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Money, Votes, and Political Leverage: Explaining the Electoral Performance of Liberals in Interwar France and Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Marcus Kreuzer
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Extract

The capacity of political parties to adapt to rapid political change has received little attention. The literature on parties usually studies political organizations from either a sociological perspective, as if they are automatically transformed by socioeconomic changes, or a rational choice perspective, as if they optimally adapt themselves to environmental changes. Neither approach pays sufficient attention to parties’ internal decision making and its effect on their capacity to innovate. This article compares the Parti radical (French Radical Party, Radicals) with the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German Democratic Party, DDP) and the Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party, DVP) during the interwar period to demonstrate how electoral mechanisms can systematically account for their different innovative capacities.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , Summer 1999 , pp. 211 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1999

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