The government bench. A study on the place of the government in Parliament as part of a "constitution of things"

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christoph Schönberger
• Subject Area: Principles of Law and Jurisprudence ; Modern and Contemporary History ; Public Law
• Term: from 2018 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 410010580

The applicant plans a monograph on the government bench in the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag). The monograph shall provide a better understanding of the constitutional position of the federal government within the German system of parliamentary government by studying the subject from the perspective of the spatial position of the government in the plenary chamber of Parliament. In doing so, the study will combine several perspectives: the legal analysis of the position of the government in Parliament under German national constitutional and parliamentary law; a historical study of the different types of seating arrangements for specific government seats in the plenary chambers in Germany since the Reichstag of the Wilhelmine Empire; a comparative analysis of the German seating arrangements with respect to the seating arrangements in other Western democracies; a thick ethnographical description of the concrete interaction between government and Parliament during plenary sessions of the Bundestag to the extent that this interaction is determined by the spatial arrangements in the plenary chamber. The study will interpret the government bench as the expression of implicit constitutional preconceptions and study the tense relationship between a plenary architecture inherited from the long period of constitutional monarchy, where a strict separation of powers between government and Parliament had prevailed, and the system of parliamentary government of the Federal Republic where the government is closely intertwined with the parliamentary majority. The monograph as a whole is conceived as a case study on the "constitution of things" which opens up the field of constitutional law to the study of material objects and their capacity to shape human interaction.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants