careers in Germany, 1949–2008: The Bundestag as Recruitment Pool

2009; Routledge; Volume: 18; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09644000902878522

1743-8993

André Kaiser, Joern Fischer,

Abstract Delegation theory assumes strong direct links between the parliamentary majority and the government in parliamentary democracies. Based on a data set of career characteristics for all federal cabinet ministers in Germany 1949 to 2008, we test whether the Bundestag serves as the dominant recruitment pool throughout the period, whether party membership of ministers is a sine qua non, and whether non-party members and/or non-MPs seek membership as soon as possible after their selection for a cabinet post. We find confirmation for all three hypotheses, although in more recent times an increasing number of ministers are level-switchers, i.e. are recruited from the ranks of Länder executives. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We thank the reviewers of this journal as well as Annika Hennl, Ingo Rohlfing and the participants of the International Conference ‘Cabinet Recruitment and Parliamentary Careers’, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, 7 and 8 November 2008, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Notes Kaare Str⊘m, ‘Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies’, European Journal of Political Research 37/3 (2000); Kaare Str⊘m, Wolfgang C. Müller and Torbjörn Bergman, Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.261–89. The latest addition to our data set is the appointment of Ilse Aigner (Christian Social Union) on 31 October 2008, who replaced Horst Seehofer as Minister of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection. Adalbert Hess, ‘Zur Parlamentsmitgliedschaft der Minister in Bund und Ländern (1946–1971)’, pp.262–76 Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen 2 (1971); Suzanne S. Schüttemeyer, Fraktionen im Deutschen Bundestag 1949–1997. Empirische Befunde und theoretische Folgerungen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998). In fact, in the German case the effective selectorate in the ministerial appointment process is a small group consisting of parliamentary and party leaders, including the most influential leaders of Länder party associations, the exception being the Free Democrats (FDP) where ministerial appointments are usually more formally decided upon in a joint meeting of the parliamentary party and the party executive (Schüttemeyer, Fraktionen im Deutschen Bundestag, p.246). Formally, it is the Federal President who appoints and dismisses ministers upon the proposal of the Federal Chancellor. The constitutional and factual details of this are presented in detail in Jörn Fischer and André Kaiser, ‘Hiring and Firing Ministers under Informal Constraints: Germany’, Keith Dowding and Patrick Dumont (eds.), The Selection of Ministers in Europe: Hiring and Firing (London: Routledge, 2009), pp.21–40. For the (s)elective function of the Bundestag in general, see Ulrich Sieberer, ‘Prinzipal Parlament. Die Bedeutung europäischer Parlamente als Wahlorgane’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 49/2 (2008), pp.251–82. Torbj⊘rn Bergman, Wolfgang C. Müller, Kaare Str⊘m and Magnus Blomgren, ‘Democratic Delegation and Accountability: Cross-National Patterns’, in Str⊘m et al. (eds.), Delegation and Accountability. James Fearon, ‘Electoral Accountability and the Control of Politicians: Selecting Good Types versus Sanctioning Poor Performance’, in Bernard Manin, Adam Przeworski and Susan Stokes (eds.), Democracy, Accountability, and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For a detailed application of this argument in the analysis of cabinet formation see Michael Laver and Kenneth A. Shepsle, Making and Breaking Governments. Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.247–260. Fischer and Kaiser, ‘Hiring and Firing Ministers’, p.30. Jörn Fischer and André Kaiser, ‘Wie gewonnen, so zerronnen? Selektions- und Deselektionsmechanismen in den Karrieren deutscher Bundesminister’, Michael Edinger and Werner Patzelt (eds.), Politik als Beruf (Wiesbaden, VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaftern, forthcoming). R. Keith Alderman and J. Cross, ‘The Reluctant Knife: Reflections on the Prime Minister's Power of Dismissal’, Parliamentary Affairs 38/4 (1985), pp.387–408. Fearon, ‘Electoral Accountability’; John D. Huber and Cecilia Martinez Gallardo, ‘Replacing Cabinet Ministers: Patterns of Ministerial Instability in Parliamentary Democracies’, American Political Science Review 102 (2008), pp.169–80; Indridi H. Indridason and Christopher Kam, ‘Cabinet Reshuffles and Ministerial Drift’, British Journal of Political Science 38 (2008), pp.621–56; Torun Dewan and David P. Myatt, ‘Scandal, Protection and Recovery in Cabinet’, American Political Science Review 101 (2007), pp.63–77. Laver and Shepsle, Making and Breaking Governments, p.248. Richard S. Katz, ‘Party Government: A Rationalistic Conception’, in Francis Castles and Rudolf Wildenmann (eds.), Visions and Realities of Party Government (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986), p.45. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution. With an Introduction by Richard Crossman (London: Fontana, 1993), p.67. Bergman et al., ‘Democratic Delegation and Accountability’, pp.150–51. Lieven de Winter, ‘Parliamentary and Party Pathways to the Cabinet’, in Jean Blondel and J.-L. Thiébault (eds.), The Profession of Government Minister in Western Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p.44. Keith Dowding and Patrick Dumont, ‘Institutional Factors and the Hiring and Firing of Ministers’, in Dowding and Dumont (eds.) The Selection of Ministers. James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions. The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989), p.38. This section partly builds on Fischer and Kaiser, ‘Hiring and Firing Ministers’ and on Fischer and Kaiser, ‘Wie gewonnen, so zerronnen?’, but has a different focus with recruitment pools. Germany's electoral system does not know by-elections for vacant seats during legislative terms, except when independent constituency MPs leave the Bundestag. The possibility of by-elections had been part of the first federal electoral law in 1949 but was changed in 1953. Since then, if a constituency seat won by a party member becomes vacant, the next candidate on the party list moves into the Bundestag. Type 3 includes a few cases of ministers who became MPs after losing cabinet office. All in all, only 10 ministers (5.3 per cent) have at no time been MPs in the German case. In addition to the fact that Germany's mixed electoral system does not know by-elections, the mixed member formula can lead to unintended consequences. For instance, if a party is too successful in a Bundesland with regard to direct seats, it may happen that even those on the first ranks of a party list do not gain a parliamentary seat. Typically potential ministerial personnel are placed at the top positions of their lists Fischer and Kaiser, ‘Wie gewonnen, so zeronnen?’ Schüttemeyer, Fraktionen im Deutschen Bundestag, pp.231–40. All calculations in this section are based on our data. In some cases our coding decisions differ from the ones used in Schüttemeyer, Fraktionen im Deutschen Bundestag, pp.233–6; and Udo Kempf, ‘Die Regierungsmitglieder als soziale Gruppe’, in Udo Kempf and Hans-Georg Merz (eds.), Kanzler und Minister 1949–1998 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2001), pp.19–23. In addition to level-switching, Hess points to other situational factors which account for non-membership of cabinet ministers in the Bundestag following from the functioning of Germany's mixed electoral system; Hess, ‘Zur Parlamentsmitgliedschaft der Minister’, pp.265–6. The analysis of level-switching should ideally be complemented by data on federal ministers with a background as Land MPs. However, this data does not exist at the moment. Schüttemeyer, Fraktionen im Deutschen Bundestag, p.232. Klaus Stolz, ‘Moving Up, Moving Down. Political Careers across Territorial Levels’, European Journal of Political Research 42/2 (2003), pp.223–48. Melanie Kintz, ‘Recruitment and Legislative Careers of German Bundestag Members’, Paper prepared for the Annual Workshop of the German Politics Specialist Group (GPSG) ‘Conflict and Consensus: German Politics and Society in Transition’. Akademie für politische Bildung, Tutzing, 12–14 September 2008. Jürgen Plöhn, ‘Ehemalige Bundestagsabgeordnete als Ministerpräsidenten der Länder – ein etabliertes Karrieremuster’, Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen 15/2 (1984), pp.176–86. Stolz, ‘Moving Up, Moving Down’. See note 2 above. One of those six, Martin Bangemann, had already been a member of the European Parliament since 1974 but remained an MEP until 1984, when he was first appointed to the cabinet as Minister of Economic Affairs and, in 1989 became European Commissioner. We count only the tenures of a minister in different portfolios if these directly follow each other. So-called ‘comeback ministers’, who return to the cabinet after some time, are counted twice because at the time of their first de-selection their reappointment was not foreseeable. The tenures of Federal Chancellors who directly moved from ministerial office to the Chancellorship are summed up. This is without the case of Ludwig Erhard. We define a push resignation as a premature and non-scheduled discontinuation of a minister's term in cabinet after having been the object of massive criticism; Jörn Fischer, André Kaiser and Ingo Rohlfing ‘The Push and Pull of Ministerial Resignations in Germany, 1969–2005’, West European Politics 29 (2006), pp.709–35. Philip Manow's data base ‘Mitglieder des Bundestages, 1949–2005’ (data collection, University of Konstanz) gives an average tenure of 3612 days for German MPs from the 1st to the end of the 15th Bundestag. See also Michael F. Feldkamp, Datenhandbuch zur Geschichte des Deutschen Bundestages 1994 bis 2003 (Baden-Baden: Nomos 2005), p.146. This is what the Selection and De-Selection of Political Elites (SEDEPE) network of scholars is currently working on; see http://www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/projekte/sedepe/members.php and Dowding and Dumont (eds.) The Selection of Ministers in Europe for a first publication of this group. Luca Verzichelli, ‘Italy: The Difficult Road towards a More Effective Process of Ministerial Selection’, in Dowding and Dumont (eds.) The Selection of Ministers, p.85; Patrick Dumont, Stefaan Fiers and Régis Dandoy, ‘Belgium: Ups and Downs of Ministerial Careers in a Partitocratic Federal State’, in Dowding and Dumont (eds.) The Selection of Ministers, p.132; António Costa Pinto and Pedro Tavares de Almeida, ‘Portugal: The Primacy of “Independents”‘, in Dowding and Dumont (eds.) The Selection of Ministers, p.151; Hanna Bäck, Thomas Persson, Kåre Vernby and Helena Wockelberg, ‘In Tranquil Waters: Swedish Cabinet Ministers in the Postwar Era’, in Dowding and Dumont (eds.) The Selection of Ministers, p.165.