Policy-making as a challenge for political parties

The policies of German parties – whether their programmes or their actual governmental action – are not the result of policy analysis, at least not if our understanding of policy analysis is a strategic process, equally taking place for and within parties, that is to say, a systematically developed policy concept based both on the analysis of societal problems and their causes, and the analysis of fundamental attitudes and expectations of important electoral groups. To perform such policy analysis, German parties would need think tank capacities, which they do not have or only rudimentarily have at their disposal. Parties are rarely policy producers who are able to assert intellectual property on their programmes or their legislative projects. Normally they act as service providers by politically collecting, negotiating and marketing policy concepts. This process takes place, however, neither systematically nor strategically, but in an erratic and increasingly contingent way – erratic for the reason that party policies are supplied by different, as well as divergent, sources, leading to contradictory goals. Furthermore, not every policy that publicly goes under the name of ‘party policy’ is actually a result of party intern processes of policy forming. That being the case, policies are always the object of conflict, transformed to consent in informal negotiations, beyond official committees of decision-making. The process of negotiation does not often end here. The policies simply leave the party intern arena and again become objects of negotiation between coalitions or between the national level and the Länder, following their own informal rules.

Policy-making in parties is increasingly contingent for the reason that the periods of time in which parties have to take a stand on topics and occurring events, are getting shorter, while at the same time parties are less frequently using their traditional lines, so-called ‘party ideologies’, for orientation. The logic of media democracy entices governing elites to put back, or even give up, programmatic positions in favour of gains in the party competition. However, since even the observation of the electorate consists only of superficial public opinion research, and the deep structure of the German electorate is not analysed, such manoeuvres are rarely of strategic, or rather long-term, value.