Content and Dynamics of Legislative Agendas in Germany

The conventional wisdom on german politics is that in response to the political volatility of the Weimar Republic, the architects of the post–World War II political system valued stability above all other concerns. As a consequence of this preference, the Basic Law introduces numerous veto points in the political process and counterbalances a strong executive branch, headed by the chancellor and a powerful upper chamber (Bundestag). Federalism and a corporatist socioeconomic structure provide additional sources of stability. Given this confi guration, political confl icts are typically managed by cooperation and agreement among political elites. Th erefore, scholarship on cross-national comparisons of democracy has categorized Germany as a consensus democracy (Lijphart 1999) or a semisovereign state (Katzenstein 1987). Th ese categorizations of German politics are not shared by all scholars. Authors working within a rational-choice institutionalist framework, especially those who examine the role of the upper chamber in lawmaking (Bräuninger and König 1999; Manow and Burkhart 2007), characterize the political process as more competitive. Th ey argue that majoritarian and power-sharing components are simultaneously at play: Germany is generally governed by a fairly narrow majority coalition of two or three parties who rarely control the upper chamber at the same time. As Lehmbruch (2000) has pointed out, this setup is delicate. It pits competition among parties against the need for federal cooperation. Given the ambivalent role of political institutions, scholarly accounts commonly waver between admiration and exasperation when assessing public policy making. On the on hand, the German political system delivers a stable environment for incremental and deliberative policy making that allows for long-term policy commitments among political actors. On the other hand, consensus-type politics relies too heavily on small-scale policy change (von Beyme 1985, 21), lacks new policy initiatives (Katzenstein 1987, 4), and is slow to respond to crises. In contrast to majoritarian systems such as that in the