The Semisovereign State Revisited

Bachelorarbeit von Tobias Schulze-Cleven

Abstract:

In the Federal Republic of Germany, party changes in the federal government have rarely altered the general direction of national policy. Apart from the short periods 1949-53, 1969-74, and the mid-1980s the major parties have agreed on most matters of political substance. The major opposition party either did not propose alternative blueprints for policy or, once its politicians had assumed responsibility in government, they found themselves moderating the stances they had held during their years in opposition.

In explaining the steadiness of policy in Germany compared to other industrialised countries, policy-making in Germany has often been described as greatly constrained by a corporatist institutional design. Katzenstein (1987) argued that the resulting multiplicity of constraints on the leeway of the federal government to change the direction of policy warrants a characterisation of West Germany as a „semisovereign state”. Studies of various policy areas showed that successful policies tended to be passed and implemented in broad consensus between corporatist actors and were geared towards incremental as opposed to comprehensive political change (see e.g. Webber 1992). Attempting to explain this bias towards consensus and incremental change, the political science literature has identified distinct stages in Germany’s policy formation process where bargaining political and corporatist actors search for a policy compromise. These findings have led to the development of alternative hypotheses about which stages in the policy formation process are responsible for the consensual nature of German politics. Focusing on the consensus-building impact of catch-all parties, coalition government, cooperative federalism and sectoral corporatism respectively, these hypotheses are not dependent on each other for their validity; any hypothesis might be true while any others are true or false. Pension policy-making, an area which has often been invoked as a prime example for consensual policy-making, encompasses all parts of the policy process highlighted in these hypotheses.

The hypotheses about the constrained character of German policy-making were developed during an era when the welfare state was still in the process of expansion. More recently, however, welfare state programmes have come under pressure. Governments in many industrialised countries, including Germany, have cut spending on social provisions. As work by Pierson (1994) on the United Kingdom and the United States has shown, the politics of scaling back established programmes are distinctly different from the politics of extending them. Comparative research by Pierson (1993, 1997) and Weaver (1993, 1998) has focused on pension policy as a primary area for observing behavioural patterns typical of the politics of welfare state retrenchment.

Welfare state retrenchment presents a crucial test for the validity of the hypotheses about the sources of consensual politics in Germany. Only when pressure is applied to the system of governance, does it become clear if consensus in German politics is anything more than a fair weather phenomenon. As the cornerstone of the German welfare state, pension policy seems an especially suitable prism for researching which - if any - of the hypotheses about consensual policy-making in Germany remain valid during retrenchment. Recent work by Hinrichs (1998) has highlighted the urgency of such a test. Hinrichs has argued that the traditional consensus in pension policy-making has been lost.

The objectives of this thesis are twofold. The first objective is to test five different hypotheses about why German policy-making is so consensual. The second objective is to determine what the German case can contribute to our understanding of the politics of welfare state retrenchment identified elsewhere by Pierson and Weaver.

The period of 1989-1998 is ideally suited to pursue the research objectives. It allows for a study of how pension policy-making has evolved in the last decade under the recent Conservative-Liberal coalition government and also provides a first impression of how the new SPD-Greens government approached the preceding coalition’s legacy. The introduction to this thesis will expand on the hypotheses about consensual policy-making and the characteristics of the politics of welfare state retrenchment. A second chapter will summarise the pension scheme’s structural features, discuss the various pressures on the sustainability of the system and introduce the reader to the main protagonists in pension policy reform. The case study will be presented in a third chapter. The conclusion relates the case study to the research objectives and closes with tentative appraisal of Katzenstein’s characterisation of Germany as a semisovereign state.

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