Addressing Supply-Side Hurdles to Gender-Equal Representation in Germany

One hundred years after being granted the right to active suffrage, German women remain underrepresented in elective office. Quotas have partially addressed demand-side barriers to gender parity in descriptive representation, but significant supply-side gaps remain. Men comprise over 70% of political party members in the Federal Republic, dominating the bodies that provide candidates for elective office. Solutions to this supply-side problem have often focused on “fixing” women to fit into gendered party institutions, rather than altering these structures to be more welcoming to women. In contrast, drawing on interviews with (potential) party members in Germany, this article identifies informal institutions that deter gender-balanced involvement in political parties and suggests ways in which these norms might be changed.100 Jahre nach der Einführung des Frauenstimmrechts sind Frauen in Deutschland immer noch unterrepräsentiert in der Politik. Geschlechterquoten konnten teilweise die Hindernisse für Geschlechtergleichheit in der deskriptiven Repräsentation auf der Nachfrageseite beeinflussen. Es bestehen jedoch weiterhin bedeutende Lücken auf der Angebotsseite. Männer stellen mehr als 70% der Parteimitglieder in Deutschland und dominieren damit die Gremien, die die Kandidat_innen für die Wahlen aufstellen. Um dem Problem der Angebotsseite entgegenzuwirken, wird häufig versucht, Frauen für die vergeschlechtlichen parteilichen Institutionen passend zu machen, anstatt diese Strukturen zu verändern, um sie für Frauen einladender zu machen. Im Gegensatz dazu identifiziert dieser Artikel unter Rückgriff auf Interviews mit (potenziellen) Parteimitgliedern in Deutschland informelle Institutionen, die auf eine geschlechtergerechte Beteiligung in politischen Parteien abschreckend wirken und schlägt Wege vor, wie diese Normen verändert werden könnten

"The Content of European Parliament Election Campaigns: A Framework for Analysis and Evidence from Germany in 2004"

[From the Introduction]. This paper seeks to explain the overwhelmingly national focus of European Parliament election campaigns. The first section reviews the plethora of oft-contradictory existing explanations for the national focus of EP campaigns, arguing that few of these explanations are both logically convincing and empirically supported. Second, the paper posits an alternative explanation for why parties may – or may not – choose to organize an EP election campaign around national rather than European themes. This alternative explanation predicts not only the primacy of national content in EP campaigns but also the exceptions to this rule – cases which other scholars write off as anomalies. The third section uses the 2004 EP campaigns by German political parties as a plausibility probe to investigate our hypotheses

Searching for the Origins of Civic Community in the Newly Expanded European Union. Jean Monnet/Robert Schumann Paper Series Vol. 4 No. 18, December 2004

Although many scholars stress the importance of a civic political culture for a functioning democracy, there is little consensus about where such a culture originates. The ‘bottom up’ approach argues that the civic culture has centuries old, enduring roots that in turn shape political and economic institutions. The ‘top down’ approach implies that political culture itself can be shaped by political institutions. Both schools of thought, however, stress the interrelatedness of civic behaviors; voluntary group membership, newspaper readership, and voting are expected to all be high in civic cultures and low elsewhere. In contrast, this article argues that these four components of ‘civicness’ are differently influenced by contemporary political institutions and are therefore less interrelated than previous scholars have hypothesized. Germany and its neighbors in a newly expanded EU provide an excellent laboratory in which to empirically investigate these conflicting hypotheses about the origin of the civic community. If the ‘bottom up’ approach were correct, there would be no differences in the level of civic community between the Eastern and Western parts of Germany and Central Europe since they were separated by the Iron Curtain for only four decades. If the ‘top down’ approach were correct, forty years of communist rule would have indeed reduced the level of civic community in Eastern Germany and Eastern Central Europe. Instead, I find marked differences in voluntary group membership across the former Iron Curtain, but much less divergence in terms of newspaper readership and voter turnout

The Content of European Parliament Election Campaigns: A Framework for Analysis and Evidence from Germany in 2004. Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series Vol. 5 No. 6, April 2005

[From the introduction]. This paper seeks to explain the overwhelmingly national focus of European Parliament election campaigns. The first section reviews the plethora of oft-contradictory existing explanations for the national focus of EP campaigns, arguing that few of these explanations are both logically convincing and empirically supported. Second, the paper posits an alternative explanation for why parties may – or may not – choose to organize an EP election campaign around national rather than European themes. This alternative explanation predicts not only the primacy of national content in EP campaigns but also the exceptions to this rule – cases which other scholars write off as anomalies. The third section uses the 2004 EP campaigns by German political parties as a plausibility probe to investigate our hypotheses

Afterword

This afterword summarises our main findings and discusses their political and scholarly implications. We find that Merkel's leadership style and foreign policy approach were consensual during her first term in office; moreover, she did not overtly address women's issues -- although her coalition did promulgate legislation which improved conditions for some German women. Our argument here is not that the Chancellor adopted this leadership style and these policy positions because she is a woman per se, but because she is a woman with a particular background. We show the utility of studying national leaders individually in order to determine how their gender roles have been defined, and how such roles intersect with social characteristics. This method can be fruitfully applied in other cases as well. As such research proliferates, the field will be able to draw more generalisable conclusions about the intersection of gender, social characteristics, and executive leadership. Adapted from the source document

Institutional Capital: Building Post-Communist Government Performance

Institutional Capital: Building Post-Communist Government Performance. By Laura Brunell. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005. 270p. $59.00. cloth,$39.00 paper This book makes an important theoretical contribution by opening the “black box” linking social capital and democratic performance. Spurred by Robert Putnam's observed correlation between social capital and budget promptness (Making Democracy Work, 1995), Laura Brunell seeks to explain the causal mechanisms connecting a vibrant civil society to good government performance

Ahead of Her Time: Eva Kolinsky and the Limits of German Gender Quotas

As German political parties began to implement gender quotas, Eva Kolinsky was sceptical whether such quotas could succeed in increasing women's presence in German legislatures. She predicted that women's unequal share of home and family responsibilities and their dislike of traditional political structures would limit the quotas' success. This article, written over a decade after Kolinsky's work, assesses the accuracy of her predictions. It finds her scepticism of gender quotas' ability to overcome women's perpetual political under-representation partially warranted. While quotas have had a positive effect on German women's political representation, they have not been quite as successful as initial observers had hoped. Kolinsky's concerns about the hindrances to women's political representation posed by their unequal share of household responsibilities and the male nature of German politics continue to explain this pattern. Although quotas alone have not been enough to ensure that German women hold an equal share of political power, they have been surprisingly effective, despite the persistence of indirect hurdles