Europeanization and its effect on the determinants of success and duration of German legislation

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas König
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2008 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 72967595

In the last 36 months of DFG funding for the project Policy Change and Reform we successfully established two novel datasets, which contain all legislative activities from the beginning of the first to the current legislative term of the German Bundestag (from 1949 to the summer break in 2012), and context-specific policy positions from party manifestos and government declarations. This constitutes a unique database of historical material, which allows us to test different theories on democratic patterns in German legislation. Based on this work we apply for an one-year extended funding to answer a central question in political science, that follows our general theoretical framework: Does the Europeanization of German legislation change the relationship between government and parliament in general, and between coalition parties in particular? More precisely, we want to apply a time series cross section analysis in order to empirically investigate whether the policy area-specific patterns of German legislative democracy have changed over time as a consequence of Europeanization. In general one can expect that the role of the government is stronger in Europeanized affairs, while the German Bundestag is weaker. However, it remains an open question for which legislative activities this pattern exists. From a coalition perspective, we will also ask whether Europeanization also impacts the pattern of coalition tensions, which inherently exist between the minister in charge and the coalition partner. The empirical answer to these questions does not only close a gap in the literature on governance and coalition politics, which hardly compares the patterns of Europeanized and non-Europeanized legislation. Furthermore, the results will be important for the public discourse, that is little based on an empirical foundation of Europeanization and its consequences for the relationship between government and parliament respectively minister and coalition partner.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants