Does anyone doubt that people can make irrational choices based on bad information? And yet, for more than 100 years, free-market advocates were content to assume that people made perfectly rational decisions based on perfect information. The human beings that populated these microeconomic models were immune to jealousy, spite, procrastination, whims, regret, caprice, ignorance, and even errors. In other words, they were not really human at all. They were more like machines, programmed to always make the best choices in their own self-interest.

Not all economists were equally persuaded by this vision. Karl Marx in the mid-nineteenth century certainly harbored no illusions about capitalists making perfect decisions, but then again, he had no effect on mainstream economics. In the early twentieth century, Thorstein Veblen found a popular audience for a theory based on the idea that workers were motivated by a sense of workmanship. He also thought that consumers derived as much satisfaction from impressing others with their purchases as they did from the purchases themselves. This concept, which he called conspicuous consumption, seemed to explain some real but distinctly irrational behavior. He also left no lasting mark on conventional economics.

The economist who achieved the most success in changing this academic view of human nature was John Maynard Keynes. In his theory, Keynes saw animal spirits driving the stock market and faulty human judgments driving savings and investment decisions.

There may have been only three Russian Nobel winners in economics, but their contributions have been substantial on three critical concepts: gross domestic product, input-output analysis, and linear programming. Two of these important tools were developed in the 1930s by Nobel Prize winners from Harvard University. The first, Simon S. Kuznets, developed the United States' system of national income accounts that included the familiar measure of economic performance, gross domestic product. Without this widely used measure, we would have very little understanding of how well the economy is performing or how fast it is growing. Other economists made contributions to this effort, including the English Nobel laureate Sir Richard Stone, but it was Kuznets who provided the grand design. The second Russian Nobel Prize winner was Wassily W. Leontief who invented one of the premier economic planning tools called input-output analysis. First devised in the 1930s, input-output models continue to be used throughout the world to provide answers to interesting and important economic questions.

These two Nobel economists had something else in common; they were both obsessed by economic data. Kuznets started his investigations by collecting information about economic performance for the U.S. economy in order to track the important but poorly understood business cycles. All of this information had to be collected, categorized, and analyzed. Similarly, Leontief started with the tedious task of collecting information about interindustry sales, that is, the sales of one industry to another, and ultimately to consumers.

This chapter accomplishes three goals. It begins by developing the corporatist catch-all party model through a comparison with Kirchheimer's vision of a catch-all party. I call Kirchheimer's version of a catch-all party a “classic” catch-all party. The chapter goes on to explicate the policy-making dynamics in a corporatist catch-all party. Finally, it offers a preliminary explanation of the CDU's behavior on women's policy, based on this new model of party organization.

My concept of the corporatist catch-all party differs from the concept of the classic catch-all party in four ways: 1) party organization, 2) leadership, 3) membership, and 4) party policy making. These differences are summarized in Table 2.1.

A classic catch-all party has the following features. First, the primary internal party division is horizontal. In other words, the party has a leadership and a membership. Second, in a classic catch-all party, leadership is unified. Third, the membership of a classic catch-all party can only affect the party negatively by forcing leadership to follow a losing strategy. Fourth, a correct, i.e. winning strategy exists and the leadership knows what it is. The important question is whether or not the membership can prevent the leadership from pursuing this correct strategy.

A corporatist catch-all party differs from a classic catch-all party on all four dimensions. First, the party is organized both horizontally and vertically. Corporatist catch-all parties are divided into leaders and members, but also into internal party groups.

In the 1990s the power of the Women's Union waned because the organization was no longer part of the dominant coalition. From its weaker internal position, the Women's Union was able to make some gains, but the reforms were limited compared with those of the 1980s, even though women's issues were arguably more a part of mainstream German society than they had been in the 1980s.

Once the Women's Union was no longer in the dominant coalition, it was forced to work through “cobbled coalitions” to get its preferred reforms adopted by the CDU. A cobbled coalition is an ad hoc alliance formed only for a short period of time around a single issue or policy. Cobbled coalitions can achieve one-time successes, but they cannot mount a long-lasting campaign. The reforms passed by a cobbled coalition are also likely to be more limited than those enacted by a dominant coalition. Cobbled coalitions are possible in a corporatist catch-all party partly because minority elites in such parties are not completely excluded from the decision-making process.

The 1990s Women's Union did have the advantage of being able to work with a new, often sympathetic, group – easterners from the former German Democratic Republic. Working with this new alliance partner, the Women's Union successfully ensured CDU backing for a policy mandating child care spots for all children aged three to six (Kindergarten). On the other hand, the party balked at providing funding for those Kindergarten spots.

The 1980s provide an excellent illustration of the power an internal organization of the CDU can have when it is in the dominant coalition. During most of this decade, the Women's Union and its allies, the Social Committees, could control much of CDU policy making. During the 1980s, the Women's Union persuaded the CDU to provide not only child-raising money, but also employment guarantees for parents returning to work. The dominant coalition was also able to prevent proposed policy change restricting abortion. The Women's Union furthermore convinced the CDU to adopt measures designed to increase women's participation in the party.

In the early 1980s, the CDU returned to power after having been in the opposition since 1969. The Christian Democrats were able to regain control of parliament when the FDP defected from its coalition with the SPD in 1982. The new governing coalition, consisting of the CDU, the CSU, and the FDP, was ratified by elections in 1983. This change of power was heralded and marketed as a “Wende,” a turning point. Although the plan was to turn in a conservative direction, policy changes remained incremental, especially compared to the United States and Britain, two other countries also going through conservative turns during this period. Moreover, with regard to women's issues, the CDU not only did not move in a conservative direction; it generally accommodated women's demands.

Angelo Panebianco argues that “a party's organizational characteristics depend more upon its history, i.e. on how the organization originated and how it consolidated, than upon any other factor” (Panebianco 1988: 50). To the extent that a party's beginnings continue to shape its organizational form over time, examination of a party's origins can inform our understanding of internal party dynamics. An awareness of the origins of the CDU in particular can also shed light on one pattern of genesis for corporatist catch-all parties in general.

What are the origins of a corporatist catch-all party? How does a party come to take on this kind of structure? This chapter begins with the general conditions under which a corporatist catch-all party is likely to emerge. Then it discusses the origins of the CDU and how the party set up internal representation for important societal groups at its founding. Finally, it considers the early relationship between women and the CDU.

The most important factor contributing to the emergence of a corporatist catch-all party is what Panebianco terms “territorial diffusion” (Panebianco 1988: 50–1). He distinguishes between organizations developed through territorial diffusion versus those developed through territorial penetration. Territorial penetration occurs when the center controls the organization's development and extends this control to the periphery. Territorial diffusion, on the other hand, refers to cases in which the organization develops from the spontaneous formation of associations that then merge into a larger organization.

This book has argued that the German CDU's response to women was defined primarily by party organization and internal alliances. I tested this argument by pitting it against rival hypotheses in explaining CDU policies toward women over a thirty-year period. This chapter adds a comparison across countries to the comparisons across time and policy. Like the German CDU, Christian Democratic parties in Austria, the Netherlands and Italy have confronted new demands from women over the past thirty years. Like the German CDU, the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) is a corporatist catch-all party in which women are represented. The Dutch Christian Democratic Party, the CDA, has only a weakly developed corporatist catch-all party structure. It is not as well developed as the CDU's or the ÖVP's. Furthermore, the women's organization of the CDA is a weak actor within the party without the power to select its own leadership. The Italian Christian Democratic Party can be regarded as a corporatist catch-all party because it did ensure representation of its internal factions. Despite some debate on the question, newer scholarship concludes that these factions were linked to policy directions. The Italian Party (the DC) had a women's organization, called the Women's Movement, but it was not a powerful player within the party.

As our central hypothesis would lead us to expect, the particular vision of Christian Democratic women has made substantially less headway in Italy and the Netherlands than it has in either Germany or Austria.

Thus far, this book has argued that the corporatist catch-all party structure shapes the CDU's approach to policy making. This chapter contends that internal party organization has also had an important effect on the selection of party leadership. A corporatist catch-all party demands a diverse leadership team. Because leadership positions within the party are inherently limited, any single person who can fill more than one internal minority slot will be highly desirable. This person's presence on the leadership team frees up another slot for a different member of the party elite.

Angela Merkel, the chair of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), was elected Chancellor of Germany in 2005, the first woman to hold this position. The logic at work in the leadership selection process in a corporatist catch-all party can help explain the rise of Angela Merkel. At first glance Merkel, a female Protestant from the East, appears to be a poor match for the CDU, a party known for its roots in Catholic southern Germany and for its conservative ideology regarding women. Merkel's rise to power can only be understood by studying the internal party dynamics of the CDU and Merkel's leadership approach.

The CDU's corporatist catch-all party structure contributed to Merkel's initial rise to prominence. Because Merkel could be viewed as representing several internal party groups, she was a frequent choice when the CDU was selecting its leadership team. Once in office, however, Merkel proved to be a surprisingly competent politician.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is easy to take for granted a “natural” affinity between women and parties of the left. Particularly from an American perspective, the long-standing partnership between the (mainstream) feminist movement and the Democratic Party substantiates this relationship. Yet in most western democracies, including the United States, from the time women were granted suffrage until at least the 1970s, the “natural” affinity was between women and parties of the right (Duverger 1955; Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes 1960; Lipset 1960; Butler and Stokes 1974). Inglehart and Norris call this voting difference the “traditional gender gap” (Inglehart and Norris 2003).

Germany was no exception to this trend. Once women in Germany gained the vote in 1919, they tended to support conservative parties, especially if those parties were religious in orientation (Molitor 1992: 24; Bremme 1956: 71). During the Weimar Republic, women voted for the Center Party and the German National People's Party. In the first decades after World War II, women were more likely than men to support Christian Democratic parties (Molitor 1992: 25).

Women were more likely to vote for conservative parties in general (and the CDU in particular) for a variety of reasons. Women tend to live longer and older people are often more conservative; women also tend to be more religious; women were less likely to be employed outside the home and housewives were particularly likely to be conservative (Bremme 1956; Lipset 1960; Molitor 1992: 33–6; Inglehart and Norris 2003: 77).

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of change in German politics. New social movements, including the women's movement, entered the political arena. The influence of these changes on the SPD has been noted frequently, particularly as the SPD struggled to come to terms with the Green Party. However, the CDU was also affected by the advent of New Left politics, including the women's movement.

One of the most important effects of the politics of the late 1960s on the CDU was the rise of the Women's Union. This internal organization had been present since the party's founding, but had served primarily as a social organization. The advent of the women's movement helped politicize the Women's Union. Christian Democratic women did not adopt the positions of the women's movement. Rather the women's movement provided the opportunity for the Women's Union to begin to advocate for its own positions on women's issues within the CDU.

The rise of the women's movement coincided with some important changes within the CDU. Helga Wex, a new energetic leader, became chair of the Women's Union in 1971. Turmoil within the CDU and a dramatic increase in female membership both presented an opportunity for the Women's Union to become much more prominent within the party.

The Women's Union's influence on the CDU is apparent in a new work-family policy, child-raising money, which advocated paying mothers who remained home to raise their children.

In September 1998, the Christian Democratic–Liberal coalition that had governed Germany for sixteen years was defeated in national elections. While the CDU itself was reluctant to acknowledge the problem, a primary reason behind this defeat was that the Christian Democrats lost the support of female voters, especially older women who had formed the party's most loyal support group (Molitor and Neu 1999). Certainly, many other factors contributed to the removal of the Christian Democrats from office: weariness with Helmut Kohl, a stalled economy with high unemployment, and the desire for something new. But if the CDU had managed to maintain its earlier levels of female support, Kohl and the Christian Democrats might have pulled out yet another victory.

In the 1998 Bundestag elections, the CDU/CSU's advantage with female voters effectively vanished. The Christian Democrats received only 0.1 percent more votes from women than from men. This was the smallest women's bonus ever, with the exception of 1980. The 1998 elections also marked the first time in the history of the Federal Republic that the majority of women ages 45 to 59 voted for parties of the left, rather than parties of the right (Molitor and Neu 1999: 257). However, the situation was even worse in 2002 when the CDU again polled worse with women than with men. When the party recovered some of this ground among women in 2005, it was able to reenter government.

The summer of 2005 was an exciting one in German politics. On May 22, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) suffered a serious defeat in its electoral heartland, North Rhine-Westfalia, which led Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to call for surprise early elections in the fall. The Christian Democrats chose to run Angela Merkel, chair of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), as their candidate. After starting the summer with a 25 percent point lead, Merkel lost ground throughout the campaign. From her controversial choice of Paul Kirchhof as future Finance Minister to her poor performance in the televised debate, it seemed Merkel could do nothing right. On September 18, the Christian Democrats received 35.2 percent of the vote and the Social Democrats received 34.2 percent. Neither major party had sufficient votes to form a government with its preferred coalition partner. After two months of wrangling, Merkel finally emerged as the leader of a grand coalition made up of the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats.

Merkel may have seemed like an odd choice for the Christian Democrats. After all, the CDU is a traditionally Catholic party and she is a Protestant. The CDU has traditional social values, yet it elected a woman. The CDU has struggled to gain votes in the former East Germany and has often seemed ineffective when campaigning there, yet the party elected the first eastern Chancellor. How did this conservative party come to make such an unusual choice for the most important position in the country?